Light and Tender Gnudi

This was cucina povera at its best: a couple of naturally paired provisions deftly worked into something substantial and satisfying. And while the name of the dish suggests a certain deficiency, the dumplings’ appeal is arguably thanks to—not in spite of—the absence of pasta dough. (“Gnudi” literally means “nudes,” referring to the way they seem like ravioli filling without the wrapper. They’re also known as malfatti and strozzapreti; for more information, see “What’s in a Name?”) In fact, Italian food scholars such as Oretta Zanini De Vita have traced praise for gnudi as far back as the 13th century. In her Encyclopedia of Pasta (2009), Zanini De Vita notes that the Franciscan friar and chronicler Salimbene da Parma “. . . tasted gnudi for the feast of Saint Clare and considered them a true delicacy.”

At the same time, it must have taken practiced hands to turn out the tender, verdant dumplings that still make up the dish today. I stumbled through my first batches as I confronted the dish’s universal challenge: water management. Both the ricotta and the greens are loaded with moisture, much of which must be removed lest the dough be too difficult to handle or require so much binder that the dumplings are leaden instead of light.

Michael Pagliarini, chef-owner of Giulia and Benedetto restaurants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, underscored the latter risk for me, noting that cooks must tread carefully when it comes to binders if they don’t want dense results. Jody Adams, a Boston-area chef best known for her restaurants Porto, Trade, and (now-shuttered) Rialto, echoed that sentiment.

“[There’s a] physical challenge to getting it right,” she said of the dough. “[There should be] just enough firmness that it doesn’t disintegrate . . . but [it should be] really airy.”

To tackle the water issue, most recipes suggest draining the ricotta in a paper towel–lined strainer and blanching the greens (I was using fresh spinach) before squeezing out as much water as possible. I had no trouble with either technique, except efficiency. It took hours for the cheese to drain sufficiently and multiple batches of blanched spinach to yield enough for four servings of dough. Ultimately, I changed tack on both: I “towel-dried” the ricotta on a rimmed baking sheet for 10 minutes and used frozen spinach, which simply needed to be thawed and dried in a single batch (see “Fast Track to Water Management”).

From there, I chopped the spinach in a food processor and transferred it to a bowl with the drained ricotta. Then I seasoned the mixture with Parmesan, salt and pepper, and lemon zest and started experimenting with binders. I needed just the right balance of eggs and starch: Egg proteins hold the dough together as it cooks, but eggs also add water; starch from flour and/or bread crumbs absorbs water, firming the dough and making it easy to manipulate, but too much can lead to dense results.

Case in point: I made a beautifully workable dough with a pair of egg whites (more valuable than yolks for their preponderance of binding proteins) and a little more than ½ cup of flour. I rolled it into tidy ropes and cut the ropes into small pieces as I would gnocchi—the shaping approach I’d seen in several recipes. But the cooked dumplings were dense and tight.

I could have kept fiddling with the ratios, but instead I solicited ideas from Lydia Reichert, a friend of mine who is the former chef at Sycamore in Newton, Massachusetts. She offered a clutch suggestion: Instead of making a dough that’s firm enough to roll, make one that’s just cohesive enough to scoop and roll into rounds (see “The Scoop on Scooping”).

To do that, I had to cut back on some of the flour without removing so much starch that the dough became sticky. And as it turned out, that was a perfect job for the bread crumbs I’d seen in some gnudi recipes: Just 1 tablespoon of conventional crumbs in place of an equal amount of flour produced a light but cohesive dough and noticeably airier gnudi, since they made the dough heterogeneous, much as they would in a meatball mixture. The results were even better with panko; these coarser crumbs are more absorbent and made the raw dough easier to handle.

Bright tomato sugo and rich browned butter are classic gnudi sauces, but I was intrigued by the thoughtful, less traditional riffs I’d seen and ended up making something of a hybrid. I browned some butter, toasting thinly sliced garlic in it as I swirled the pan, and then added halved cherry tomatoes along with a splash of cider vinegar. I cut the heat and covered the pan so that the tomatoes collapsed and spilled their bright juices into the butter—almost like tomato confit. Fresh basil and grated Parmesan over the top made the whole ensemble pop and placed my take on this dish just where I wanted it: comfortably wedged between traditional and personal.