Carrot buttons

Method

1. Heat the oven to 200°C. Halve the peeled carrots lengthwise, quarter any thick ones so all pieces are about the same thickness, toss with the olive oil and a good pinch of salt, and spread them cut side down on a sheet pan in one layer. Crowding steams them, which is the one thing you are trying to avoid.
2. Roast 40 to 50 minutes, until the carrots collapse under a fork and the cut faces have brown patches. You want them past tender. Every minute here is water leaving, and water is the enemy of this dough.
3. Let them cool to room temperature on the tray, uncovered. Warm carrot keeps releasing steam into the dough and makes you add flour you will regret.
4. Pass the carrots through a potato ricer, or mash them thoroughly with a fork. Do not use a blender or food processor. A machine gives you a slack, wet purée that behaves like soup, and you will need half again as much flour to bring it back. Weigh the mash: you are aiming for about 600 g.
5. Spread the mash in a wide bowl. Scatter over the drained ricotta, egg yolks, parmesan, a generous grating of nutmeg, and a teaspoon of salt. Fold gently with a spatula. Add the semolina and 130 g of the flour and fold just until no dry patches remain. Ten or twelve strokes. Stop. Overworking builds gluten and turns the buttons chewy.
6. Boil a test button before you shape anything. Bring a wide pot of well-salted water to a bare simmer. Pinch off a walnut of dough, roll it between floured palms, flatten it, and drop it in. Give it three minutes. If it holds together and tastes tender, the dough is right. If it dissolves or slumps into shreds, fold in 20 g more flour and test again. Repeat at most twice.
7. Dust a tray heavily with semolina. Working with floured hands, roll pieces of dough into 2.5 cm balls, then flatten each one gently between thumb and finger into a disc about 1 cm thick. That is the button. Set them on the semolina, not touching. If you want ridges, roll each one down the back of a fork, but they are better plain and the ridges tear this dough.
8. Rest the shaped buttons uncovered in the fridge for 30 minutes. They firm up and take on a thin dry surface that holds them together in the water.
9. Cook in batches of about 15 in barely simmering salted water. A rolling boil tears them apart. They rise in 2 to 3 minutes; give them another 30 seconds after they surface, then lift them out with a slotted spoon and drain briefly. Keep 200 ml of the cooking water.
10. For the chili oil sauce: melt the butter in a wide pan, add the white parts of the green onions, and cook 1 minute. Off the heat, stir in the chili crisp, soy sauce, and vinegar with a splash of cooking water. Add the buttons and turn them over gently until coated. Finish with the raw green onion tops.
11. For the brown butter: melt the butter in a wide pan over medium heat with the smashed garlic. When it foams, subsides, and smells nutty with brown flecks on the bottom, add the sage leaves and the whole thyme sprigs. They will spit for 20 seconds and go crisp. Remove the garlic. Add 60 ml of the cooking water and swirl to emulsify, then add the buttons and turn them until glossy. Strip the thyme leaves over the pan and discard the woody stems. Finish with parmesan, lemon zest, and pepper.

Notes

• Why this is not a potato substitution. A carrot is roughly 88 percent water against a potato’s 79, and it carries almost no starch, maybe a gram or two per 100 g against the potato’s fifteen or more, with most of its carbohydrate as sugar instead. Sugar does not build structure. So if you boil carrots and mash them the way you would for potato gnocchi, you get a wet, sweet purée with nothing holding it together, and the only lever left is flour. By the time you have added enough flour to make it roll, you have made paste, and the buttons boil up dense and gluey. The fix is to take the water out before the dough exists, which is what the oven does, and to add structure that is not flour, which is what the egg yolks, the ricotta, and the parmesan do. This is the same problem beet and pumpkin gnocchi have, and everyone who solves it solves it the same way.
• What too wet looks like, before you ruin it. Dough that is right feels like cool, thick modelling clay: it takes a fingerprint and holds it, pulls away from the bowl in one mass, and rolls into a ball on a floured board without spreading. Dough that is too wet sticks to your fingers in strings rather than releasing cleanly, will not hold a rolled shape for more than a few seconds, and leaves a smear on the board when you lift a piece. The moment you notice that, stop adding flour. Past about 200 g of flour per 600 g of carrot the buttons stop being tender and start being erasers. Instead: chill the dough for 30 minutes and test again, or scrape the mash into a dry frying pan and stir it over low heat for 5 minutes to steam off more water, cool it, and start over. Both of those cost you time. More flour costs you the dish.
• Ricotta. Drain it. Put it in a sieve lined with a paper coffee filter over a bowl, in the fridge, for at least 2 hours. German supermarket Ricotta gives up a surprising amount of whey. If you cannot get decent ricotta, use Schichtkäse, which is drier than Quark and sold in blocks at Rewe and Edeka, or drained Speisequark 40 percent. Quark is more acidic, so use a little less salt.
• Which sauce, and when. The brown butter is the quiet one. It is what you make when the carrots are the point, when it is cold outside, and when you are serving these as a first course before something else. It also lines up with the ricotta gnudi, so you can make both from one pan of butter if you are feeding people properly. The chili crisp version is the loud one: it turns the buttons into a full main course on their own, it plays the sweetness of the carrot against heat and salt rather than against nuttiness, and it is what to make on a Tuesday when there is already a jar of chili crisp in the fridge. Do not try to serve both at one meal; they cancel each other out.
• Make ahead. Shaped raw buttons freeze well. Freeze them solid on the semolina tray, then bag them, and boil from frozen with an extra minute. Do not refrigerate raw buttons longer than a day, since they weep. The roasted, riced carrot keeps three days in the fridge, so you can split the work across two evenings.
• Leftovers. Cooked buttons are good the next day fried in butter until browned on both faces, which the carrot sugar does quickly. Watch them, since the same sugar means they go from browned to burnt in under a minute.
• Any leftover cooking water is worth keeping for the sauce. It is starchy and lightly sweet, and it is what makes the butter cling instead of pooling.

Sources used

• Emiko Davies: Carrot gnocchi
• Emiko Davies: Carrot and ricotta gnudi
• RecipeTin Eats: Easy pumpkin gnocchi
• Justine Doiron: Beet ricotta gnocchi
• Kitchen Stories: Carrot-ricotta gnocchi