Welcome!
Hi and welcome! Ever wonder how to make gnocchi at home? We are sharing a loved homemade gnocchi recipe with you today that is easy and delicious.
Once you know how to make gnocchi, you can enjoy homemade gnocchi anytime. This is a potato gnocchi recipe that is quite easy to learn how to make. Enjoy delicious homemade gnocchi at home with your favorite sauce, or with a nice butter and herb dressing.
You will notice that homemade gnocchi tastes absolutely amazing when it is fresh and made from scratch, rather than buying air-packed from your grocery store. Plus, you can freeze your extra gnocchi if you make a big batch!
Making gnocchi is easy. Gnocchi is a type of pasta noodle made with mashed potatoes, so it is a bit more dense and chewier than regular pasta noodles. How do you make gnocchi? Gnocchi is made by boiling, mashing and cooling potatoes, and mixing them with eggs, flour, and salt. Let's continue right on to our easy, step-by-step gnocchi recipe below.
1. Peel your potatoes and cut into chunks.
2. Place potatoes into a pot of cold water on the stove top, turning to high.
3. Boil potatoes until you can insert a fork easily into them.
4. Drain potatoes, then set them aside to cool off.
*The next step for making gnocchi is easiest to do in a food processor. Our favorite and long voted by many as 'the best food processor' for the past several years, continues to be the Cuisinart Custom 14 Food Processor, which you can check the price on Amazon. If you don't have a food processor for making gnocchi, you can do the next step with a fork to blend ingredients together.
5. Place the cooled, mashed potato to make gnocchi into a food processor or bowl. Add the egg, and mix together until combined.
6. Add flour and salt, and mix together again.
7. Your gnocchi dough should have the consistency of moon sand. I know, that may be a strange comparison, but it is exactly how it should feel. Soft, smooth, and will form a ball easily. See my picture below of how your gnocchi dough consistency should look at this point.
9. Take one gnocchi dough ball out, and roll out with a rolling pin onto a floured surface. You want your gnocchi dough to be about a half-inch thick, and even throughout. Roll gnocchi dough into a flat circle.
If your gnocchi dough feels a bit wet, it won't run properly through a gnocchi making machine if that is what you will be using. You can add some flour and flip it on your floured surface, giving a gentle roll with the rolling pin. Don't worry, you can make gnocchi without a gnocchi machine, although I highly recommend using a gnocchi maker. The one we use is called a cavatelli maker, which you can find on Amazon here. Our gnocchi maker stays permanently on the counter since we make gnocchi so often with it!
10. Cut your gnocchi dough into strips, about 1 inch thick. Although, if you are using a gnocchi machine or cavatelli maker, here is a gnocchi hack for you: cut your dough into a spiral shape, so it is one continuous strip you can feed into your machine! See below:
11. With a plate under your machine, turn the crank and let the gnocchi fall onto the plate, turning as it fills. You can sprinkle gnocchi with a bit of flour as you go, just a dusting, to make sure your noodles don't start to stick together on the plate.
If you don't have a gnocchi machine or cavatelli maker, you can simply press gnocchi with a fork and cut into small pieces with a knife.
Repeat the steps above with the second ball of dough.
12. Place a pot full of water on the stove to boil on high, add a bit of salt. Once boiling, add enough homemade gnocchi to feed your crowd and the rest can be frozen.
Freshly made gnocchi cooks quickly, about 4-6 minutes in boiling water is good, but you can do a taste test carefully once your noodles start to float.
13. Drain homemade gnocchi and then put it back into the same pot or a large bowl with a bit of butter and add your desired sauce, if any.
Enjoy! And be sure to check out our article, Best Tools For Making Homemade Pasta.
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Homemade gnocchi can be eaten with Italian bread and butter and a great salad. Serve gnocchi with tomato sauce, or melt butter in a pot with Italian herbs and Parmesan cheese and pour on top. If serving your homemade gnocchi meal with a salad, we have an Italian salad dressing recipe that you can easily make, likely with what you have on hand. Check it out right here!
The best potatoes to make gnocchi with are yellow potatoes or Yukon gold potatoes. Also, a tip, using potatoes that are not quite as fresh are best for making gnocchi! Make sure the yellow potatoes for gnocchi are cooled before adding the rest of the ingredients for the best results.
You can absolutely make gnocchi ahead of time. In fact, we make gnocchi in large batches and freeze them!
Here is how to freeze gnocchi for making ahead of time: after making the gnocchi, give them a dusting of flour and place them, single layer, onto a baking sheet. Put them into the freezer. Once frozen, you can put them into ziplock bags.
You can keep homemade gnocchi in the freezer for 3-4 months, and when you want to make them, pull them out and add the frozen gnocchi directly into the boiling water until they float.
We hope you love this recipe as much as we do. Be sure to Pin it to your recipes Pinterest board to find it again later. We would appreciate that!
Happy cooking!
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Mireille Delisle Oldham
February 01, 2024
The dough came out hard and crumbly… quite the mess… :(.