Gnocchi a la Parisienne for French Fridays with Dorie

Blogger Sanjana of KO Rasoi (if you don't read her blog you should!) recently jokingly referred to me as the supreme master of gnocchi. While I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call myself anything close to a master, I certainly do seem to have turned into quite the gnocchi maker of late. This is, after all, the fourth time I've done a gnocchi post. And I have a feeling it won't be the last.

First, I made sweet potato gnocchi with brown butter sage sauce; then came malfatti, lovely quenelles of Swiss chard, after a dish I loved at Al di La Trattoria in Brooklyn;  followed most recently by oh-so-light Viennese gnocchi baked in pumpkin cream. And now here we have these little dough balls again for French Fridays with Dorie, the weekly blogger event where members cook a predetermined dish from Dorie Greenspan's book Around My French Table. Yep, me and gnocchi ... we're tight like that.

The funny thing is, none of the gnocchi I've made are anything alike, and Greenspan's gnocchi a la Pariesienne are no exception. Who knew that orbs of starch could be so various in construction? These are made with pate a choux, also known as pastry cream, a mixture of flour, water, butter, salt and eggs.  I have certainly worked with pate a choux before to make things like gougeres, but I've never made gnocchi with it. And to be honest, at first I didn't find the results to be promising - they came out of the water rather pale and misshapen.  But that didn't matter once they baked in their sauce of bechamel with cheese on top and everything got puffy and bubbly and turned into this:

A word about the bechamel - I found the proportion of flour to butter for the roux as written to be a bit off. I have always used an equal amount of fat to flour when making a roux, but here the amount of flour given was nearly three times that of the butter. It did not compute. So, I ignored that part of the recipe and did it my way,  and it worked perfectly.  I topped the whole thing with a mixture of Emmenthal and Parmesan. Diet food it's not, but it really hit the spot on a cold winter's day. If you're curious to see how everyone else's dish turned out, please go check out the links. And if you'd like to join the group, just pick up a copy of the book, sign up, and start cooking along  - it's totally worth it! Happy French Friday!