Amalfi Style Gnocchi – Ciao Italia

Amalfi-style gnocchi in a heavy cream sauce of asparagus tips and lemon zest.

(Season 30 | Episode 12)
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Ciao Italia with Mary Ann Esposito turns everyday cooking into a happy celebration of authentic regional Italian cuisine with flavorful recipes from the Piedmont to Puglia, Tuscany to Sicily, and everywhere in between. By using authentic ingredients from the heart-healthy Mediterranean diet, Mary Ann creates Italian recipes that turn ordinary meals into memorable masterpieces. Buon appetito!

#cooking #italianfood

– Ciao, I’m Mary Ann Esposito. – And I’m Karen Gazzara. – Today, on “Ciao Italia”, – [Both] Ricotta and gnocchi. – And that’s all there is to it. I mean, cooking doesn’t have to be complicated. Add the cream. So about a half a cup of heavy cream goes in here. You did a great job Mary Ellen. – Thank you Mary. – With the base of the pan. It’s a little rumba action.

– I think I’ve got a relatively clean hand to work with. – I always say you have to keep that hand clean so you can answer the phone. – There you go. – [All] Ciao! – You did both so well. You did really, really well.

That was beautiful. I think you should keep that. – No, I don’t think so. – Oh, absolutely. – Today Karen, we are going to make a different kind of gnocchi. Most people think of gnocchi made out of potato, but there are really so many different kinds.

In the north of Italy, you find gnocchi made out of pumpkin. If you go to Rome, it’s made out of semolina. And today we are going to make gnocchi in the style of Amalfi. So if you’ve ever been to the Amalfi coast, you probably had these gnocchi.

So we’re gonna start with making part of our sauce. And for that, we have to start with some fresh asparagus. So here I have some really thin stalk asparagus and we only wanna use the tips, the very top. This we can save and use for soup some other time.

So we just want the top. So I’m just gonna cut the tops off. ‘Cause we just want the tips for our sauce. I’m gonna set this aside and now the tips we have to cook in some boiling water, but we wanna shock these so that they stay nice and green.

So the first thing we’re gonna have to do is put this in some boiling water. Karen, we wanna salt the water really well so we get the best flavor, right? And now you can put in the asparagus, just the tips. Remember we’re just doing the tips. And now all we really wanna do

Is kind of cook these for about two minutes, not more. We still want a little bit of that crunch but by having them here in boiling water, we wanna retain that green color. That’s why I have a bowl of ice water. So when we take these out of the boiling water,

We can put them in the ice water and that will shock those veggies and they will stay nice and green. And you can do this for any kind of vegetable that you wanna keep green. Green beans, broccoli, broccolini, anything like that. So we’re gonna wait for about one minute

Then we’re gonna take it out. So Karen and everybody at home and friends, when you make ricotta gnocchi, you better start with a good ricotta. Now, you can either make it yourself. And for that, we have a recipe on the “Ciao Italia” website. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do. But if you’re not gonna make it,

You wanna make sure you buy a good one. And that means to get a very dry, a dry ricotta. You see how dry this is? You don’t want one that’s very soupy. That means you would have to add a lot more flour. That’s why you want this to be dry,

To control the amount of flour that you’re gonna add with this because there’s nothing worse than a heavy lead gnocchi. Right? – Right. – And I should say, gnocchi in Italian means little dumpling. So here is our ricotta. This is two cups, two cups of ricotta cheese that is very well drained.

And we wanna add just a pinch of salt to that. So you’re gonna add a pinch of salt to yours. We’re going to add the zest of a lemon because I did say this was Amalfi style, didn’t I? And in Amalfi, guess what they grow a lot of?

What do they grow a lot of? – Lemon. – Lemons, yes. And they’re as big as grapefruits. We don’t have them that size, but lemon is going to be in this gnocchi and it’s gonna give it a really, really nice flavor.

So get yourself a rasp like this or if you don’t have that, you could do it on a cheese grater and you wanna get just the zest, not the pith because the pith is bitter. All right. So I’m gonna let you do that on yours. Put that aside, you wanna mix that in.

I remember when I was in Amalfi, oh, I don’t know. Have you ever been to the Amalfi Coast? – No, I haven’t. I have wanted to. – Everything has lemons in it because first of all, lemons in Amalfi are used to make limoncello, everybody knows what that is, right?

Limoncello, that’s the big product but then lemons go into lots of seafood dishes, they go into pasta dishes. So we’re gonna go back to the Amalfi Coast so to speak when we make these gnocchi. All right, so these are gnocchi all’amalfitana, so gnocchi in the style of Amalfi.

So once you have that in, you got your salt, right? – Yes, I do. – Now we’re gonna add our egg yolks. Two egg yolks go in and we just mix those in, get them really well mixed with the ricotta. ‘Cause what we wanna do here is have a gnocchi

That’s gonna be very light tasting and we’re going to use a sauce that’s light as well, a lemon flavored sauce to go with this. All right, so now we have that. We need to work with our flour. So here is the flour that we’re going to use.

Now, you probably noticed it’s a little yellower looking than a regular flour and that’s because it’s not a regular flour. It’s this flour, see? Durum flour. And on here it says durum rimacinata and that means it’s been reground. So they took semolina flour, which is a very gritty hard wheat flour,

The hardest of wheat flours. And they reground it until it was this fine silky consistency. So now we need to add enough of this to this to give us a dough that is not too sticky. – Okay. – All right. So what we wanna do is start adding this

A little bit at a time. So take a cup, take about a cup, you know, blending it in. If you’ve made a lot of gnocchi in your lifetime, you know what that consistency should be. But we’re gonna check this. We’re gonna check the consistency of this gnocchi

Because before we make all of them, what we’re going to do is test a few in a little pot of water. And if they hold together, then we can go ahead and make all the rest of the gnocchi. But if we went ahead and just made all of them

And then we come to find out that they’re all gonna disintegrate in boiling water, we know that we have to say Three Hail Mary’s and start over. So we don’t wanna do that. So this is looking good, but now we need a little bit more flour. We don’t want too much.

I would say in general for about two cups of the ricotta depending on how dry it is, maybe you’re gonna use about a cup, a cup and a half of flour. So now when you get to the point where it’s starting to get really harder to move,

We gotta think about putting this out on our board and you always wanna make pasta, I don’t care what kind of pasta it is, gnocchi, ravioli, whatever you’re making, you wanna do that on wood because wood gives you grab. And if you didn’t have wood,

It’s just gonna be a little harder really, to do anything. And I’ll talk about that in a minute. So let me see, how do you think that feels? I’m gonna take my fork out now and I’m gonna put a little flour down on my board. See? Just like that.

And I’m gonna dump this right out. Right there. Already I can see that it’s starting to make a dough that’s gonna hold together. But try to get it into a disc and see if you can roll it into a cylinder. I didn’t use very much flour for this

And I don’t wanna use a lot of flour. So when you get it into a disc, then what we’re gonna do is pinch off just one or two of these, put it in some boiling water just to see if it holds together. And if it holds together, you know you’ve got enough flour.

If it doesn’t hold together, what do we have to do? – Add more flour. – Add more flour. Okay. So all right, good. That’s looking good. Get it kind of in a cylinder, if you can. Yeah. That’s it. So Karen, here are our rolls. How’s it feel? – It feels great.

I mean, it’s nice and dry and not too sticky. – Not tacky, so we can work with it. So we wanna cut just small pieces at a time and work with them. So you push aside the whole batch of dough, take a little flour, put it down there.

And then just kind of under your hand, kind of roll it into a sausage-like. Now you can make these as thick or thin as you want them. I’ve had them in Italy where they’re as big as walnuts. And I’ve also had them where they’re tiny as peas. So it just depends.

But you see it’s holding together nicely, right? – Yes. – So that’s the first part of the gnocchi, the gnoccho. So once you get it into a rope like that, then we have to cut them up. So again, however you wanna make them,

What size you wanna make them, that’s just a personal thing. But I just… Okay, so you go ahead. Yeah. Good. Excellent. Now I just sprinkle them with a little flour. Now, there’s several ways you can form them. So you’ve worked in an Italian restaurant, right? – Yes.

– And did you make gnocchi there? – No, I did not. – Okay. But you know all about making pasta and stuff. – I do, yes. – So you know that it’s critical, the tools that you use are the correct ones. So for making the gnocchi, you can take the wimpy way out,

Which is to do just what we did, cut them and now you can cook them just like that. Or you could use a fork mixed in a little flour and you can take that and create that ridge. – Oh, that’s how it looks. – See that ridge?

Yeah. So you just little pressure to create the ridge. See that ridge? We’re gonna put them right there. Because once you get the hang of it, you have a little groove on the underside. See the groove on the underside? That’s to trap the sauce.

The little groove on the top side is also to trap the sauce. So you can make them large like this, you can make ’em smaller. And if you really wanna get into gnocchi making, say you made a really (speaks Italian) looking one,

You know bad, just re-roll it and put it back on your fork. You just keep doing that. You do all of them like this. And there are all kinds of sauces that go for gnocchi. You can do, if it was a potato gnocchi, what kind of sauce would we be putting on this?

If it was potato? Yeah, the classic. Tomato. – Tomato sauce. – Yeah. A tomato sauce. Exactly. But we’re doing ours with a butter and Parmigiano Reggiano sauce. All right, so that’s one method. Then there’s the gnocchi board method. See? Cute little tool. Gnocchi board, you can find these

In any kind of cookware stores. So again, let’s slop off another little piece and get that going. Again, under the palms of your hands going from the inside outside, from the center out. Like that, and then cutting them. And now for the gnocchi board, wanna do the same thing.

Give that a little flour. See how it has grooves in it? Yeah. And you just roll them down. I like the gnocchi board, but I like the fork better. And why do I like the fork better? ‘Cause it’s groovier. Yeah, that’s why. But this is an option. This is an option. Don’t use your hand. Use your thumb like that. – Use my thumb, okay. – Use your thumb. Yeah. See look. Just a little pressure. See? And there you have it. And you keep going like that.

And just make a whole pile of these. Now, when you deal with gnocchi like this, there’s several things you can do, either we can cook it right away and eat it, which we’re gonna show you today. But let’s say that you wanted to freeze this. What would you do first?

Would you just take them like that and put them in the freezer? – No. – Smart girl. What would you do? – I’d make them first. – Yeah. Then what? You’d make them first, then would you put them in the freezer cut up like this? – No.

– You’d put the roll in the freezer? This whole roll? – I’m not really sure. – Let me give you a little tip on what I like to do. So I get ’em like this. Now, I wanna freeze them, right? What you don’t wanna do is freeze them like that.

Because when you go to cook them, you put them in boiling water. What are you doing to that water? Bringing the temperature down, right? So now the water’s not boiling. So now you’re not saying Three Hail Mary’s, you’re swearing because all of this is now just disintegrating

Into something that looks like mashed potatoes. There’s a better way to do it. And the way that I do it because over the years, I’ve tinkered with many ways to do gnocchi, is you cook them first. You cook them, then you just toss them with a little bit of olive oil.

Put them on a board or a tray like that in a single layer, freeze them. Then all you really have to do is defrost them, get your sauce going and you’re ready. I bet that’s the way you did it in the restaurant, right?

When you had to do a lot of them, you would do it that way. So now we’re gonna make some more because we need to have enough for you and me. So a dough like this, where we have the two cups of ricotta

And we have the flour about one, one and a quarter cups, give or take, this will serve about four people. And remember that gnocchi, like other pastas, is a first course. It’s never the course. And that’s why pasta is not a fattening food. Because the Italians know how to eat pasta.

And they eat it in small, small portions, right? – Right. – You don’t eat platter fulls. Yes, if you’re gonna eat a platter full, that’s no good. If you’re gonna eat a platter full, yeah, you’re gonna put on a little weight, but if you eat the way the Italians do, you’re not.

So now we have our gnocchi. Are you having fun yet? – I’m having a blast. – Any questions about this? And the other thing you wanna do is don’t keep your fork down like that. Keep your fork at an angle. So you don’t want it down here, you want here.

– Oh, makes it much easier. – Makes it much easier. Then it just kind of slides off. So keep it at an angle. So you’re either doing the fork trick like that, or you’re doing this trick, or you’re just taking the wimpy way out and leaving them like that.

So that’s how you make the ricotta gnocchi. Now it’s time to make the sauce before we cook the gnocchi. And now the sauce. And Karen, you’re gonna show them how to do this. So we’ve got about one and a half sticks of unsalted butter in our pan because all butter in Italy is unsalted. That’s how we know it’s fresh. And remember, that was asparagus we made. – Yes.

– Okay. So you can put those in now. That’s gonna be part of our sauce. So remember, those were just the tips, just the tips. Now, if you wanted to use something else here you could. You could use spring peas, you could use fava beans, whatever was in season.

And now we wanna add the zest of a lemon because remember, we did say that these are the ricotta gnocchi Amalfitani. So we wanna have that lemon zest and we want to have some cream. So slowly, slowly at the side of the pan, add the cream.

So about a half a cup of heavy cream goes in here. This is a little modern twist on how to use a sauce for gnocchi. We normally wouldn’t have cream in something like this, but I was staying up one night and I figured why not?

Let’s try this with a little bit of cream. So we have the cream in there and then to give this even more flavor, Karen, we have one and a half cups of grated Parmigiano Reggiano. So you wanna put that in and that’s gonna help to thicken the sauce.

So you wanna make the sauce before you cook the gnocchi because the traditional way to dress any pasta is in padella, is not dumping it out in the sink in a colander and then putting it in a bowl and saucing it. No, you do it right in the saute pan

That the sauce has been made in. So you see how that is thickening up nicely, isn’t it? – [Karen] Yes, it looks great. – All right. So that looks good. We’re not gonna put any salt in that until the end because we have salt in the Parmigiano Reggiano.

So once you get it at this state, it’s done. So now we can just turn that off and it’s time to cook the gnocchi. So now we can put the gnocchi into our salted boiling water. You wanna have a lot of water when you cook pasta.

So either you can put it in with a spider, or you could just take the towel that you had the gnocchi on and just dump. See? Easy. So now what we have to do is wait until these gnocchi bob to the top. When they bob to the top, we’re gonna take them out

And they go directly into the sauce. You see how the gnocchi have bobbed to the top, Karen? Just gently take them out, get out most of that water. That’s why you want to use something like this. And that’s why you would never want to throw these into a colander in the sink, ’cause they’re just too delicate.

They go right there and you gently, gently stir them. Gently stir them. They’re so beautiful looking. Look at how nicely they held together. You did a great job. All those little grooves are gonna get the sauce. Beautiful. Mix it with that asparagus. Here’s the last few. I wanna get everyone. Here they are.

And that’s all there is to making these ricotta gnocchi Amalfitani. So look what we made today, Karen. Ricotta gnocchi Amalfi style because we added lemon. Lemons are so popular in Amalfi and it’s great. Now we have the asparagus with that wonderful cream sauce that we did with the heavy cream, we did with lemon zest, Parmigiano Reggiano.

And by the way, I think it only needs a sprinkling now of Parmigiano Reggiano over the top to really finish the dish. So give it a good sprinkling of cheese. They look beautiful and I can really find yours immediately in the dish. Karen, thank you for helping me in the kitchen.

– Thank you for inviting me. – You’re welcome. Cin cin. And until I see you nella cucina again, I’m Mary Ann Esposito. – And I’m Karen Gazzara. – [Both] Ciao! – Behind me is this gorgeous villa, which of course I would love to own, but never will. The Villa Melzi, which was built

By Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. Isn’t it beautiful? Just I love the balustrade flanked by two lions. And when you walk out your front door, of course you have this wonderful view of Lake Como and the mountains in the background, gorgeous. These magnificent gardens, which belong to the Villa Melzi, has a surprise around every corner and here’s mine. Dante and Beatrice. Beatrice of course was Dante’s love. And in this statue here, we see them together. Of course, she’s got her hand on his and she’s leading him towards paradiso, to paradise.

How do I know this? Because when I was in college, I was fascinated by “The Divine Comedy”. I read it page by page, very deliberately. And it was difficult because Dante wrote in a type of Italian that was hard to understand, a very poetic type of Italian.

But every time I come across an image of Dante like this statue, it just brings me back to those days when I enjoyed reading “The Divine Comedy” so much and be able to see that he and the love of his life are here in the Melzi gardens. So that’s a real treat. I’m lucky to be here to be able to, first of all enjoy this beautiful view and the lake and all of this wonderful foliage and plantings. And also to be able to share it with you, because I know that many of you probably aren’t gonna be able to get to this region

Or you’ve been to this region so it’s a good reminder of where you’ve been, kind of like a postcard for you.