Gnocchi

A potato gnocco is a two-to-three-centimetre piece of dough made from boiled, riced potato, flour and salt, usually ridged on one side with a fork. It goes into boiling salted water and is done when it floats: two to three minutes. The word is already plural (one is a gnocco, several are gnocchi), which makes 'a gnocchi' impossible in Italian and 'gnocchis' doubly so.

Gnocchi is a family rather than a single recipe. Gnocchi alla romana are semolina discs baked with butter and cheese that never touch water. Canederli, in the Alps, are bread dumplings the size of golf balls. Gnudi, in Tuscany, are ricotta and spinach with barely any flour at all. Gnocchi di zucca use squash; gnocchi di susine, around Trieste, hide a whole plum inside. What holds the family together is the method, soft dough portioned into pieces and cooked in liquid, not the ingredient.

Potato is the newcomer. It reached Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century but only entered Italian cooking in any quantity during the nineteenth, which makes potato gnocchi considerably younger than most people assume. Before that, gnocchi were made with stale bread, plain wheat flour, chestnut flour or squash.

Mild, faintly sweet and mostly of potato, which is the point. Gnocchi are a vehicle: the flavour comes from what dresses them, and the dough's job is texture. A good one is soft to the edge of collapse: dense but weightless, closer to the inside of a well-baked potato than to anything made of flour.

Bad ones announce themselves on the first bite. Too much flour and they bounce: a springy, chewy resistance that never goes away, with a raw floury coating in the mouth. Long-life vacuum-packed gnocchi have that bounce by design, plus a faint sourness from the preservative. They are a different food, and they are much better fried than boiled.

Fresh from a good pastificio, dressed with butter browned with sage and a heavy fall of Parmigiano, a gnocco should almost dissolve by the second chew. That is the benchmark to judge everything else against.

Boil them in plenty of well-salted water at a lively simmer, in batches. They are done when they rise to the surface, which takes two to three minutes; count another twenty seconds and lift them out with a slotted spoon straight into the pan with the sauce. Do not tip them into a colander, where they crush each other, and do not cook them in advance. Test one first: if it falls apart, the dough needs a spoonful more flour.

Three dressings cover most of Italy. Butter browned with sage and a heavy fall of Parmigiano, which exposes the dough completely and forgives nothing. Tomato and basil, optionally finished in the oven with mozzarella in the Sorrento style. And gorgonzola melted over low heat with a splash of milk, which becomes a sauce on its own and needs no cream, the Lombard default. In the Veneto, duck ragù and melted butter with grated smoked ricotta are the local answers, and in Verona gnocchi arrive with pastissada de caval, a long-braised horsemeat stew.

Pan-frying is the underrated method. No boiling at all: hot pan, butter or olive oil, gnocchi spread in a single layer and left alone for four or five minutes a side until blistered and crisp outside, soft within. It is the best possible use for a supermarket packet.

Portion at 200 to 250 g of fresh gnocchi per person: they weigh more than dried pasta and fill you sooner. Keep sauces on the thick side, because thin, watery ones soak straight in and soften the dough on the plate.

An unopened shelf-stable vacuum pack sits in the cupboard until the date printed on it, usually several months out. Once you cut it open, move it to the refrigerator and use it within about two days. Chilled supermarket packs run to the date on the sleeve, generally one to two weeks, and a day or two after opening. Loose fresh gnocchi from a deli counter, and any you make yourself, carry a two-to-three-day date and are meant for the same day: keep them in a single layer on a floured tray or board, lightly covered, never sealed airtight in a tub.

Left in the refrigerator, fresh dough pushes out water, the pieces stick to each other and to whatever they sit on, and the surface turns tacky and dull grey. Freezing avoids that: spread them raw and separated on a floured tray, freeze for two hours until firm, then bag them for up to two months. Drop them into boiling water straight from frozen, allowing an extra minute; thawed at room temperature they slump and lose their shape. Beyond the printed date, that date and the maker are the reference.

Three different things sit under the same name abroad. Shelf-stable vacuum packs in the dry pasta aisle are dense, glossy and perfectly uniform, with a date months away. Chilled packs in the fresh pasta case are softer and dated within a week or two. Real fresh gnocchi, sold loose at Italian delis, come dusted with flour, matte and off-white to ivory rather than bright white, they give under a fingertip without gumming it, and they smell of potato. A date two or three days out is the usual marker of that third category.

Read the ingredient list before you look at the price. Potatoes at the top, ideally declared above seventy per cent, is the mark of the real thing; potato flakes, potato starch and wheat flour at the top mean reconstituted dough. Long-life packs almost always list sorbic acid or potassium sorbate. Cauliflower gnocchi are a separate product altogether, and gnocchi alla romana are semolina discs that share nothing but the name. Price tracks all this closely: roughly 3 to 5 dollars a pound for shelf-stable, 8 to 14 for deli fresh.

In the US, shelf-stable vacuum packs sit in the dry pasta aisle of most supermarkets at roughly $3 to $5 a pound, and chilled fresh gnocchi appear in the refrigerated pasta case. Italian delis and Eataly stores carry proper fresh gnocchi at $8 to $14 a pound. Trader Joe's cauliflower gnocchi are a genuinely separate product: not potato, not Italian, and reasonable enough judged on their own terms.

In the UK, every large supermarket stocks the long-life version at about £1.20 to £2.20 for 500 g, chilled fresh runs £5 to £9 a kilo, and Italian delicatessens and specialist online grocers sell fresh gnocchi at £10 to £16 a kilo.

Read the ingredients before you look at the price. Potatoes should be first on the list and above 70% of the total; if the list opens with potato flakes, potato starch and wheat flour, you are buying reconstituted dough. Long-life packs almost always carry sorbic acid or potassium sorbate. Genuinely fresh gnocchi have a two-to-three-day date on them, so a long date on a pack labelled fresh tells you what you need to know.

Making them beats all of it on cost. A kilo of floury potatoes and 250 g of flour produce about 1.3 kg of gnocchi for two or three dollars of ingredients, and after the first attempt the whole job takes under an hour.

Verona is the place to go. Venerdì Gnocolar, the last Friday of Carnival, a moving date between late January and early March, turns the San Zeno district into an open-air kitchen, with floats, a costumed parade and the Papa del Gnoco, an elected figure who leads it carrying an oversized fork with a single gnocco on the tines. The rest of the year, order gnocchi with pastissada de caval in the osterie of the centro storico or across the river in Veronetta. It is horsemeat, it is the local benchmark, and it is better to know that before the plate arrives.

Rome runs on a timetable. Thursday is gnocchi day in the traditional trattorie of Testaccio, Pigneto and San Giovanni, and on any other day of the week you will not find them on the board: the habit comes from the old Friday fast, with the substantial dish landing the day before. While you are there, order gnocchi alla romana at least once as well, purely to see how little the two dishes share beyond a name.

Beyond those two: the Veneto plain between Padua and Vicenza for duck ragù, best at the late-summer sagre; Lombardy for gorgonzola, in the belt between Milan, Lodi and Novara where the cheese is made; and Trieste and Friuli in summer for gnocchi di susine, sweet-savoury plum dumplings rolled in buttered breadcrumbs, an Austro-Hungarian survival that catches most visitors off guard.