Gnocchi a la Parisienne

Now, this was an interesting FFWD recipe. I’ve made Gnocchi Parisienne before, but it was sans sauce: lovely pastry dumplings topped with cheese and then broiled. When I saw this version included a bechamel, it was a match made in heaven.

Unlike like the potato gnocchi we’re used to in the U.S., French gnocchi is made with pâte à choux — the same dough responsible for delicious pastry treats like gougères and cream puffs.

This loose dough creates wonderfully light and puffy gnocchi.

The dough is so loose, in fact, that it’s quite common for pastry chefs to use a pastry bag to pipe the dough into its final shape or destination (which in this case, is into a pot boiling water for a quick poaching).

I’m not printing the recipe here (per the rules of the group), but do know that the bechamel sauce as printed was problematic for many folks making this. The proportion of butter-to-flour-to-milk was, in my non-culinary-school-certified opinion, way out of whack. I didn’t have problems producing the sauce, but it was very, very thick. The photo above shows a shallow layer of bechamel under the gnocchi, prior to the addition of the remaining bechamel. Next time, I would halve the quantity of bechamel and stop at this point, topping the cheese directly on the gnocchi.

Ready for the oven.

Okay, this photo makes the dish look like roasted marshmallows, but it was quite delicious, like a very sophisticated mac-and-cheese. It was enjoyed by all.

This post is participating in French Fridays with Dorie, a blogging project where we cook our way each week through the recipes in Dorie Greenspan’s new cookbook, Around My French Table. Given the book’s newborn status, we’ve been requested to not post the recipe (although SoupAddict will post it if she finds it elsewhere on the web). SoupAddict hopes that you’ll understand and will perhaps be inspired to either buy the book or seek out a recipe of a similar nature to try on your own. Or better yet, join us on French Fridays with Dorie!