Gnocchi a la semoule/Semolina Gnocchi and Daube dioise/Winter Beef Daube from Die

MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2009

I am visiting my daughter in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It is October 12^th and it has been snowing! Big fat stick-to-the ground flakes! This calls for something cozy and warming. Since my daughter has volunteered to be sous chef, the cooking should be a breeze as well as fun. I’ve put her in charge of selecting the project. It must be innocuous, with not very many exotic ingredients, as we want her not-so-gastronomically-adventurous husband to enjoy the results of our labors. A recipe for gnocchi seems like it fits the bill. I love gnocchi and almost always order them if they are on a menu. However, every time I’ve tried to make them at home they fall apart when I plunk them into boiling water. This recipe calls for baking them. And they’re not the usual dumpling shape but rather squares. This is a leap of faith, but I will try. We’re also going to make a beef stew, or Daube dioise – a daube from the Die region of France. Hopefully this will be just the right hearty touch to top the gnocchi on this wintry day.

So, preparing the stew was a challenge for this vegetarian-inclined chef. I must confess I was a little squeamish about the task of removing extra fat, tendons, blood and gore from the beef shank meat that had been cut into chunks by the butcher. I was very aware of the “imperfections” in the meat as the stew was cooking, but the 3 ½ plus hours of cooking rendered everything quite tender. The end result? The assessment of my daughter and her husband was that this was a cut above an ordinary stew. They liked the addition of canned Italian plum tomatoes, reduced to a rich sauce. The dish really was quite tasty. I, too, enjoyed it but I’m drawn to foods that have a little more flash.

The gnocchi was another matter. First of all, Lydie specifically instructs us to use semolina, not semolina flour. Well, in the UP finding anything exotic is a challenge. I have to admit that I don’t really even know the difference between semolina and semolina flour. Anyway, all I could find was semolina flour. It made a sticky dough which we then baked on a cookie sheet. They definitely did not look like any gnocchi I’ve ever seen. I kept returning to the recipe: “Do they really get cut into squares??” It made me wonder what makes a gnocchi a gnocchi? Apparently not the shape. And apparently not the ingredients: these were made with semolina rather than potato as I’m accustomed to. Wikipedia describes gnocchi as a word meaning “lumps”. That covers a lot of territory. As for the taste, they were pretty subtle (aka bland) even with the gruyere cheese that the recipe called for. So, in conclusion: I may not have done justice to the recipe, given the substitution of semolina flour for “real” semolina. At any rate, my quest for a foolproof, dynamite gnocchi recipe remains unrequited. I did end up with a bag of semolina flour, which I may be inspired to turn into pasta at some future point.

You call this gnocchi??

The final product.