7453. Make gnocchi

 When I saw that the Little Chute Library was having a gnocchi making class, I immediately signed up. Danielle offered to come with me. 

Local Chef Spencer Webster volunteered to teach us how to make gnocchi. I thought we were making regular gnocchi but we were making goat cheese gnocchi with tomato fig sauce. I was intrigued to say the least. 

Gnocchi is an Italian Potato dumpling but instead of potato we were going to use goat cheese. Apparently the fig sauce was going to compliment the goat cheese. Okay... we shall see. 

We were given the ingredients for the gnocchi. Flour, Eggs, Goat Cheese, Nutmeg, Pepper. It was a pretty simple recipe.

First we mixed the goat cheese and flour together and got it crumbly.

Then we added the eggs and kneaded well.

We wanted to make sure it sprung back when poked. This takes longer than you think. This is why I don't make putzy things. I am too impatient.

We added the spices and continued to knead until it sprung back.

Then we got a lesson in shaping the gnocchi. This step works best when the dough has been chilled for several hours. Spencer showed how to make snakes with the dough.

Then he cut it into pieces and showed us how to roll the gnocchi using a fork to get the grooves. There is a such a thing as a gnocchi board which has built in grooves for this purpose. But if you don't want to spend $10 on Amazon the back of fork works too. The grooves are only there to hold sauce.. so be lazy and just cut off pieces.

I did try rolling a gnocchi. It was harder than it looked.

Since process was going to take a while, Danielle and I headed out with our dough. I had way to much going on to wait around to try tomato fig sauce.

A few days later, I busted out the dough and rolled my dough into gnocchi snakes and chopped them into pieces which I then rolled on the back of a fork.

I boiled my gnocchi for about 2-3 minutes until tender.

Since I didn't have fig sauce, I just used olive oil and pepperoni. It was pretty dang tasty. If I didn't know there was goat cheese in it, I wouldn't have known. Nutmeg was the dominate flavor but I think that was because we had too much nutmeg and pepper. 

I definitely enjoyed the culinary experience. Now to convince the hubby that we need to have proper potato gnocchi sometime.