Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats; chef Marco Canora is ready to make his signature gnocchi—a gnocchi so good that William Grimes of The New York Times once referred to a bowl of it as “lightweight and butter-laden, each dollop an eye-rolling pleasure bomb.”
Please be advised that there are no tricks up Canora’s sleeve; everything that you’re about to see is 100 percent real. “All you need to make great gnocchi is potatoes and flour,” explains Canora in the kitchen of his New York apartment, wielding a tray of Idaho potatoes hot from the oven.
When asked where he got his gnocchi recipe—from his grandmother? a trip to Italy?—Canora will answer, matter-of-factly, “I just came up with it. I knew the less liquid I had, the less flour I’d have to use and the lighter the gnocchi would be.”
How does he extract the liquid from the potatoes? Observe as he takes the extremely hot potatoes (they baked for more than an hour at 350°F) and slices them in half to expose the maximum amount of surface area. Watch as he scoops out the insides into a ricer and then rices the potato all over his kitchen counter. Pay attention as he spreads it out with a spoon and then stabs, stabs, stabs it with that same spoon, spreading out the potato shreds and fanning them with a bench scraper (an essential gnocchi-making tool, as you’ll find out).
Why is he doing this? “To allow steam to escape.” Steam equals water. Water equals the need for more flour. More flour equals heavy gnocchi.
This commonsense approach applies to every dish Canora cooks. His beef braciola is cooked in a sauce that begins with a soffrito. (“I live for soffrito,” he tells me. “It’s the starting point for everything in Italian food.”) In a food processor he combines 50 percent onion, 25 percent celery, and 25 percent carrot. “Do it by eye,” he says. “This isn’t technical. If the ratio’s a little bit off, it’s not the end of the world.”
After adding garlic, thyme, parsley, and basil, he whirs the mixture up with a little olive oil and adds it to the pan in which he just browned the meat. “All cooking starts with fat,” he says. “You add flavor to fat,” he continues, pointing to the soffrito in the pan, “and then you add that flavored fat to something. And that’s your dish.”
The other dish he teaches me—a salad made with dandelion greens, white anchovies, and hard-boiled egg—is one that his mother used to make. “She’d say, ‘You have to eat this because it cleans your blood!’” he tells me.
But, ladies and gentlemen, you didn’t pay good money for witty personal anecdotes or soffrito lessons. You paid to watch the master make his gnocchi. Watch as he sprinkles the now-cooled potato with flour. (“Like a dusting of snow,” he says. “A single fine layer.”) Lean closer as he works that flour into the potato with a bench scraper until “the potatoes suck it all in and it just looks like potato again.”
Two more additions of flour (see the recipe) and Canora is rolling the dough into logs, then cutting the logs into gnocchi. He boils the gnocchi until they float, spoons some of the tomato sauce infused with the beef and soffrito into a pan, and brings it all together until everything’s coated. He plates the gnocchi and tops it all with Parmesan and parsley.
Which is your cue to rise and give the chef his standing ovation. He’ll be humble, though, and bow his head: making gnocchi’s not rocket science, it just takes good common sense.
“I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel.”
Makes 3 or 4 dozen gnocchi*
Rarely does the word “delicate” come into play when describing gnocchi, but if you follow this recipe—and, by all means, you should—the resulting gnocchi will be so light and airy, you’ll be nervous to toss them in a pan with sauce for fear that they will fall apart. (I suggest lifting the gnocchi out of the boiling water with a spider straight into serving bowls and then topping with either melted butter and Parmesan cheese or the sauce from the braciola. This recipe isn’t so much a recipe as it is a technique, and the technique is all about getting the steam out of the gnocchi. The cooler you get it, the less flour it’ll take and the lighter it’ll be. Feel your way through it and you’ll create what may very well be the best gnocchi of your life.
6 large baking potatoes (older potatoes are better; they have less water), skin on, wiped clean*
3 to 4 cups all-purpose flour
ESSENTIAL TOOLS
Food mill or ricer
Bench scraper (also called a pastry scraper)
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Place the potatoes on a cookie sheet, poke each several times with a fork or knife, and bake until easily pierced with a knife, 1 to 1½ hours*.
Immediately slice the potatoes in half lengthwise to expose the maximum amount of surface area. Quickly scoop the steaming-hot insides* into a food mill or a ricer. Pass the potato flesh through the mill (on its finest setting) or the ricer onto a clean, wide work surface (marble, granite, or metal work best). Do not use a cutting board.
Stab the pile of potatoes with a small metal spoon, spreading it out into an even, shallow layer but being careful not to drag the spoon (that works the starch); stab downward and evenly across for up to 10 minutes*, until the potatoes are broken down into very small bits and cool to the touch.
Use a bench scraper to flip over the middle portion of potato, which will still be hot underneath. Stab this again and again with the spoon until cool.
Sprinkle the entire mass of potato with an even blanket of flour (about 1 cup). Incorporate it by stabbing with the bench scraper for several minutes until you can no longer see flour, only potato. Fold in the outer edges and stab again; the mass should get smaller.
Add another portion of flour, sprinkling it evenly over the whole mass again. Stab again with the bench scraper, but this time, as you do it, slowly bring the mixture together into a mound. It should begin to look like a cohesive dough: press it tightly together with the bench scraper so you can flip it over.
Make a pile of flour on the work surface and flip the mound of potato and flour onto it. Sprinkle with another layer of flour and, using the bench scraper, press the flour in, fold over, press again—don’t knead!—until you no longer see any trace of flour. When the dough sticks to the counter, you’re finished.
Form the dough into a large loaf; bang it, roll it, hit every side, and push it together to get rid of any air inside. Sprinkle flour onto a clean part of the work surface and flip the loaf onto it. Generously coat the outside of the loaf in flour. Let rest for 3 to 4 minutes.
Use the bench scraper to take a 1-inch-thick slice from the loaf. The cross-section should look aerated and not wet. Roll the slice into a snake, the diameter of which will determine the size of the gnocchi. (Aim for ½ inch in diameter.)
Continue rolling snakes from slices of the loaf, coating them in flour, and when you have a few, use the bench scraper to cut them into individual ½-inch gnocchi. Toss the gnocchi on a cookie sheet coated with flour.
To cook, bring a pot of water to a rapid boil and season aggressively with salt. Boil the gnocchi just until they float (about 3 minutes) and serve them either with melted butter, sage, and Parmesan or with the red sauce from the recipe for braciola (see photograph above). Top with more Parmesan and parsley.
Serves 4
Here’s a rustic, familiar “Sunday gravy” kind of dish: sirloin that’s sliced thin and pounded (you can ask your butcher to do this; tell him you’re making braciola, pronounced “bra-zhule”) and cooked with soffrito and tomato puree until fork tender. The meat is certainly a high point, but the sauce (which gets infused with the meaty brown bits) is the real star—you can spoon it, as Canora does, over gnocchi. Or it works equally well on pasta or polenta or sopped up with crusty bread.
FOR THE BEEF
½ cup flat-leaf parsley
3 small cloves garlic, peeled
2 pounds beef sirloin (well marbled)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
¼ pound thinly sliced pancetta
FOR THE REST OF THE DISH
½ medium red onion, peeled and diced
1 celery stalk, roughly chopped
1 carrot, roughly chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
1 tablespoon chopped thyme leaves
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1 tablespoon chopped basil
Olive oil
Kosher salt
½ cup dry Italian red wine (such as Grumello, Chianti, or Barbera)
24-ounce bottle of La Valle Passata di Pomodoro* (see Resources)
1 bay leaf
Freshly ground black pepper
Begin by chopping the parsley and smashing the garlic. Then place the garlic on top of the parsley and chop them together, integrating the two (see Kitchen Know-How), for a good 5 minutes until the mixture looks like a paste.
Thinly slice the beef against the grain. Lay each slice down on a piece of plastic wrap, cover with more plastic wrap, and pound with a meat hammer until it’s an even thin slice.
Lightly season each piece of meat with salt and pepper, sprinkle some of the garlic-parsley mixture on top, and then top with a piece of pancetta. With the meat lying lengthwise in front of you, roll it from the bottom toward the top. Use a toothpick to cinch the rolled meat together. Repeat with the rest of the slices and then season the outsides with salt and pepper.
Make a soffrito by combining the onion, celery, and carrot in a food processor. Pulse a few times and then add the garlic, thyme, parsley, and basil. Continue to pulse until everything is nicely minced but not liquefied: you want to see little flecks of the ingredients. Set aside.
In a large Dutch oven, heat a few tablespoons of olive oil on medium heat until it feels hot when you hold your hand over it. Lay the beef rolls in the oil and cook*, turning, until brown on all sides. (Don’t overcrowd the pan; you don’t want the beef to steam. If necessary, do this in batches.)
When the meat is brown all over, use tongs to remove it to a plate. Add another splash of olive oil to the pan and add the soffrito with a pinch of salt. Cook for a while, stirring to pick up brown bits from the bottom of the pan, until the soffrito just starts to color (2 to 3 minutes). When it does, return the beef to the pan.
Add the wine and use it to scrape up any brown bits left on the bottom of the pan. Add the passata, the bay leaf, and a gentle sprinkling of salt and pepper (not too much because the flavors will intensify as the sauce reduces). Bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, place a cover halfway over the pan, and cook for 40 minutes, or until the beef is tender (a knife will go in easily). If the sauce becomes too thick, add a little water. Remove the bay leaf.
To serve, remove the beef from the pan and remove the toothpicks. Dress with the sauce and save the remaining sauce for the gnocchi or another type of pasta. Eat hot. Leftovers will keep for several days in the fridge.
Serves 4
Normally, salad dressings are emulsified with a raw egg yolk, but in this recipe hard-boiled eggs play the role of emulsifier and help marry the few but disparate elements: the olive oil, balsamic, bread crumbs, pickled white anchovies, and dandelion greens. And though the greens in this salad are replaceable—you can try escarole or romaine hearts—the pickled white anchovies really make this salad special. They’re sweet and tangy and have a visually dramatic presence; the jarred gray type just won’t be the same.
A few handfuls of dandelion greens, washed and spun dry in a salad spinner
4 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
Toasted bread crumbs (optional)
8 pickled white anchovies (boquerones; see Resources)
Good-quality olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Cut the bottoms off the dandelion greens and discard. Chop the rest of the greens a few times so each green is bite-size. Add a layer of greens to a large salad bowl.
Sprinkle the chopped egg and the toasted bread crumbs (if you’re using them) over the greens, and then lay the anchovies on top.
Take the salad to the table, and when you’re ready to serve, drizzle on olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste. Toss with salad tongs and taste for balance. Serve right away, before the greens start to wilt.
