Homemade vs. Industrial Gnocchi: A Taste Test with Italian Chefs

“It’s not really very traditional, it’s not very Italian,” says Bartolo Calderone when someone has just handed him a packet of Lustucru pan-fried gnocchi. This Sicilian cook is at the head of the Capperi pizzeria and the School of Pizza and Natural Breadmaking, both in Bordeaux. “Pasta is in my genes,” he says.

To know what a “real” gnocchi is (in the singular we should already say “gnoccho”), just refer to the bible of Italian cuisine: “Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well”. , by Pellegrino Artusi, a directory of recipes collected in 1891 and available online at Wikisource. “There is obviously the gnocchi recipe! »

The chef follows the instructions: he steams 400 g of potatoes, peels them, purees them and adds 150 g of wheat flour. ” That’s all ! », price of ingredients: €1.58 per kilo compared to €5.58 per kilo of Lustucru gnocchi. Bartolo Calderone kneads everything to obtain a homogeneous paste, rolls it into long sausages which he cuts into pieces 3 cm long. Then he prints stripes on the pasta by rolling each section against the tines of a fork. He cooks these gnocchi in a large volume of salted water and puts them on a plate with a drizzle of olive oil.

In the next plate, he pours the contents of the Lustucru package: “It’s not pretty, he observes. Neither the color nor the texture. Following the instructions on the package, he browns them in a frying pan. What if we want to brown the homemade gnocchi to make them crispier? “It’s forbidden,” says the expert, “or if need be, to reheat leftover gnocchi from the day before,” specifies the purist.

Reluctantly, he performs a demonstration for us. A few minutes in the pan and here are two plates of pan-fried gnocchi, some industrial and the other homemade. “If you have time, it’s much better to make them at home,” he concludes. But if we don’t have time, are the industrial versions interesting?

We compared four supermarket references with an agricultural engineer and dietitian, Constance Régnier (@aunomdugout on Instagram), then organized a blind tasting of these products with Fabrizio Ferrara, also a Sicilian chef, at the head of the Osteria Ferrera in Paris.