My cooking life has centered around Italy. I earned my stripes in the kitchens of Fifteen, at the time an Italian restaurant where I made one hundred risottos a week and rolled every incarnation of pasta on a bench by a sunny window. I spent a long summer in the Chianti fields of Tuscany working every hour as a line cook in a posh, white-table-clothed trattoria. No one spoke English and I spoke little ltalian. In fact, the only words I knew were food related, so all my conversations that summer were about oil, wine or polenta. As much as I love to travel in my kitchen, Italian food is the food I come back to, it feels like home in every way.
I don’t make as much time as I would like for the lovely labours that come with Italian cookery: rolling pasta, shaping plump gnocchi or the slow and meditative stirring of a risotto. This week I’ve put that right. First, a risotto which uses buttery, slow-cooked onions for creaminess meaning it’s a little lighter than the half-a-pack-of-butter risottos I used to make in my days in the kitchen at Fifteen. Next, a forgiving gnocchi recipe which will please all ages, from 1 to 100, served with my favourite tomato sauce – bright and sweet with cherry tomatoes finished with a slick of brown butter.
Nettle and slow-cooked onion risotto (main picture)
Having made all those risottos, I know how much the quality of a risotto centres around two things: firstly, how gently the cook stirs, and secondly how generous the cook is with the butter and cheese. Obviously, there’s a place for butter and cheese-laden risottos, but I can find them over-rich and cloying at times – not something that can be enjoyed every day of the week. This risotto is different, using a purée of nettles, and slow-cooked onions, in place of the butter and cheese.
Serves 4
For the nettle and onion cream
Olive oil
1 onion, peeled and roughly chopped
1 ladleful of hot vegetable stock (see risotto ingredients below)
4 large handfuls of nettles
For the risotto
Olive oil
1 celery stalk, finely diced
1 leek, washed, trimmed and finely diced
2 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
Salt
A bunch of asparagus, woody ends snapped off, stalks finely sliced, tips kept whole
200g risotto rice
1 glass of white wine
800ml hot vegetable stock
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
A generous grating of pecorino cheese (I use a vegetarian one)
A couple of handfuls of pea shoots or other spring leaves
A small handful of hazelnuts, toasted
1 Fry the onion slowly in a drizzle of olive oil on a low heat until very soft and gently brown, this will take about 15 minutes. Meanwhile carefully put the nettles into a bowl and cover them with boiling water to take away their sting. Pull them out with a pair of tongs and pick the leaves from any big stalks. Once the onions are ready, add a ladleful of hot stock, stir in the nettles and allow to wilt, then take off the heat. Allow to cool a little, then blitz in a food processor. Set aside for later.
2 Next, heat a little oil in a large pan on a medium-low heat and cook the celery, leek and garlic with a pinch of sea salt for 10–15 minutes, until the vegetables are soft and sweet. Add the sliced asparagus stalks and cook for a minute or so. Then turn up the heat, add the rice and stir around for a couple of minutes. Add the wine and allow it to evaporate.
3 Once all the wine has evaporated, turn the heat down to medium-low and start adding the stock a ladleful at a time, allowing each ladleful to evaporate as you stir. Keep adding stock until the rice is almost cooked – this will take about 25 minutes.
4 Once the rice is just about cooked, add the asparagus tips, peas and broad beans and cook for another 5 minutes, until they are tender.
5 Take the risotto off the heat and add the nettle puree and the lemon juice, stirring vigorously to mix it through. Season with sea salt to taste, put the lid on and leave the risotto to rest for a couple of minutes.
6 Serve with lemon zest and pecorino grated over the top and add a scattering of toasted hazelnuts and a little pile of pea shoots.
Ricotta gnocchi and cherry tomato sauce
My favourite dumplings are gnudi (meaning naked) – the almost untouched, soft ricotta balls which require an overnight rest. I am rarely organised enough to think about dinner the night before and, to my mind, April Bloomfield’s recipe cannot be bettered (I have tried). So, these are rather more manageable and forgiving ricotta dumplings that I make more often. They use a little flour and sit in a cherry tomato sauce spiked at the last minute with the toastiness of brown butter. Leaning on perky cherry tomatoes is perfect for this time of year, just before our bigger British tomatoes get going.
The ricotta you use here is important: the more watery ricotta that you can buy in most supermarkets is a lot wetter than the strained ricotta which I prefer to use for these dumplings, as well as for dishes such as baked ricotta and desserts. You can buy it in good Italian delis, or you can strain supermarket ricotta yourself. Simply wrap it in muslin and hang over a mixing bowl for 4 hours or overnight (500g fresh ricotta yields about 400g strained).
Serves 6
For the gnocchi
500g strained ricotta
Salt
150g pasta flour (‘00’)
¼ whole nutmeg
1 egg, beaten
For the cherry tomato sauce
Extra virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
750g of cherry tomatoes
Salt
A small bunch of basil, leaves picked
To finish
50g butter
Parmesan (I use a vegetarian one)
A few basil leaves
1 To make the gnocchi, spread out half of the flour on to a work surface in a rough circle and crumble the ricotta on top, sprinkle over the salt and grate the nutmeg on top. Use your fingers to delicately gather the ricotta into a mound, picking up the flour as you do. Make a well in the middle of the mound big enough to house the beaten egg. Drop the egg in and use a fork to work it carefully into the flour and ricotta until it has become a rough dough. Gently knead the dough adding a little more flour if needed until you have a smooth dough (you may not need to use all the flour). Try to be delicate here as being rough will develop the gluten in the flour and make your gnocchi tough. Once smooth, wrap it in clingfilm and put it into the fridge for 20 minutes.
2 While the dough is resting, you can get on with the sauce. Put the oil into a large frying pan with the garlic and place on a medium heat for a couple of minutes. Add the cherry tomatoes and a good pinch of sea salt and cook for 30 minutes until all the tomatoes have burst and you have a bright red sauce. Add the basil leaves and put to one side.
3 When you are ready to roll your gnocchi, lightly flour your work surface and have a lightly floured tray nearby. Unwrap the dough and shape into a 2.5cm thick disc, then divide this into quarters. Take one quarter, and roll it into a log about 1.5cm thick. Cut this log into 2.5cm pieces and transfer them to the flour-dusted tray. Repeat with the remaining three quarters of dough. You can keep the gnocchi in the fridge until you are ready to cook them.
4 When you are ready to serve the gnocchi, put a large pan of salted water on to boil, and warm the tomato sauce gently. In a small frying pan, cook the butter until it goes a couple of shades darker and smells nutty, then take off the heat and stir it into the sauce. Drop the gnocchi into the boiling water and cook until they rise to the surface, this should take about two minutes. Toss the drained gnocchi in the tomato sauce. Add a grating of parmesan and more basil before serving.
- Anna Jones is a chef, writer and author of A Modern Way to Eat and A Modern Way to Cook. (Fourth Estate); annajones.co.uk; @we_are_food
