Sweet Potato Gnocchi

I decided to give this a try to see how it would work out. It was a complete success and so I am writing down the recipe to keep for future reference.

Ingredients:
4 Large sweet potatoes
2 Cups grated parmesan cheese
Potato Flour or Potato Starch
1 egg
1/2 Tbsp Butter or margarine
Salt and Pepper to taste.

Boil the sweet potatoes until soft.

Strain out the water and using a potato press, puree the sweet potatoes*.
* sweet potatoes absorb more of the water than potatoes do. Before mashing the potatoes, squeeze the press gently to squeeze out the excess water, then mash the potatoes into a bowl.

Add the egg, butter, salt and pepper to the potatoes. Also add about half the quantity of potatoes of flour, and mix.

The overall dough should be light, and still slightly sticky but not too much so.

roll out the dough on a floured surface and cut and mould into appropriate sized shapes. Some recipes also recommend putting the dough in a piping bag and sniping off pieces of dough as it comes out of the bag.

Add the gnocchi to salted boiling water and boil until they start to float.

Serve warms with butter and salt, or sauce of some kind.

Sauce recommendations: The sauce from the previous recipe (the goulash stew creation), Alfredo sauce, or Mushroom sauce.

Tips: Do not add too much flour since the result will be too heavy. If you are worried, boil a small amount of dough to see how it tastes before deciding whether to add more flour.

If you run out of potato flour, you can add normal flour. Too much normal flour however will weigh down the gnocchi.

If you are feeling experimental, you can try different cheeses. One option is to substitute the parmesan with cottage cheese (drained) and add nutmeg and cinnamon then serve with butter and sugar.

Noodles Continued

So I realize I am posting this on the same day, but I felt that this needed to be two separate posts. I cam down with a cold this weekend and decided to make some chicken soup. About 2 hours in, I realized I was out of any soup noodles.

You guessed it! I decided to make some on my own. I found a nice recipe for some egg noodles.

Mixing together flour, salt, eggs, and milk (lactose free). The mix worked out beautifully, although the noodles grew much more than expected and became quite large. As soup noodles, they failed since they would have to be cut extremely thin in order to work. However, I finally found what seems to work as a great Udon noodle recipe. I have tried cutting them a little thicker and will let you know tonight how it works.

UPDATE:

So while waiting for my boyfriend to come home, I got to work preparing the noodles for dinner. I took one batch and cut them very thin. I used the knife to bunch up a small amount of dough and then pressed down. After letting the noodles dry a little, I made myself a bowl of soup. The thin noodles worked out perfectly.

I also prepared the Udon noodles for the evening. Before we got down to dinner, Alex and I had to run a few errands. We packed up the drying noodles in a ziplock bag to keep from the dog and left. When we got back, we found that the cat had chewed through the bag and devoured the entire batch! I whole roll of raw dough devoured!

I guess it will have to wait till I next make noodles, before I can figure out if these work as Udon. *sigh* Silly Kitty! 

Wish me luck!

All About Udon Noodles!

One of the results of looking for work, is that when I am not sending resumes, I have too much time onn my hands. So what do I do? I bake, and cook, and roast, and what not.

The problem with that is: if money is tight, this is not the best moment to be going out grocery shopping for exotic ingredients. To kill two birds with one stone, I decided to try and make some of the staples we use around the house by hand.

One of these, believe it or not, is Udon noodles.

Since I love making udon soup and since I was out of Udon Noodles, I decided to embark on a quest to make my own. Inspired in part by this video,

I didn't expect to be able to do this, but I thought maybe at least I could make something to go with my spicy beef udon.

I found a pretty basic recipe involving:

3 cups of flour
1 Tbsp salt
1 cup of water

One of the important parts of noodles is making sure to release the gluten. To that effect, a friend of mine who does martial arts did me the honour of beating my dough (with all the associated jokes of course)

We worked it until we got a soft dough, then cut it into roughly the right shape.

The soup was delicious, but the noodles (although good) were somewhat heavy and a bit more tough than what we are used to.
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I decided to try a new recipe involving tapioca flour. They advertised as being chewy and I was hoping not as tough.

Much to my disappointment, the dough itself was so tough, I could barely work it. After an hour of stepping on it and having my friend punch and kick it for a while, it was still much too tough. Finally in a desperate effort to make it lighter, I added some melted butter.

It worked to soften the dough and make it easier to work but the noodles when thick were even heavier and tough than the ones before. When sliced much thinner and over cooked slightly, it was better but not really udon.

So the search continues. What does it take to make noodles thick, but still light?