Ricotta gnudi

Method

1. Drain the ricotta. Line a sieve with a paper coffee filter or a double layer of kitchen paper, set it over a bowl, tip in the ricotta, and refrigerate at least 2 hours and up to overnight. Do not press or weight it. You are after 400 to 430 g of drained curd; German supermarket ricotta usually gives up 70 to 100 g of whey, sometimes more.
2. Put the drained ricotta in a bowl and break it up with a fork. Add the parmesan, egg, yolk, a good grating of nutmeg, half a teaspoon of salt, and plenty of pepper. Stir until even.
3. Sprinkle the flour over the surface and fold it in with a spatula, stopping the moment it disappears. The mixture should be soft and slightly tacky, closer to thick cake batter than to dough. It is not meant to be rollable. If it is genuinely loose enough to pour, your ricotta was not drained enough; add 15 g more flour, no more than that, and go straight to the long rest in step 5.
4. Spread half the semolina in a deep tray in a layer at least 1 cm thick. Scoop the mixture in 25 g portions, about a tablespoon and a half, straight onto the semolina. Roll each one into a rough ball with cupped semolina-dusted hands, then bury it in the semolina so it is covered on all sides. Space them out. Sift the rest of the semolina over the top.
5. Rest them in the fridge. One hour is the minimum and gives you gnudi that hold their shape. Two to three days is the real method: turn each one over once a day, and the semolina slowly pulls moisture out of the surface and builds a thin pasta skin around a still-creamy centre. That skin is the whole trick, and it is what lets you get away with only 50 g of flour in 500 g of cheese. Do not go past four days or the skin turns tough.
6. Bring a wide pot of well-salted water to a boil, then drop the heat until the surface is just trembling. A rolling boil breaks them.
7. Brush the loose semolina off each gnudo and lower them in, no more than ten at a time. For the one-hour version, they float after about 3 minutes; give them 30 seconds more and lift them out. For the multi-day version, count 15 seconds at the boil, then simmer 90 seconds, and do not wait for them to float. The long-rested ones do not reliably float, and waiting for it will overcook them.
8. Melt the butter in a wide pan over medium heat while the gnudi cook. Let it foam, subside, and turn nut brown with dark flecks on the bottom, about 4 minutes. Add the sage leaves and let them crisp for 20 seconds.
9. Add a ladle of the cooking water to the pan and swirl until the sauce comes together and looks creamy. Slide the drained gnudi in and turn them once, gently. Serve at once with the parmesan, lemon zest, and more pepper. Gnudi will not wait; they go from creamy to pasty within a few minutes of being sauced.

Notes

• This teaches the same lesson as the carrot buttons, with a forgiving ingredient. In both dishes you are holding a wet, low-starch mass together with as little flour as you can get away with. The difference is that ricotta will tell you what it wants and give you a second chance, while carrot will not. Make these first, learn what the mixture should feel like under a spatula, then make the carrot buttons.
• German ricotta. German supermarket Ricotta, mostly Galbani in a tub, is cow’s milk and noticeably wetter and blander than what you get in Italy. Drain it as above and it works fine. For the real thing, ask an Italian deli or a Turkish grocer for Schafsricotta or ricotta di pecora, which is sheep’s milk, firmer, and much more savoury; it needs less draining and makes a better gnudo. Failing both, Schichtkäse from the Rewe or Edeka dairy shelf is a good stand-in: it is drier than Quark and mild, so use it straight without draining and add a tablespoon of cream. Speisequark 40 percent also works but is sharper and firmer, so use half quark and half ricotta and cut the salt slightly. Hüttenkäse is too grainy and too wet on its own.
• The failure everyone has is gnudi disintegrating in the water. The cause is almost always one of three things: ricotta that was not drained, water at a rolling boil, or not enough rest. It is very rarely too little flour, so do not fix it with flour. If a test gnudo falls apart, put the tray back in the fridge for another day and try again.
• Make ahead. The rest is the make-ahead. Mix on Friday, eat on Sunday. Raw gnudi also freeze well once the skin has formed: freeze them on the tray, bag them, and boil from frozen with an extra minute. Cooked gnudi do not keep.
• Other sauces. A thin, sharp tomato sauce is the classic Tuscan alternative and cuts the richness better than butter does. A spoonful of chili crisp stirred into the brown butter is not Tuscan at all and is very good. In spring, add peas or asparagus tips to the butter.
• Fifty grams of flour in 500 g of ricotta is the low end on purpose. The Spotted Pig version uses none at all in the mixture and relies entirely on a three-day semolina rest. If you commit to the long rest, you can drop to 30 g and the gnudi get lighter still.

Sources used

• Food52: April Bloomfield’s ricotta gnudi
• Hunter Angler Gardener Cook: Ricotta gnudi
• Smitten Kitchen: Spinach and ricotta gnudi
• Eats History: Tuscan gnudi