Pillowy dumplings are a customer favorite among pizzerias’ pasta offerings

Fom samosa to shumai, nearly every culture has its own tasty, dough-based dumpling. Italy’s signature dumpling is gnocchi, the pillowy pasta dish that can be made with potato, pumpkin or ricotta and served with a variety of sauces.

And while shelf-stable and frozen gnocchi are mass produced for restaurant kitchens, pizzeria operators known for their gnocchi say customers return for the home-made dish they produce just like Grandma used to make – with a twist.

Three Main Ingredients

For GianLuca Giovanetti, who opened Gnocco in New York City’s East Village neighborhood in 2000, gnocchi are a reminder of his upbringing in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy. The area’s wet soil is fertile ground for growing potatoes, one of three ingredients he uses in the simple yet decadent dish served three ways at Gnocco.

“Flour, potato, a little salt, and the gnocchi is done,” Giovanetti says of the dough. But for all of gnocchi’s simplicity, it is easy to mess it up, resulting in gnocchi that is chewy or glue-y. According to Giovanetti, overly chewy gnocchi is a result of adding too much flour, a common is­sue with shelf-stable gnocchi, which he says often is made with potato flakes rather than fresh potato.

“Potato costs more than flour, so industrial gnocchi use a percentage of flour that is crazy high,” Giovanetti says. “But the flour needs a lot of (cooking) time to be digestible.”

Traditional, freshly made gnocchi, by contrast, are dunked into boiling water and removed once the pillows float to the surface – about a minute after being submerged. Flour-heavy industrial gnocchi often aren’t fully cooked by this time, Giovanetti says, creating a chewy texture that feels heavy in the stomach.

Giovanetti says he has experimented with a variety of potatoes for the gnocchi at Gnocco, which primarily uses Russet potatoes due to their low water content. While some restaurants prefer to bake the potatoes prior to mashing them, the potatoes at Gnocco are boiled to achieve a consistent texture. After boiling, kitchen staff peel the potatoes to remove excess starch before adding zero-zero flour.

Simple gnocchi recipe:

• 1 kilogram of boiled, peeled potatoes
• No more than 350 grams of zero-zero flour
• 15 grams of salt

Giovanetti prefers to keep the salt ratio low for his gnocchi, knowing the sauce will provide its final flavor. Depending on the time of year, Gnocco often incorporates seasonal gnocchi to its menu of specials, but the standard menu offers three types of gnocchi:

• Gnocchi al Pomodoro e Bufala: homemade gnocchi with tomato sauce, buffalo mozzarella and basil.
• Gnocchi con Tartufo Nero: homemade gnocchi with truffle butter, shaved black truffle and parmesan cheese.
• Gnocchi Gorgonzola e Noci: home­made gnocchi in gorgonzola cheese sauce with walnuts.

From Caserta to Miami

At Miami-based La Leggenda Pizza, chef Giovanni Gagliardi makes his gnocchi with ricotta cheese, so it is lighter to match the warm climate. “It’s just a little bit of potato, flour and ricotta inside,” he says. “The dough is more light with ricotta,” rather than heftier and chewier with a higher ratio of potato.

To make gnocchi, Gagliardi uses a different zero-zero flour than the one he uses for La Leggenda’s Napoletana pizzas and calzones. But unlike pizza dough, gnocchi dough does not need to ferment, meaning it is ready to be cooked immediately or frozen and used later.

“The moment it’s out of the freezer, it’s ready,” Gagliardi says of the gnocchi he freezes at La Leggen­da’s prep kitchen. Gagliardi says he makes a week’s worth of gnocchi at the offsite prep kitchen and brings one box – or 10 to 20 kilograms of gnocchi – to the pizzeria per day, along with 100 kilograms of pizza dough.

Depending on the size of the batch, Gagliardi adds between one and three eggs to the dough mixture. He then dusts the pan with semolina flour to keep the gnocchi from sticking together during storage, and pizzeria staff use flour to keep the gnocchi from sticking to their hands.

Gagliardi uses “the grandma theory” to decide when the gnocchi is done, meaning when the dump­lings rise to the surface of boiling water, they are fully cooked. From there, he drains the gnocchi and quickly drops them in a small sauce pan for finishing.

Gagliardi says the three gnocchi sauces at La Leggenda represent the flag of Italy: red, green and white:

• Gnocchi alla Sorrentina: gnocchi in plum tomato sauce with cow’s milk mozzarella, parmesan cheese and basil.
• Gnocchi al Pesto: gnocchi in pesto sauce, consisting of basil, extra-virgin olive oil, garlic and pine nuts.
• Gnocchi al Quattro Formaggi: gnocchi in four-cheese sauce.

Gnocchi in a Pizza Bread Bowl

All the gnocchi dishes at La Leggenda are served in a pizza bread bowl, which is made to order. To cre­ate the bread bowl, Gagliardi covers a stainless-steel mixing bowl with pizza dough and uses a peel to put it in the wood-fired pizza oven, turning the bowl quickly until it is evenly cooked.

When the pizza bread bowl is ful­ly cooked, it is taken out of the oven and flipped over, and the stainless-steel bowl is replaced with freshly cooked gnocchi finished in red, green or white sauce. The dish is then topped with cheese and basil, depending on the order, and served piping hot.

Gagliardi says he originally used pizza bread bowls in Italy as a dessert item, and after mov­ing to the United States, his wife suggested he try the gnocchi bread bowl as a savory dish. He uploaded a video of the gnocchi bread bowl to social media, and it went viral, garnering 8 million views.

In addition to bringing traffic to La Leggenda, Restaurant Manager Veronica Mangiapia says the viral video has made more custom­ers aware of gnocchi in general. “Not a lot of people knew about gnocchi. … Then we started to see the difference,” she says, adding that La Leggenda clientele like sampling both pizza and gnocchi at the restaurant located four blocks from Miami’s famed South Beach.

Best Practices for Making Gnocchi

With fewer ingredients, it is more important to use good ingredients, according to Giovanetti of New York City-based Gnocco. For him, this means real potatoes as well as high-quality flour. He prefers to store gnocchi in the refrigerator rather than the freezer to shorten the cooking time needed at the restaurant from one minute for refrigerated versus three minutes for frozen.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to the program, Giovanetti says he used to invite neighborhood schoolchildren to make fresh pasta in the kitchen at Gnocco. “That pe­riod was amazing,” he remembers, adding, “As soon as they start to get dirty with the flour, they understand they can play around. It’s like playing on the beach or playing in the mud.”

Giovanetti enjoys playing with gnocchi combinations himself, adding that it is rela­tively easy to make stuffed pasta, such as truffle sauce-stuffed gnocchi with parmigiano fondue. For stuffed gnocchi, he says, the sauce should be different but complementary from what is on the inside to ensure the combination is not too sweet or salty, as with too much cheese. The same dough, he says, can be used to create ravioli.

Finally, Giovanetti says he prefers small gn­occhi because they cook quickly, which is key in the busy Manhattan kitchen. “Dimension is important to cooking time as well – it’s going to take time.”

KATE LAVIN is Senior Editor at Pizza Today.