Welcome back to our new column at PEOPLE.com: the Tiny Test Kitchen. Here, we test recipes from the latest and greatest cookbooks and let you know how it went. Why Tiny Test Kitchen? Because we whip up these dishes in our very own (very tiny) New York City kitchens to show you just how easy or difficult, tasty or terrible the food turns out to be.
THE BOOK:How to Eataly
THE DISH:Gnocchi al Pomodoro Piccante (Potato Gnocchi with Spicy Tomato Sauce)
THE TESTER:Mark Marino, PEOPLE.com deputy editor,@mamarino
I live close to Eataly, NYC’s Italian mega-store, and as impressive as it is with its superdupermarket and many restaurants, the wall-to-wall tourists can make shopping and dining there a challenge. So, I wasn’t sure what to expect from acookbookcalledHow to Eataly— would bringing it home mean I’d suddenly have mobs of strangers turning up in my small apartment?
As it turns out, the cookbook is a guide to buying, cooking, and eating Italian food (at least that what the subtitle says). Cooking is what I was interested in, so I decided to try making Eataly’s focaccia. But that involved creating a “starter” (flour and water fermented to form yeast and bacteria — yum!) several days in advance, and my “starter” stopped working after two days, so I opted for the Gnocchi al Pomodoro Piccante recipe instead.
To get into the spirit, I put on Italian music (“Mambo Italiano” is great to chop to, FYI), and gathered my ingredients. I scrubbed four russet potatoes, then measured out 2 cups of coarse sea salt. I initially thought the salt was to be added to the potatoes after they were cooked, but it is actually used to line the baking dish in which you’ll bake the spuds (Eataly prefers to bake, not boil their gnocchi taters).
While the potatoes baked at 350 degrees, I prepped the spicy tomato sauce. Instead of the indicated two garlic cloves, I used three, and crushed them with a knife (this is great for getting your aggression out — “Damn you, Ebola!” Smack!). I sautéed the garlic in olive oil with some crushed red pepper flakes, then added a can of crushed tomatoes.
The recipe called for whole peeled potatoes, but I accidentally bought crushed, which actually worked out in my favor since you’d need to crush the tomatoes if they were whole. Anyway, after 20 minutes of simmering, the sauce looked and tasted great.
But back to the potatoes. They are supposed to bake for about 40 minutes, but mine were nowhere near done at that point. So I played another round of Italian music, and about 20 minutes later — around the time I was weeping along to “Al di là” — they were done. I couldn’t figure out what to do with the 2 cups of toasty, coarse salt that remained in the baking dish, since it seemed a shame to throw it out. Real Italians waste nothing — surely they would turn this into a scrub to polish their feet before stomping grapes, or spray paint it different colors and make some kind of artful mosaic, or add a heel of bread, some cheese rinds and a few wilted vegetables to make a salt soup. But I didn’t have time to be creative, so into the trash it went.
When the potatoes cooled a bit, I peeled them (the crisp, salty peels make a nice snack, BTW) and passed them through a ricer. If you’ve ever used a ricer, you may notice that sometimes a few potato pieces just get mashy but won’t pass through the holes. You should toss those, because they will end up forming lumps in your dough, as I later learned.
After dividing the dough into about a dozen egg-sized balls, I rolled each one out into 3/4-inch-wide ropes and cut the ropes into 1-inch pieces. (Confession: I’m bad at measuring, so none of my gnocchi were the same size.)
Then, I rolled each piece agains the back of a fork so that the tines formed grooves in the gnocchi — only the grooves barely formed. But, I pressed on (literally).
Now it was time to cook the gnocchi. After bringing a large pot of salty water to a boil, I plunged the potato pasta in, and about a minute later they all came floating to the top and were ready to meet their marinara.
I plated the gnocchi, added a sprinkle of parmesan cheese and sat down to mangia with my friend Alecia.
Gnocchi al Pomodoro PiccanteServes 6 as a first course
4 russet potatoes (about 1 1/2 lbs. total)2 cups coarse sea salt, plus more for salting the pasta cooking water3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting1 tbsp. fine sea salt, plus more for seasoning the sauce1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for finishing2 cloves garlic, crushedPinch crushed red pepper flakes1 (16-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes
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source: people.com
