Georgetown’s Mezzanotte makes delicious handmade pasta paired with curated wines. #newdaynw
We are starting this morning in the kitchen with one of my favorite restaurants down in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood. Mezzanote is known for their authentic Italian cuisine with handmade pasta and curated wines, and their chef Johnny Sullivan joins me now with a delicious recipe for a ricotta gnocchi. With tomato and summer veggies, yum, I’m so excited for this. Is this a staple on the menu or is this more seasonal? The ricotta gnocchi is always on our menu and we do change it seasonally, so, um, we do have a version of this on on the on the menu right now, um. — Pretty simple sauce
— and you said you can pair it not just with — pasta but
— with really any pasta. I brought ricotta gnocchi which we make at the restaurant, but you could use a dried pasta, you could use a nice fish, um, — any of that stuff would be great
— with this. Amazing. OK, so how do we get started with the recipe? So I am just gonna start with some fresh tomato, uh, pick these up at the market. These are some nice, uh, organic, uh, heirloom tomatoes. It’s gonna make a. Very — coarse chop with these
— uh and you have a pan really hot too is also important that pretty hot uh we’re gonna wanna break these tomatoes down pretty quickly. Is there a certain type of tomato you like and this time of year you said is pretty perfect. Uh, at the restaurant right now we’re using some cherry tomatoes, um. Uh, and those work great. Uh, these tomatoes are great. Anything, any tomato is gonna work, and that’s kind of the, kind of the point of this, yeah, smoking hot, — smoking
— hot. — So you put some olive
— oil in the pan. That’s right. We want a good amount of fat. We don’t want these to sit. I’m gonna add a little more tomato as well. I wouldn’t think that you would want the pan that piping hot, so I’m glad I’m watching you today with what you’re supposed to be doing. Yeah, it’s going to give everything a little color as well. And — flavor
— and is this another tomato just another color? Yeah, exactly. This is another heirloom tomato. I’m actually not sure what the variety of this guy is. Yeah. And for someone that’s never been to Mezzanote, — how would you begin to describe this special restaurant that I love
— so much. Yeah, so we’re northern Italian inspired. Um, I wouldn’t say 100% traditional. Uh, we can kind of mix it up a little bit, but Northern Italian inspired, yeah, OK, amazing. What are some of your favorite items on the menu? So we’re pretty well known for our Tyrene, which is, uh, well, we do all of our pasta in-house, right? So we do extruded pasta and we do hand cut pasta as well, and Tyrene is a hand cut pasta. So that’s a sort of a 50/50 egg yolk to double O flour pasta, very rich, um. And it’s quite delicious. We serve it just with a little bit of butter and sage and parmesan. — Simple but
— delicious but delicious. So you’re seasoning as we’re going with a little salt, OK, you kind of wanna layer by layer just to make sure you get it all in there, um, so I’ll add a little more seasoning, uh, later on. Uh, so I’m just adding some nice yellow corn here as well, um, put that into the fresh corn, can you use? Yeah, I mean, it’s the height of summer, so you know, why would you not, why would you not, why would you use something else I guess yeah, um, and then lastly I’m just gonna grab some of this squash and this squash is from our friends. Uh, equilibrium Farm, it’s an organic farm just north of Seattle, um, and their stuff is great, so we, we try to use local farmers as much as possible and equilibrium is a place that we go to pretty frequently. So I’m again I’m just gonna kind of course. chop this. OK, um, is there a reason why you like coarsely chop instead of like fine chop with a dish like this? Yeah, I, I think that we kind of wanna preserve the integrity of the vegetables even though so you know we’re cooking this tomato. Down, it’s going to cook the water out of it. It’s going to concentrate the flavors and it’s gonna make our sauce, but this stuff, the squash, the corn, these extra vegetables, um, we’re gonna want them to add something else to the dish, right? So this zucchini is gonna add a little bit of texture and a little bit of bitterness, probably because we’re not gonna cook it too too much. The corn is gonna add a little bit of sweetness and a little bit of bite. Um, and then of course our tomatoes are just gonna make a nice luxurious sauce, OK, and about how long would you let something like this simmer just for people at home? Yeah, and the reason why I wanted to show you guys this sauce is because it is so quick. You can really make this in about 5 to 10 minutes depending upon how much you wanna cook it down, and I think that that is kind of an invaluable invaluable thing to be able to do, especially um. In the summer when it’s so hot and you don’t wanna be standing over a stove, trust me it’s really not so fun. It’s not so fun. OK, and then Nokia is gonna take no time at all, right, because it’s, that’s right, so it’s uh we. We roll this by hand at the restaurant and then because it’s a restaurant, uh, and we need to have like quick access to it we’ll we’ll blanch it off right? um so it’s like any other gnocchi uh you drop it in the pot of boiling water and you wait for it to rise to the surface and we skim it off and we’ll toss this in a little bit of oil and hold that so that you guys don’t have to wait so long for your food and it doesn’t get too sticky, but, uh, so this is. I have, I have a little bit of par blan. OK perfect here we go, yeah, I’m just gonna drop this in here um and we just kind of wanna warm it up. We’re also gonna be adding a little bit of starch to our water here, and that is gonna be a valuable resource as well. So we’re gonna use some of this pasta water to um thicken up our sauce, right? So, um, we have it’s just a salted water, seasoned water, um, and that’s gonna add a little bit of body, um. And kind of thin thin it out a little bit, so bring everything together a little bit. We’re also gonna add a little bit of uh fat to the pan. Don’t be afraid when you’re making food for other people, um. Don’t be, don’t be afraid to use a little bit of butter in there. They’re, they’re gonna love it. You don’t have to tell them. You don’t have to tell them how much you’re putting in there. That’s true. OK, we have about a minute left. So how are we doing? So we’re doing pretty well. I’m just gonna crank up the heat a little bit and then I’m going to add a little bit of water, just a little bit of splash of water here, and you don’t throw it away. — Give me
— all the butter too. I’m, — I’m
— here
— we go, yeah. And while this is cooking too, — you have a ton of wine
— we have a great wine program at Mezzinote. Um, our wine director Brett Garden is a very talented guy and so we have. Uh, a nice light red here. Uh, this is a dolcetto that we have on our, uh, menu right now. You would love to open that. I’m gonna pour that and I’m gonna try this dish too. Great. And a trio and a, a gay that also would go really well with this. OK, excellent. So boom here I go, bon appetit. Oh my gosh, pillows of heaven, pillows of heaven, yeah, nice and tender. Thank you so much for being here. Cheers. That was fantastic.
Dining and Cooking