Category: how to

March 12, 2008

Gnocchi with Thyme Vinaigrette and Lemon Cashew Cream

In Italy, gnocchi doesn’t require potatoes. They can be made from regular pasta flour, or cheese. In fact, pretty much anything that can be rolled into a lump and served like pasta/dumplings can be gnocchi. In the United States, however, gnocchi is usually assumed to be made mostly from potatoes, though you’ll see sweet potato gnocchi and ricotta gnocchi every once in a while.

When it comes to potato gnocchi, there’s a great debate between those who insist on adding eggs to the dough, and those who insist that eggless gnocchi is the best. Begin vegan, this is a problem easily solved. No eggs! There, that was easy, right?

What’s really nice about this is that your vegan gnocchi is just the same as a lot of traditional gnocchis out there. While I love adapting recipes to be vegan, it’s really nice to make time-tested dishes that have always been vegan. Gnocchi is one of those dishes. Don’t let anyone make you put eggs in your gnocchi!

The downside is that eggless gnochhi can be a bit more fussy than the egged version. But don’t despair! I did a bunch of research, and I think I have a solid recipe here that will minimize if not eliminate any problems. These tips will be detailed in the recipe below.

I decided to serve this with two easy sauces. If I’m going to the effort of making fresh pasta, I want sauces that compliment and showcase the pasta–nothing too thick or too heavy that would hide it or mask the flavor of fresh gnocchi. First I made a thyme vinaigrette, but vinaigrette is too strong of a word. It’s simply fresh thyme leaves, mashed in a mortar and pestle with some salt, olive oil, and a tiny splash of white wine vinegar. It’s not nearly as tart as you might expect with a title like “vinaigrette”. It really lets the fresh time flavor stand out, and shows off your beautiful gnocchi.

To cut the thyme vinaigrette, I made a simple cashew cream sauce with a hint of lemon. It has a light sweetness and richness that really matches nicely. If you have a high-speed blender (like a Vita-Mix) you’ll have no problems blending the cashews into a smooth sauce. I’m not sure how a regular blender will fare. You could try powdering the nuts in a spice grinder before adding them to your blender, and straining the cream afterwards if it’s still lumpy. It might work fine, though!

Alright, are you ready to make gnocchi? And PS – this recipe is soy free!

Gnocchi with Thyme Vinaigrette and Lemon Cashew Cream
Serves 2-3

For Gnocchi
2 Russet Potatoes (about 1 1/2 pounds)
1 Scant Cup Bread Flour*
(No salt!)

For Thyme Vinaigrette
2 Tbs Fresh Thyme, leaves only
1-2 Pinches Salt, to taste
4 Tbs Olive Oil
1 tsp White Wine Vinegar

For Lemon Cashew Cream
1 Cup Water
1 1/4 Cups Roasted, Salted Cashews (or raw)
Zest of 1 Lemon
1/2-1 tsp Lemon Juice

*I call for bread flour because of the high-gluten content. This will help the pasta set up while it’s cooking a little better than regular flour would.

Game Plan: The first thing you’re going to do is get the potatoes in the oven. Baked potatoes will be drier than boiled, so even though it takes longer, it makes for better gnocchi. While they’re baking, prepare both sauces, get your workstation ready, and put a large pot of salty water on to boil. (It’s important that you salt the water and not the dough; this will help keep the gnocchi firm. Salt is hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs water–salt in the dough would make your gnocchi a little mushy). Now you’ll be ready to cook and plate the gnocchi as soon as you’re finished shaping them.

For your workstation, you’ll need the following: 1 knife (a paring knife is ideal), a fork or a gnocchi board, a large plate lightly dusted with flour (for your shaped gnocchi), and a large, flat surface for rolling out your pasta. A potato ricer (or a food mill) is ideal for ricing the potatoes, but a box grater or even just a fork will suffice.

You want to rice your potatoes as soon as possible when they come out of the oven. The hotter the potato, the more steam comes off when you rice it, which reduces the moisture content of the gnocchi. The dryer the gnocchi, the less flour you need, which leads to the lightest, fluffiest, most delicious gnocchi. Use a kitchen towel to hold the potato, unless you feel like burning your fingers!

Near your pot of boiling water, place a bowl with 1/2 of the vinaigrette in the bottom. When the gnocchi are finished cooking, you’ll scoop them out of the boiling water with a slotted spoon and place them directly in this bowl and toss to coat. Then you can plate them and drizzle them with the cream sauce before they cool. Got it?

Preheat oven to 400º F. Stab your potatoes with a fork and wrap them in foil. Bake in a small dish for about 60 minutes, or until tender all the way through.

Sauces
Meanwhile, prepare your sauces. Strip the thyme leaves off their stems into a mortar. Add a pinch or two of salt and grind with the pestle until a rough paste is formed. Add oil and vinegar and mix again. Don’t worry if it’s emulsified, it just needs to be mixed. Taste and adjust salt or vinegar as needed. Set aside.

Place all the ingredients for the cashew cream in a blender and blend on high until thick and smooth. Adjust seasoning if needed (this should be slightly sweet and not as salty as the vinaigrette) and set aside.

Making the Gnocchi

As soon as the potates come out of the oven, remove the foil and then peel them. The photo shows me using a vegetable peeler, but I quickly switched to scraping the skin off with the back of a knife. Much easier.

Put the hot potatoes through a ricer as soon as you can. The hotter the potatoes are during this step, the better the gnocchi will be. Rice them over a wide, flat surface to maximize contact with the air to help them dry out better. You can also grate them or shred them with a fork.

Let the potatoes cool/dry for 10-15 minutes. During this time, make sure you have everything in place you’ll need for shaping, cooking, dressing, and plating the gnocchi. Once they’re shaped you want to be able to cook them and serve them as quickly as possible (unless you’ll be freezing the cooked gnocchi for later).

Gather your cooled potatoes into a flat disc and sprinkle about 1/2 the flour over it.

Work the dough with your hands, adding more flour if needed. You probably won’t need the whole cup of flour. I had about three tablespoons leftover. If in doubt, use less as opposed to more.

Work your dough until just combined. Do not overwork it! It should be soft, not sticky or crumbly. You’re not even going to really knead it, just mix it together. You must shape the dough immediately.

My favorite part! Roll some of the dough out into a long snake, about as thick as your tumb. Cut the snake into little “pillows” and dust them with flour. To shape, simply roll one of the pillows down a ridged gnocchi board (or the tines of a fork!). The gnocchi should curl around your thumb. Once side will be ridged, and the other side will have an indent in it. This helps to catch the sauce.

Place the shaped gnocchi on a plate that has been dusted with flour. At this point you should cook the gnocchi immediately. I tried freezing the raw shaped gnocchi and it was a disaster! You must at least partially cook the gnocchi at this point or all your hard work will be ruined.

Cooking and Serving the Gnocchi
Gently place the gnocchi in to salted, boiling water. After a minute or two, the gnocchi will float to the surface. About 30 seconds after they begin floating, use a slotted spoon to remove them from the water, draining them well.

Place the cooked gnocchi into a large bowl that has 1/2 of the vinaigrette in the bottom. Toss the gnocchi to coat. Drizzle your dinner plates with the other half of the vinaigrette and some of the cream sauce. Pile the gnocchi on the plates and drizzle more cream sauce on top. Garnish with a fresh sprig of thyme and serve immediately.

January 8, 2008

Petits Fours

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog for a while, you know that I like all things miniature. Especially desserts. I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to make petits fours. They’re the perfect mini dessert; a tiny layer cake, dipped in poured fondant and individually decorated. Bite sized individual cakes? Yes, please. Who on earth could say no to these?

Sometimes people use the term petit four generally. They might be referring to any small dessert, even a simple piece of chocolate. The majority of the time, however, they are referring to these fancy miniature iced cakes. They’re typically cube-shaped, though you’ll sometimes see diamonds, rectangles, and cylinders. The iced versions are technically called petits fours glacÃ©s, but rarely to people get so specific.

You can just dip a cube of cake into icing and call it a day (or rather a petit four), but the most traditional versions are layered with jam, soaked with liquor syrup, dipped in poured fondant and decorated. Pain in the ass? Yes. Worth it? Hell yes.

Let’s talk for a minute about the components of this type of petit four. The cake is typically a gÃ©noise, which is a French cake named after a city in Italy. GÃ©noise cakes traditionally do not include any chemical leavening all, but instead trap air in the batter by vigorous beating before baking. In normal gÃ©noise recipes, eggs help to keep the air in the batter. In the oven, the heated air expands and causes the cake to rise. This recipe contains no eggs, however, so chemical leavening is used. I used Bryanna Clark Grogan’s recipe, but any fairly dense cake recipe (like a pound cake) will work for this. A tight crumb will make your life easier when slicing the petits fours. Make sure to visit Bryanna’s page, though; she has wonderful tips on making fancy vegan cakes, a nice buttercream recipe, and lots of photos.

I iced my petits fours with poured fondant. There are two types of fondant, rolled and poured. Before I started researching for this, I only knew of rolled fondant, which is the really neat sugar-dough stuff that is often used to decorate wedding cakes. Poured fondant is similar to rolled, but instead of rolling it out to use it, you pour it while it’s in a liquified state. Makes sense to me. It’s easy to make, but it does require a candy thermometer. You need to boil sugar, corn syrup and water until the soft ball stage, but we’ll get to that later.

Once you have the cake and the fondant figured out, give yourself a break and buy a jam, any jam, for the filling. Sure, you can pick berries and make your own filling, but store-bought jam works beautifully in this and saves you a step or five. You can also soak the cake with a liquor syrup if desired. I never do this for my cakes, but if you want to, use a ration of 1:1:1 water, sugar, liquor. In a saucepan, dissolve sugar completely in the water. Remove from heat, add liquor, and allow to cool.

Now you’ll also need a few tools. A candy thermometer ($10 for a standard one, $30 for an electric one that has programs and alarms and such), a jelly roll pan (aka cookie sheet with sides), a food processor, a large serrated knife, parchment paper, a rolling pin, and a cooling rack.

Right. Are you ready?

Petits Fours
Makes 30 1 1/2″ Pieces

1 Cake recipe, below
1 Fondant Recipe, below
1 1/2 Cups Jam, warmed (raspberry is nice!)
1/2 Cup Marzipan
Powdered Sugar, for rolling out marzipan
Melted Chocolate, for decoration, optional

Bryanna Clark Grogan’s GÃ©noise
Makes 5 Cups of Batter

2 1/2 Cups plus 2 T. pastry or cake flour
1 1/2 Cups Granulated Sugar
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
3/4 tsp Salt
1/4 Cup plus 2 Tbs Earth Balance
2 Tbs Fresh Lemon Juice and Zest of 1 whole Lemon
1 Cup Water
3/4 Cup Soy or Rice Milk
1 1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 tsp Pure Lemon Extract

Preheat oven to 350Âº F.

Brush a Jelly Roll Pan (half sheet size, 12 x 17 x 1″) with oil. Use two sheets of parchment paper to cover the bottom, overlapping each long edge of the pan. This will allow you to lift the entire cake out of the pan without breaking it. The oil helps the parchment stick to the pan, so it doesn’t slip while pouring in the batter.

Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Add Earth Balance, water, and lemon juice and beat well (with an electric mixer if available) for about a minute. Add the remaining ingredients and beat again. Pour the batter into the lined jelly roll pan and bake for 25-30 minutes, until the edges are golden brown and the top is lightly browned, and the center springs back to your touch. Allow to cool in pan until just warm.

Gripping the parchment in the center on either side, gently lift the cake out of the pan and place it on a large cutting surface. It should look like this:

With a serrated knife, cut off all the caramelized edges (eat them!), and quarter the cake. Below is a photo of one of the four trimmed quarters:

Alright, here’s the first tricky part. With a large serrated knife, cut each quarter in half horizontally. You can take as much time as you need. Cut a little bit at a time, making sure your knife is being held level. Ideally you want two even layers.

Carefully separate the layers. You should now have this:

Spread the warmed jam on one of the sliced cake quarters. You don’t need a ton of jam, just enough to color the cake. You should still be able to see the cake through the jam.

Begin stacking, alternating cake and jam, until you have four layers of cake. You should have enough cake to make two stacks, each stack containing four layers of cake and three layers of jam. Trim the edges if needed.

Divide the marzipan in half. Knead it until it softens, then roll each chunk out separately using powdered sugar to prevent it from sticking.

Roll it out until you get a thin, even sheet that is larger in all directions than your layered cake.

Brush one side of the marzipan with water to make it sticky, then place it on top of your cake, sticky-side down. Trim the edges off with scissors. Repeat for the second rectangle of cake.

The cake is now ready to be refrigerated. It should be approximately 1 1/2 inches high. Cover it in plastic wrap and refrigerate for several hours or overnight; this helps the jam set up and will help the cake stay together when you cut it into petit fours.

Now the cake has been refrigerated overnight!

Using a ruler, score the marzipan with 1 1/2 inch grid as a cutting guideline. Each rectangle of cake should have 15 full squares, and a little extra that you can cut off and eat. Here’s the scored, trimmed cake:

Keeping your knife as straight as possible, use long, sawing strokes to cut the cubes. Cover with plastic wrap to prevent the cake from drying out.

Prepare your fondant:
Helen Fletcher’s Poured Fondant

2 1/2 Cups Sugar
1/2 Cup Water
1/4 Cup Corn Syrup

Written directions copy and pasted directly:
Heat sugar, water and corn syrup to the soft-ball stage (238Â°F; 114Â°C). Pour into the food processor fitted with the steel blade. Wash the candy thermometer well and reinsert into the syrup. Let the syrup cool undisturbed in the workbowl to 140Â°F (60Â°C), about 30 minutes. Remove the thermometer.

Add any coloring or flavoring (vanilla, almond extract, etc.) and process 2 to 3 minutes, until the syrup completely converts from a glassy syrup to an opaque paste. When thoroughly cooled, store sealed at room temperature for 24 hours. Use or refrigerate for later use. [I just want to add: It will harden once completely cooled, simply microwave to liquify. It is warm enough to use for the petits fours immediately after processing.]

Place your petits fours on a cooling rack and pour your fondant into a small bowl. You’re ready to ice them!

In my opinion, icing is the hardest part. You need to keep your fondant warm and melty, and you’ll notice that it starts to set up fast. Give it a stir with a spoon before you dip each piece, as this will break any skin that has formed on top of the fondant. If it gets too thick (thinner is better), pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds and try again.

Start with the ugly ones, that way if you mess up on the first few you won’t be as sad. Hold each cube so your forefinger is on the top of the cake (touching the marzipan) and your thumb is on the bottom. Dip all four sides.

Place the dipped petit four on the rack. Use a spoon to ice the top.

Let the petits fours set. You may need the help of a sharp knife to remove them from the rack once the fondant is hardened. I drizzled some melted chocolate over them to decorate, but you can decorate them anyway you want. Piped buttercream, molded marzipan, whatever makes you happy.