Ricotto Cheese Gnocchi

It’s going to be Ricotta Cheese Gnocchi with morels, fava beans, asparagus and a little bit of sherry wine, okay.

So, we’re going to take a little bit of our Ricotta cheese put it inside. And we have some egg yolks here, just three egg yolks there okay. And then we’re going to proceed to mix this whole mass together. Okay, so we want to make sure we mix that really well. And then we have a little bit of parmesan cheese. Very important when you get parmesan cheese, if you want to make sure that it is a very good brand of parmesan cheese, okay, this is where Parmigiano-Reggiano, okay. If you get a lesser brand of parmesan cheese; parmesan cheese is not to tend to melt as well.

For this particular recipe, you want a cheese that melts really well. This is the more expensive of the cheese but I guarantee you’re going to love this cheese. So we mix that up just a little bit. So you put a little bit of flour in. As, when you’re making anything with flour, you want to make sure not too add too much or all at once, okay? It all depends on how dry you got to dry that dry atmosphere; the egg could be smaller this time or a cup of cheese could be wetter, it could drier. And the last thing that you want is Gnocchi; you know that feels like a boulder. You know you want it nice, soft, light and Gnocchi And so I mix that up like that. Put a little bit of salt and pepper inside then now you can add anything you want to this Gnocchi. If you want to add herbs, you can add herbs to Gnocchi.

You could add nutmeg in Gnocchi. I like to keep it pretty simple because of the sauce that we have on it still has a lot flavors in it so I want the contrast between have it a nice, simple Gnocchi in the sauce that it comes with. If you like to get really messy, you can put it all in a board and work with your hands with it okay. And so it looks like we’re getting right about there. I want to mix it up really well. Now in a recipe, it will call for putting this in the refrigerator then wrapping it with plastic. What that does is that absorbs then all the moistures then goes into all the flour.

Okay. Let's go here, so what you got to do is you’re going to give it a little tester; you always want to make sure that you have a tester, okay. And last thing you want to do is prepare your Gnocchis and then you put them in the water and they start to disintegrate. That will ruin the party completely, okay? Yeah.

So what you’re looking for is something that’s just slightly sticky.? This is why when we go on the restaurants; the Gnocchi’s vary so much because some people put a lot of flour, some people put a little flour and the best Gnocchis are little ones that are extremely light.

So we’re going to drop that in hot water, okay. Now, Gnocchi is one of those fabulous things that they tell you basically themselves when they’re done, okay. They rise to this top and you know what? It’s done, okay. So there’s no room of guess work involved, okay. Give a little tap, okay, you want to make sure to release it, we release it from the bottom. And once it is cooked, that means the egg is cooked inside in it; it comes up to the surface.

And the what we’re going to do is we’re going to test the Gnocchi to make sure that it has the right consistency balance to it. So if we need to add more flour, we add more flour. If it’s just the right amount then we hit it right on the, you know, we got it just right, okay.

And you see it takes between two and, two and three minutes to that Gnocchi. Okay. And then I’m going to ask first the help of the audience here, okay. So help me roll Gnocchi. Has anybody feel like working today? Okay. So here’s what we’re going to do. Now we’re going to take a little bit of our flour here and actually going to move me over here just a little bit, okay. So you’re going to take just a little bit of flour; put a little bit of flour down on the board. Okay, we’re going to take our Gnocchi mixture. As you can see you might feel that. Okay. Actually, would you like to wear gloves? We do have gloves. Okay.

So you’re going to cut a little bit of the Gnocchi mixture off. Then you’re going to put in flour. And you’re just basically, you put one hand on top of the other and roll like this. Once you get an odd shape then you put your two hands together, okay, and you roll outwards, okay?

And then after we roll it out like so. We’re going to go ahead and cut it with a knife, okay. Cut it about this size. Now depending on how you like your Gnocchi, you can make a big, you can a small, this is also something really easy to do with kids. If you have kids at home and you want to get them into cooking; this is a great thing to do with kids because you really can’t ruin it. They could play with it like kids, you know. Like you throw it out, you could pick it back, you catch it, and continue making your Gnocchi,.

So we want to cut it on about this size. Okay now, when you take your Gnocchis after you’ve cut them, you can even leave them like that, okay? Or you can take this side that I’ve cut; put them in your palm, take your finger and just give it a little push, okay? I usually like to make my Gnocchis like these because in it has a little bowl for the sauce. Or you can make the traditional way where you take it back and forth and you run your Gnocchi on the fork. But I personally like from done this way. You could, that’s beautiful, that’s beautiful. There you go. So you’ve done this before, I can tell. They're nice and even.

I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to start the process for the sauce. The fresh morel mushrooms, okay. I left a couple hole. Morel mushroom is a very, very nice mild mushroom. And as you can see it have a nice little stem on it, looks almost like a sponge if you will. Okay. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to cut the ends of these off, because you want to cut this piece off. The reason why is because this is a little chewier than the medium side. And when you’re making your sauce, you don’t want the cook the chewy part in there because it don’t have a, you know it’s going to be very, very difficult for your teeth. Okay now, you can cut them either in rings. If you want to be fancy, you can cut them in a rings like that, okay. Or you can cut them directly in half, okay. For this particular purpose, we’ve cut them directly in a half. How are you doing? Great job. Okay.

We have some garlic, okay. And you always want to make sure to remove the end of the garlic. Okay, then we’re going to go ahead add garlic. We have our shallots here. I cut off the end of the shallot put our bowl over there. Then we’re going to proceed just like, just very similar to how we did the onion. I cut those like that, okay. So I cut it this way and then one time this way. Then we go ahead. I just cut them like that, okay. Now we can do the same thing with the shallot. If you really feel very bold, okay, you can also do it like this. Can I borrow your knife for a second, okay, yah that’s right, it’s my knife, isn’t it?

One thing that we do at sometimes in a restaurant, basically we take the garlic, put our blade like this, okay, give it a big smash. Then we smash everything up, okay? Then you take the back of the knife like that. Now your garlic is already ready to go, okay. It’s a very easy way to do garlic and onion. Okay, same thing with the shallot, again, making sure that you got nice, small pieces to the shallot. And again using the same technique is keeping everything nice and uniform, okay.

So in the sauce, we have a little bit of fava beans, we have some fresh asparagus, fresh morel mushrooms. How are you doing with the Gnocchi over there? Okay, these guys look really hungry so.

Okay, this is a fava bean, okay? Oops. Looks like a huge sugar pea, right? Now out of 10 lbs. of fava beans, you’re probably, if you’re lucky; get 1 lb. of actually using the bean, okay. So what you want to do is basically just pull the stem, pull the security vein, as I call it and you just push, okay. And those just come right up; take your thumb, and remove your thumb right along there and they just come right out like magic, okay.

Now this is a little different than a lima bean, a lot of times people replace these fava beans with the lima beans, okay. So then once it’s in a shape like his, then what we’re going to do is we’re going to blanch them for one minute, okay. And after you blanch it for a minute then you’re going to peel the outside off. And you see here you just basically you take the top of the fava. Put your thumb in, push, and then you take out the actual bean, okay.

So as you can see, there’s a lot of work involved in this okay? These are great thing to do, and now while you're watching TV, okay. You can do this while you’re watching TV of again, you know if you want to teach your kids, that’s perfect thing for them to do, okay? They love that.

Okay, we’ll see how our pan is, make sure our pan is nice and hot. Take a little bit our olive oil, okay. It’s all boiling there, okay. So I move right around you –don’t worry I'm a professional, I won’t burn you.

Okay, we’re going to put our garlic; I’m going to put our shallots in there. Okay, now we’re going to start to sauté. Does that smell good? Smells great. So you always want to make sure never to burn your garlic, okay. If you burn the garlic; you’re going to get a bitter flavor.

So once you sauté, it’s literary only 30, 35 seconds depend on how hot your oil is. So we put them in like that, okay. Just give them a little toss around, okay. Now these mushrooms have been washed previously. You want to really make sure to wash your mushrooms, especially these because outside of the mushroom, how we said before, oh you’re done. Alright, you want a job? You’re pretty fast. The outside of the mushroom has this sponge texture to it so that’s what’s going to collect some dirt, okay? So you always want to make sure to wash these out. It doesn’t have the smooth surface, as in culinary mushroom has. So we sauté that up just a little bit. We’re going to put a little bit of white wine inside. Thank you very much, I appreciate that work, What was you name? Lorelei, thank you Lorelei. Let us give Lorelei a hand here, that’s fantastic. It is the wine reduces there.

We are going to get our ingredients together here. This is asparagus. Now this asparagus has been previously peeled. Okay as you can see this is where we start the peeling, okay. The rule of thumb with asparagus is if it’s thin, you don’t peel it, okay? When it’s medium like this, you want to definitely peel it, okay. Because the outsides starts to become a little woody. So you always want to make sure to peel the larger asparagus. So if you’re doing a dish that you don’t really want to do a lot of work with. You can go ahead and buy the real thin asparagus, okay. Because there’s a little more tender, okay. So our mushrooms are sautéing nicely. Got our white in there and that’s reducing down, okay. While that’s doing, let’s help and put out all the alcohol to it. It’s also helping convince a lot of the flavors in there, okay.

So as this cooks, we’re going to check our water. We’re going to put a little salt in our water. You always want to make sure to let the water boil before you put the salt in if you’re in a hurry because as soon as you put salt in, it remove some of the oxygen and water, then it takes longer for the water to boil. Little tips for you guys to use at home there.

So this is about just about ready there. Then we’re going to put a little bit of our chicken stock inside, okay. I like to use chicken stock because it’s a very neutral stock. It adds some body to your sauce, but then again it has a very light flavor. If you use a real stock to this dish then what happens is you overpower their nice delicate taste and the fava beans and those asparagus.

Okay, so we have that going just like that, okay. Just a quick note also; anytime you use a fortified wine, okay, or sherry, a cognac, anything like that, popular demands says, “okay go ahead, throw it in a pan, lot of flames going on everywhere, okay, that does really nothing flavor. It’s more of a show. Fortified wines, you always want to add in. You’re going to get the biggest bang for your bucks, so to speak. And whenever you use fortified wines, you want to use very nice expensive fortified wines. That’s going to give you a much better flavor to your sauce.

So we’re going to wait to put that in at the end. But before we do that, we’re going to turn that down just a little bit, we’re going to add a little bit more chicken stock, okay, because between the chicken stock and the butter, that’s going to form it’s own cream.

Then take our Gnocchis here. We’re going to drop our Gnocchis in there. When you do the asparagus, whenever it tends -- for cutting things on the bias, you put your knife, hold that at about 10º angle, okay, and you slice. Yes, so add a little bit of butter in here. Okay, now hopefully, we can cook this fast while the Gnocchis are still cooking. All right, because you don’t want to really let the Gnocchisit in the water too long because if you let it sit in the water too long, then what’s going to happen is it’s going to start going inside of the Gnocchi itself and then the Gnocchi will end up turning into a soup in your pan. We don’t want that.

As you can see they’re risen to the surface. Let hem dry just a little bit. Now, if you’re doing a dinner party and you want to cook these ahead of time, this is a great way to do it. Just put them into a dish. A little bit of olive oil on top; just let it all stick together. Then we kind of just give that a nice little wiggle. Our sauce looks great here, okay.

So now we’re going to put a little bit more butter in it, okay. Now this recipe, I guess, calls for a lot of butter. There’s no, this is not caloric dish here, all right. So once we got it, a little bit more butter in there, we’re going to put our asparagus in and we’re going to let that warm up in there. As well as our fava beans, so let's put some fava beans in there and our parsley.

Now it’s very important, when you cook, you always want to use an Italian parsley. The American style parsley is traditionally just for garnish or to use if you have bad breath, you can eat the parsley and it will get rid of bad breath, okay. I like to use Italian parsley because it adds a much better flavor to it. Okay so we throw that in at the end, okay. You always want o use herbs at the final stage of your cooking. If you’re going to use it during your cooking; that’s fine too because you always want to put some of the fresh herb in at the very, very end, okay. Because if you put it at the end, it’s going to really release all the flavor, all the herbs and spices, they all have what’s called an aromatic sap to them and so when you slice an herb or you slice a spice, you get the smell, okay. You’re releasing the aromatic sap, okay? So if you cut parsley today and you try to use it tomorrow, you have no flavor anymore left to your parsley. Herbs have to be done nice and fresh, okay.

All right, so we’re going to add just a little more of that butter. As I can see you guys need a little more butter here. A little bit more butter in there, okay. As you can see our sauce now is starting to turn a little more creamy; put our Gnocchi in there, all right, nice and creamy there, okay. So give it a little presentation here on the plate.

Okay, so we have our Gnocchis there, a little bit of asparagus, some fava beans, this is a wonderful, wonderful spring dish. Take a couple of these tomatoes, the tomatoes are going to add some nice freshness to the dish. A little bit of cheese on top. And there you go! There you have it. Wonderful.


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