French Fridays with Dorie - Gnocchi à la parisienne

Well, here I am, participating in my second week of French Fridays with Dorie, after I told myself I wasn't going to make this week's dish, gnocchi à la parisienne. I admit it, I have absolutely no willpower when it comes to creamy, cheesy, baked comfort food...especially after seeing my man's eyes light up at the prospect of trying a new style of gnocchi. We've made traditional potato gnocchi, Gnocchi Verdi al Gorgonzola and Gnocchi Gnudi, but never gnocchi made from choux pastry. Frankly, before embarking on this gnocchi à la parisienne, I envisioned a plate of cream puffs, drenched in béchamel sauce...not too appealing. Silly me.

Unlike profiteroles, the process of dropping the quenelle-shaped gnocchi into simmering water before baking creates dense, not hollow, but pillowy-soft gnocchi. We now have another form of gnocchi in our gnocchi-loving household!


A few, simple ingredients - eggs, milk, flour, butter, Emmenthal cheese
...and my additions of toasted walnuts and sage 

  

The dough comes together easily, first in a saucepan stovetop (water, butter, salt and flour), and then in the bowl of an electric mixer for incorporation of the eggs. You can use the dough right away, but I followed Tante Leo's method of covering the dough with a kitchen towel and letting it rest for a few hours. Who is Tante Leo, you ask? I have no idea, but he taught Paule Caillat, Dorie Greenspan's longtime friend, how to prepare this family recipe.



Standing in for the potato dumplings is pâte à choux,
or cream puff dough



While the dough rested, I made the béchamel sauce.  Something went wrong here, despite making successful béchamel sauce in the past. I doubled checked my measurements of butter, flour, and milk, which were correct according to the recipe, but the sauce came out almost as thick as the gnocchi dough. Miserably failing in pushing it through a fine mesh sieve in order to disburse the lumps, I ended up scraping it back into the saucepan and whisking in another cup of milk to achieve the right consistency and quantity for the recipe (based on subsequent review of comments in the FFWD Forum, I wasn't the only one who experienced thick and lumpy béchamel).

Dorie says, "Gnocchi a la Parisienne is a dish that doesn't wait. As soon as it comes out of the oven, it should go directly to the table."  Easier said than done when you're a food blogger taking photos of everything along the way. I had the dish out of the oven, and on the table, for photographing...and then John wanted an Alton Brown-ish "oven shot" (calm down, I didn't bake the pie dish of gnocchi on the pizza peel).

I loved how the gnocchi around the edge really puffed up.  I did turn the broiler on for a minute to brown the cheese a bit more.

We had some walnuts and fresh sage on hand, so I toasted the walnuts and fried some crispy sage leaves for a crunchy and flavorful garnish.

Again, we don't post the actual recipes from Dorie's Around My French Table, but if you want to join the fun, I highly recommend adding this cookbook to your collection.

French Fridays with Dorie is scheduled to prepare something extremely decadent next week. As of this moment, I'm telling myself I shouldn't...

...but it's sooooo tempting!