Fuck Fluffy
Especially when it comes to gnocchi
A few months ago, I was in Nashville at a restaurant called City House, where they had bread gnocchi on the menu and I asked the server about it.
“They’re not fluffy like potato gnocchi,” she said with the same tone in which someone that picks you up at a bar tells you that they’re actually married: a little sheepish, but still hopeful things can continue.
“Thank God,” I said. “I hate fluffy gnocchi.”
It’s true: I do. Whenever I make potato gnocchi, I load them up with flour and egg and work them to death until they bear as little resemblance as possible to pillows or clouds or whatever ethereally inedible ideal those gnocchi people aspire to. Even then I don’t like them that much. I’d rather eat cavatelli with a side of mashed potatoes. I don’t know why the hell I keep cooking them (to this day the gnocco I’m proudest of is this one I made out of a pile of wasabi when I was bored at a Japanese restaurant and had just discovered Instagram).
These bread gnocchi — chewy, dense as hell, and made out of pizza dough — were big news. I called my sister, a fellow gnocchi cynic — it’s genetic — to…
