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04/16/08 |
                          
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Sweet Potato Gnocchi w/prawns v2.0 Yields 4 very orange servings 2 lb. garnet sweet potatoes 1 T. olive oil 2 t. kosher salt 2 ea. large egg 2 c. AP flour, more or less 2 T. garlic 12 ea. 16-20 count prawns, peeled 1/2c. white wine 1 t. five-spice powder 2 c. heavy cream 1/2 t. grated ginger, squeezed of juice salt & white pepper to taste
In a 400 degree oven, roast sweet potatoes in their jackets until soft, approx. 1 hour or so. While they're still hot, peel them and mash them (use a ricer if you want perfect texture), then add--in this order--the oil, the salt, and the egg. Add in enough flour to make a soft dough, like...it's hard to describe the texture. Basically, if it's still sticking to your work space, it's too soft. If you let it *sit* for five minutes and it sticks to your work space, you're right on. It's like warm cookie dough or something. At this point, cut off a hunk, dust your work space with some more flour, roll your hunk into a log about a half-inch thick, and then cut your log into half-inch chunks. To cook the damn things, boil in salted water for about five minutes, or until the dough firms up. Shock the gnocchi in an ice bath and set aside. To make the actual dish, heat some oil in a large pan and fry up your garlic until golden brown (if your prawns are raw, add them with the oil). Deglaze with white wine, then add the cream, ginger and five-spice. Reduce the cream until it bubbles thickly (not quite like Cream of Wheat, but more like Wendy's chili), throw in your gnocchi (and the prawns, if they're pre-cooked), toss to heat through and serve. Garnish with some fresh-grated Parmesan cheese and some chilli flakes and you are SET.
Note from GG: Thanksgiving was a bounty of crap for us at Ray's. We had to peel six cases of sweet potatoes, which were then turned into tournes for service. Since folks don't necessarily like sweet potatoes unless they're swimming in sweetened syrup with marshmallows, we had a ton left over. I did my best to use them up, and this is a recipe that I came up with. And if I may rant for a second or two, QUIT FSCKING CALLING THEM YAMS! Yams are different than sweet potatoes! Yeesh... For those of you not in the know, gnocchi are mini potato pasta-like thingies served in Italy. If you're so inclined, you can probably substitute potato starch for the AP flour, but it'll thicken differently (and possibly more). Potato starch will probably act like corn starch, so I'd use about half as much to start. Quite honestly, I'm not totally happy with this recipe, as the flavour is just a bit skewed. I can't quite figure it out, but it tastes good enough by itself (and our servers really liked the recipe), but not perfect like some of my other recipes. I'll just take a mulligan here. Update, Jan. 5 2008: I figured out what my problem was, and I corrected it in this recipe. Up to this point, I'd always been boiling or steaming the potatoes for the gnocchi, which was doing little more than waterlogging them. As such, I was having to add WAY too much flour to get them to set properly, and what I wound up with was some kind of gigantic spaetzle. This is bad. Spaetzle are dumplings and gnocchi are supposed to be pasta(-ish). Thus my old recipe produced insanely heavy gnocchi, which I'm sure caused no small amounts of stomachaches. I can only apologize. Anyway, the proper method is to *bake* the potatoes first, thus eliminating the extra moisture absorbed by boiling. I did this recipe today at Nell's, and the results were several parsecs different that my previous attempts. This is what happens when you get to work with a real chef.
This site was last updated 01/05/08 |
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