Another Mark Bittman post. What can I say? I’m a big fan. (How many times have I said this before?)
I could easily turn the Cream part of this blog into a Rhianna & Mark journey a la Julie & Julia, but if you follow along, you know that I do use recipes from other people… occasionally.

Mark’s recipes just go so well with how I like to cook (simple and flexible) that it’s hard for me to lose motivation for trying one of his recipes.  And with fresh ricotta still in my fridge, there was now no holding back on a recipe I’d bookmarked months before.

I’m sure we all have stories of good gnocchi and bad gnocchi.  The good ones use adjectives like pillowy, soft and tender. The bad ones use adjectives like leaden, gluey and chewy.  Traditional potato gnocchi are easy to find on menus but difficult to rate successful.  The bad stories tend to flood the marketplace, often disguised with a too-heavy sauce or under mounds of cheese. I’ve never attempted traditional gnocchi for fear of failing and writing a bad story, but also because the prep load (cooking potatoes…) hasn’t been something that I’ve wanted to carry thus far.

But when I saw Mark’s video for his ricotta gnocchi, I was pretty sure this load would be light enough for me to carry.

 

 

These ricotta gnocchi are pretty much the perfect choice for a comfort food fix. Perhaps not as versatile as their potato cousins (I don’t think they’d stand up to baking), but easily just as tasty. After loving my first batch so much (served atop some jarred marinara I had in the fridge), I made another round of ricotta the following weekend and another batch of gnocchi.  With my second batch, I prepared a classic brown butter sauce and played a little bit with substituting about a third of the flour with cornmeal and adding a good dash of nutmeg — the cornmeal doing not much more than adding some colour.

Mark’s servings are a little small, so I would say the recipe is better suited for two generous main course servings or four starters. How’d I get uniform-sized gnocchi? Cookie scoop.

 

Ricotta Gnocchi
Adapted from Mark Bittman

Watch the video and then read through the recipe to get a sense of what to do. Do start with the minimum amount of flour and build up as you need to.  The test gnocchi is important, but I think you can get away with a little one. I used Mark’s recipe for the brown butter.