Roosevelt Culinary Arts

Potato Gnocchi with Bertrand Weber

Bertrand Weber is the director of Culinary and Wellness Services for all of Minneapolis Public Schools. If you can believe it, they serve over 43,000 meals a day at 73 schools! Since becoming director, he has turned our school district into a national leader in bringing whole, healthy, locally-grown food to the school cafeteria, even at that grand scale. We were lucky to have him visit our class to tell us about his story and teach us his family recipe for potato gnocchi.

Bertrand shared with us that he was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and didn’t come to the United States until he was 15, so he had to learn English while in high school, just like many of the students in class. He has many family recipes from back in Europe, but the one he cooked first with his own kids was potato gnocchi. As he pointed out, it’s similar to play dough – you make the dough and then roll it out! It’s actually a little more complicated than that, but with Bertrand leading us, we set to work.

Step one is to boil and peel potatoes. The gnocchi will turn out the most tender and fluffy if the potatoes are still warm, so they are best peeled immediately (even it it means a hot-potato situation while peeling).

The next step is to pass the potatoes through a ricer or food mill. If you don’t have a ricer (like in the picture below) or a food mill, the small holes of a cheese grater actually work quite well, too.

Once the potatoes have been riced and spread out to cool, olive oil, salt, pepper, and nutmeg are added. Then the potatoes are formed into a well and a beaten egg is placed inside. Stirring with fingers from the middle, the egg is incorporated into the potatoes.

It’s now a wet mush, and ready for the flour, which is added in stages. Once the dough comes together, it is cut into pieces and rolled out into logs, which are cut into short pieces, now known as gnocchi!

The gnocchi should be floured well and boiled in salty water immediately. Once they rise to the surface, they only need another minute and they are done. (They can also be frozen for later, in which case it is best to lay them out flat on a tray in the freezer until they are frozen and then transfer to a container or bag.)