The Escoffier Series, Ch 13, Vegetables and Farinaceous Products concludes
We’ve come to the end of chapter 13 as we cover gnocchi, macaroni, and noodles. Escoffier’s distinction is between dry pasta and fresh pasta.
Gnocchi are made from a variety of different primary ingredients which offers a variety of flavors and textures. What is possible with pasta, dried or fresh, is so extensive that covering it all would take a lifetime.
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Finally, we are at the farinaceous products part of chapter 13.
Escoffier covers a few items plainly not French. Macaroni which is the word he uses for pasta. He also discusses noodles which is his term for fresh pasta.
He opens the section with Fondus au Parmesan. He makes it clear this is not the cheese fondue you dip bread and other foods into. It is, he writes, popular in Belgium where it was served as a hot Hors-d’oeuvre. I’ve never made this. It seems simple enough. In some sense, it resembles a croquette except without a starch binder.
It is a Bechamel made with a roux of 2 ounces each of butter and flour. Add 2 1/4 Cups milk, season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Bring to a boil and cook in the oven for 25 minutes. Do not cover the pot.
When the time has passed, remove the skin from the sauce and pour it into a bowl. Add 5 egg yolks and 3 1/2 ounces of grated Parmesan cheese. Mix well, pour the mixture into a buttered tray, lightly butter the surface (or place plastic wrap on top) and cool.
Cut the cold mixture into rounds–I would cut squares for product utilization, three-step bread, and fry. Garnish with fried parsley.
That sounds pretty tasty and there’s room to add some chopped herbs.
Gnocchi is next. There are several ways to make gnocchi and most are quite different from the rest. The first he calls Gnocchi au Gratin. It is made with a choux paste, or pâte à choux, and is boiled. He writes to form small balls of paste, about the size of walnuts, and poach them. They’re done when they float and feel resilient to the touch. Remove and drain on a cloth.
I’ve seen it also made from a pastry bag with no tip so the gnocchi is wide. With a sharp knife cut the choux paste as you squeeze the bag to form uniform pieces of gnocchi. There isn’t a rule about how long they should be but they should be mostly the same so they cook mostly the same. They will almost double in size.
To finish these gnocchi for this procedure, some Sauce Mornay is placed into an earthenware dish, the gnocchi are placed on top, and more sauce to cover. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese and brown in a hot oven.
I did some recipe development for a company that made a Keto flour blend. No grains at all. Pâte à choux made from that flour worked. I’ve also made pâte à choux with various gluten-free flour blends and that works. Most gluten-free flour mixes contain a small amount of Xanthan gum which didn’t present any funky texture issues.
Gnocchi made with pâte à choux can be added to pretty much any sauce you prefer, including a tomato sauce. They are very filling and have nearly no texture. It’s a very soft dish with nearly no flavor of its own. Add herbs if you prefer or some cheese with the caution that the more you add increases the risk that the pâte à choux will fall apart in the water. A highly flavored sauce will offset the mild gnocchi.
Next is Gnocchi à la Romaine which is made with semolina flour, a wheat product. This is obviously Italian. Wheat products predate the potato in Europe so flour products would have been used before they used potatoes.
You may see similar gnocchi made with polenta, a corn product. Depending on the coarseness of the polenta, both semolina and polenta gnocchi may be similar in texture and consistency. The flavor will be different. There are too many variables between the grinds of both grains to say with certainty that cup for cup they are interchangeable. One-for-one is a good place to start if you are going to use polenta. Keep in mind you might need to adjust something.
For this semolina gnocchi, start with 4.5 Cups of milk and bring it to a boil. Rain in 9 ounces of semolina and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Lower the heat and cook for 20 minutes stirring often. Watch out, it spits and those little semolina lava bits are hot.
After 20 minutes, remove the pot from the stove, add 2 egg yolks, stir well, and spread the mixture on a lightly oiled sheet pan. Aim for the mixture to be about 1 cm thick. You may not need all of the pan you have. Pour the mixture nearer one end of the pan and move the mixture to the center until you get the right depth. Chill the pan until the mixture is cool.
Cut the gnocchi with a 2-inch round cutter. Arrange them in a buttered ovenproof dish slightly overlapping. Top with grated Parmesan and Gruyère cheeses, some melted butter, and heat to nicely browned in a hot oven.
I suspect the version of this with polenta will come with tomato sauce. There’s no reason you can’t use tomato sauce with this recipe.
Before we move on I want to address the term rain in the semolina. If you dump a cup of semolina or polenta into a pot of boiling water you’ll get a lump. The grains won’t separate like rice will separate. Instead, they’ll just be a big lump that you cannot break up since the starch will absorb the hot water faster than you can separate the grains. Instead, hold the bowl 8-10 inches above the pot and almost sprinkle the semolina or polenta into the water. That way, each individual grain remains individual and you get the smooth texture you want.
When you rain a grain into hot liquid, I find it best, and necessary, to use a whisk to start. The whisk ensures even distribution of the grains for a smooth, lump-free product. After the grain is incorporated, switch to a wooden spoon. Stirring raining grain with a wooden spoon might work. It probably won’t give you quick immediate grain distribution and that’s instant frustration. Avoid instant frustration.
These gnocchi are heavier and denser than the previous gnocchi. They’re more filling, too. This gnocchi will take some rosemary or thyme or marjoram quite nicely.
Next up is what is probably the most famous gnocchi, the potato gnocchi. These are light and delicate and can be a touch challenging.
We made these at the Governors Club and always cooked the potatoes whole with the skins on to keep as much starch in the potato as possible. It has the added benefit of keeping out excess water.
You’ll need 1 # 2 ounces of boiled potato. Peel while they are hot. There is an excellent chance you’ll boil more potatoes than you need for this recipe. Make bread or mashed potatoes with the leftovers.
Food mill the potato through a fine plate into a pot or a sturdy metal bowl. Add 1 ounce of butter, 1 egg yolk, 1 whole egg, 2.5 ounces of flour, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Mix all to form a stiff dough and stop mixing as soon as the dough comes together.
Cooked potato can get gummy and that ruins the gnocchi.
On a lightly floured counter, divide the dough into at least 4 portions and roll each portion to be about 1 inch in diameter. Using a bench scraper or a table knife, cut gnocchi of about 3/4 of an inch.
If you’ve seen The Godfather III, you’ve seen that very awkward scene where the Andy Garcia character and Sophia Copolla character make gnocchi. They can be rolled on those little boards to form lines and also curl the gnocchi to help uniformity of cooking and to hold the sauce. They can be cooked as is, or moved onto the cut edge and dimpled on the top to form a small indent to also hold sauce.
Escoffier lists one last procedure. The word sounds like gnocchi, it is just spelled differently. Noques au Parmesan. I have never made this either. Never seen anyone make it. I’ve never even heard a chef comment that such and such a task is hard but not as hard as making Noques.
I asked the Twitter-verse if any chefs have ever made Noques. I got no answers. I rarely get engagement on Twitter so I’m not sure what that reveals. I suspect few if any chefs have made them.
To make Noques, mix butter which has been warmed to be soft and smooth, and add salt, pepper, grated nutmeg, 2 egg yolks, 2 whole beaten eggs, 5 ounces of flour, and one stiffly beaten egg white. “Take pieces of this mixture the size of a hazelnut and drop them into boiling salted water and poach until cooked.”
There’s a lot of room for uncertainty there. It sounds pretty amazing and I have to say I’m more than a little interested.
Gnocchi can be made from more than just starch or grains. Ricotta cheese is one example. Many years ago in New York City, there was a restaurant by chefs for chefs called the Chefs and Cuisinares Club. It wasn’t a club with dues. It was a place for chefs to go after work to let someone cook for them. They had ricotta gnocchi that was amazing.
You can find various versions of a recipe on the interwebs. The key point to making ricotta gnocchi is to allow the excess water to drain off. Some recipes make a sandwich of paper towels to absorb the water. You can hang it in a cheesecloth bag overnight in the cooler or drain it in a fine-meshed strainer for an hour. The paper towel version might be the fastest, it just uses lots of paper towels. If you plan properly, draining overnight isn’t an issue.
A gluten-free flour can work here. Probably it would be best to avoid one with Xanthan gum. It won’t hurt the gnocchi. It’s that taste/texture issue that Xanthan gum seems to have that’s the problem. Depending on your gluten sensitivity, that Italian 00 flour will work. It is wheat but not American wheat. American wheat hardly resembles wheat anymore. The old-timey wheat seems to be better tolerated by gluten-sensitive folks.
Ricotta gnocchi, after they are cooked, can be toasted in a hot pan to get some crispiness. The contrast between tender inside and crispy outside and some well-browned butter and potent herbs, sage, lavender leaves, or rosemary, seems a perfect cool weather evening dish. I’ve mentioned lavender leaves as an herb on other shows. It tastes like lavender, of course, with a higher herbal note than a floral note. It can stand the heat of a hot pan or the slow cook of a braise. Lavender leaves might be the most overlooked herb in your garden.
Escoffier mentions Kache, which can be buckwheat or semolina. The grain is boiled, panned, baked, scooped, mixed, pressed, cooled, cut, and fried. For the semolina version, after it is cooled it is grated and boiled like pasta. That’s about as far as it seems we need to go for that. I would much prefer a dish made from kasha, or groats, which is very tasty and is also probably an acquired taste. If you find it and want to make it, send me an email. I’ll give you some tips.
Polenta is next. It seems odd that in a French cooking book, we’re mostly in Italy.
Italian mamas will certainly have something to say to Escoffier about his polenta procedure. He’s making a rather stiff version that could be grilled when cooled.
Into 4.5 Cups of boiling water add a teaspoon of salt and rain in 9 ounces of course corn meal. Stir with a wooden spoon and reduce the heat, stirring occasionally. Cook for 25 minutes. Add 2 ounces of butter and 2.5 ounces of grated Parmesan cheese, and stir to mix. Adjust the seasoning and serve.
If the polenta is to be used as a garnish in shapes, spread onto a lightly buttered or oiled sheet pan and allow to cool. Cut out shapes of circles or half moons and fry the polenta in butter until golden brown, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese and the browned butter from the pan and serve.
One significant challenge I’ve had over the years is the cooled cut polenta shape doesn’t hold together when being reheated. On the grill, it sticks and in the pan it sticks, resulting in the rest of the polenta sliding off the part stuck in the pan. It was always hit or miss as to why. My guess is we added too much butter and cheese and the starch was too weak from the fat in the polenta.
Escoffier mentions coarse-ground maize. How coarse? Perhaps we have more options than he did. I’ve seen some polenta almost as fine as flour and some as coarse as sand. And sometimes even more coarse than that. For polenta, as he offers it, probably the medium coarse is best. I’m a big fan of runny grandma versions of polenta and I’m mostly alone on that preference.
Escoffier offers a polenta souffle which sounds interesting.
2 ounces of corn flour rained into 2.25 Cups of boiling milk seasoned with half a teaspoon of salt. Start with a whisk and then use a wooden spoon. Cook the mixture in an oven for 25 minutes.
When the time has passed, transfer the polenta to a bowl and add 2 ounces of butter and 2 ounces of grated Parmesan cheese. Then add 3 egg yolks and 1 whole egg. Mix to incorporate thoroughly then fold in 3 stiffly beaten egg whites. Transfer the mix to a souffle dish that has been buttered and coated with grated Parmesan cheese and bake the souffle in the usual manner.
On to macaroni. For Escoffier, this means dried pasta. The various ways to cook dried pasta and the hundreds of shapes of dried pasta could be an entire podcast for someone. Escoffier does offer one important tip for pasta which is to cook it as needed. “Reheated pastas can only give a bad result.”
Cannelloni is his first entry. He makes it more complicated than it needs to be and fills it with things we simply don’t eat today, specifically cooked brain. As if anyone has that in a Tupperware in the fridge. He writes to make a meat forcemeat with foie gras and truffles and we’re aren’t going to do that. He also writes to cook the cannoli shell, cut it open, fill it, roll it back up and why oh why? It is so that the cannoli shells can split open on their own and maybe he’s just getting ahead of that. I will explain how you can make cannelloni at home without premade tubes.
I like a cheese filling. Ricotta and herbs, some breadcrumbs, and egg to bind, and gently fill the cannelloni with a pastry bag. Place the filled cannelloni in a butter casserole dish, add some Bechamel or Veloute sauce, a bit more cheese, and buttered bread crumbs, and bake till bubbly. Remove the foil cover and bake until browned on top.
Nearly all of Escoffier’s macaroni recipes are baked pasta dishes. It will not surprise you that, despite the names, some of them are macaroni and cheese with some additions.
Macaroni à l’Italianne reads “[c]ook the macaroni in boiling salted water, drain well and dry out on the stove. Season with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. For each 500 g (1 lb 2 oz) macaroni add 75 g (2.25 oz) each of grated Gruyère and Parmesan cheese and 60 g (2 oz) small pieces of butter.
Toss over to ensure that it is completely mixed and serve in a deep dish.”
From that procedure, we make Macaroni au Gratin. “Prepare a Macaroni à l’Italianne adding a little Sauce Bechamel; place in a buttered gratin dish previously sprinkled with grated cheese.
Sprinkle the surface with a mixture of grated cheese and dry white breadcrumbs and with melted butter; gratinate in a hot oven.”
Macaroni à la Sicilienne is Macaroni à l’Italianne with a quarter of the volume of pureed cooked chicken livers and a little Sauce Velouté.
There’s a theme here. Chicken livers in any fashion might not be appealing to you.
The coup de gras, as it were, is Macaroni Crème Gratin aux Truffles.
Cook the macaroni, 1 pound, until just done. Drain and place into a pan with 3/4 of a cup of heavy cream and let that cook on low heat for 5 minutes. Season with salt and grated nutmeg and add 8 ounces of grated Gruyère cheese, 3 ounces of butter, and 20 slices of truffles; mix well. Add to a prepared gratin dish, cover with grated cheese, dry white breadcrumbs and melted butter and brown in a hot oven.
Of course, that sounds untouchable because of the truffles. So, make mushroom Duxelles. Truffles are Porshe: there is no substitute. Duxelles is a rich mushroom flavor which will do nicely.
The most important takeaway from macaroni dishes is the versatility they offer. You don’t always need butter and cream, either. I’ve made a version of this next procedure and it is quite nice.
Cook the macaroni until just done. Drain and place in a pan with some gravy (or rich stock) from braised beef and allow it to simmer until the liquid has been absorbed by the macaroni. Serve in a deep dish and sprinkle with some gravy.
I made small sausage meatballs, browned them in the pan, added stock, and cooked spaghetti in a separate pot. I cooked the pasta till almost done then added it to the sauce and let the pasta absorb the liquid. Delicious. Some sliced onions or mushrooms and herbs and it’s an easy dish that tastes great.
Chef Alain Ducasse, who holds many Michelin stars, suggests a different way to cook short noodles like elbow macaroni, penne, or ziti. Instead of boiling it and then adding it to a sauce, cook it in the sauce and add portions of water similar to how risotto is cooked. The concept is to keep all the flavor in the pan and the pasta. It works. The flavor difference isn’t magnificent and maybe not much noticed by anyone eating it. What is different and noticeable is the consistency. It holds together more. The starch never leaves the pan so the whole dish is a bit stickier. There seems no way to describe pasta sticking as a positive. It’s not good or bad, it is simply how it cooks.
Fresh pasta is called noodles. Escoffier seems to avoid the word pasta. He calls fresh pasta noodle paste. Since pasta is the Italian word for dough or paste, it seems to make sense.
Escoffier’s pasta recipe uses flour. Some folks will demand only semolina be used. Semolina is Durum wheat and is a hard wheat. Durum is higher in protein than most white wheat flour and seems to have more gliadin, one of the two proteins that make gluten, which means it is less elastic. As I understand Italian growing regions, Durum prefers the southern climates. This adds to the southern Italian pasta dishes being more semolina-based and northern pastas being made from softer wheat flour.
All that is to get to this. Escoffier’s recipe for noodle paste calls for white flour. The section for noodles, beginning with procedure 4298, is only ravioli fillings. He makes no distinction between shapes and names. For Escoffier, if it is filled and relatively small, it’s a ravioli. It will be the Italians who find the various names.
I have made ravioli with white flour pasta and semolina pasta. Semolina pasta is a bit stiffer since the flour itself is more like fine cornmeal. It tends to like being made into long noodles or, if you have the machine to do it, extruded into elbows or radiators or anything else that can be extruded. Your Atlas pasta machine will make the noodles it has cutters for, and semolina pasta makes fine long noodles. It tends to crack and break, in my experience, when making a lot of ravioli at one time. No doubt a semolina pasta recipe can be tweaked to ensure that does not happen.
The pasta recipe he offers makes a lot. You might be able to reduce it and you’ll hear in a moment why I question that. Measure 500 g, 1 lb, 2 oz of white flour, 15 g salt, 1/2 oz, 5 egg yolks and 4 whole eggs. Mix together in the usual manner. For pasta that is to put the flour on the counter, make a well in the middle, add the remaining ingredients, and carefully mix the flour into the eggs, usually using a table fork, until a paste is formed and you can start to use your hands. You can find more than a few examples of mixing pasta this way on the YouTubes.
Escoffier offers a few ravioli fillings which, it seems fair to guess, nobody is going to make. Chicken livers, mashed cooked brains, or Daube of beef and brains. There are a few more ingredients but I think mashed brains is pretty much a deal killer. Anything can be a ravioli filling. I’ve used left-over braised short ribs for a filling. Simple and elegant herbed ricotta cheese or even the elusive Gordon Ramsay egg yolk ravioli. I never did that.
There are at least two ways to fill the pasta for ravioli and I suggest watching at least one video to see how they do it. What may not be mentioned is this detail. Pasta for ravioli needs to be rolled thinner than you would roll it for linguini or fettucini. The reason is you are doubling up the pasta when you make the package. If the edges are too thick, that part of the ravioli will still be a bit raw while the pasta of the ravioli risks being overcooked and breaking open, allowing the inside to become garnish for the pasta water. The other important step is to make sure the edges are wet, with water or egg wash and you seal each ravioli to ensure what’s in stays in.
Sauces should reflect the flavor of the ravioli. A meat-based filling would be well paired with a rich stock sauce. Cheese ravioli benefits from a light cream sauce with fresh herbs.
At one restaurant we ran butternut squash ravioli with sage browned butter. Man oh man, that was a great combination. Pumpkin also works in place of the butternut.
One last word about fillings. Season them well. Maybe a touch saltier than you think it needs to be. Make sure everything is cut small. Minced or pureed fillings are less likely to puncture the ravioli either while being made or when cooked or removed from the water.
You might be thinking that’s just the start so how can this be the end of ravioli? It can seem intimidating at first. A new task with possible failure points can be aversive. It takes some planning and mise en place and is absolutely doable.
If you plan to store them for a few hours, place them on a corn starch dusted sheet pan. Work to avoid one ravioli touching another since that will be a place where the pasta sticks. If you accidentally allow one raviolo to rest on top of another, cook them that way. If you pull it, the bottom raviolo will tear.
You can also use this same pasta dough to make cannelloni. Roll out the pasta on your machine, cut that into at least squares, and boil them until done. Shock in ice water, remove when cool, and lay on a lightly oiled sheet pan. Whatever filling you would use for ravioli can be used for cannelloni.
It can be a tad messy, so my suggestion is to put the filling into a pastry bag. Pipe the filling along one edge of the boiled cannelloni pasta, roll it up, it’ll be slippery, and place that into a prepared dish, at least buttered or with some sauce in the bottom. When the dish is filled, top it with more sauce, cover, and chill or bake and serve. I’ve made them today to serve tomorrow but never have I frozen them. It should work, but I don’t know for certain.
