Russet Potato

It isn’t hard to make featherlight gnocchi. The main thing to keep in mind is this: the less flour you add and the less you handle the dough, the lighter the gnocchi will be. The less moisture there is in the potatoes before you start adding flour, the less flour you will need, so the following tips for making light gnocchi all have to do with removing as much moisture from the potatoes as possible: Don’t overcook the potatoes—their skins will pop open and the flesh will soak up water. Rice the potatoes while they are still quite warm and steaming—rubber gloves help. Spread the riced potatoes out in a thin layer so the steam rising from them has a chance to escape. Once you form gnocchi, they must be cooked or frozen immediately or they turn to mush. To freeze them, pop the tray with the gnocchi on them right into the freezer. When they are solid, scrape them into a resealable plastic bag.

This, like bean- and potato-based soups, can be made ahead, but will thicken a lot. The best bet, if you plan to make the soup in advance, is to reheat it slowly, adding water or stock as needed to restore the soup to its original thickness. And always check the seasoning of reheated soups before you serve them.

Sprinkling the onions with salt as they cook not only seasons them, but extracts some of the water and intensifies their flavor. Keep the water hot before adding it to the soup, as described below, and you won’t interrupt the cooking—it will flow smoothly from start to end. Remember this when braising meats like the short ribs on page 218, or when making risotto. You can use the method outlined below—bringing the beans to a boil, then soaking them in hot water for an hour—anytime you want to cook beans without soaking them overnight, or anytime you’ve forgotten to soak them a day in advance. It works especially well here because, by soaking the pork along with the beans, you kill two birds with one stone. (I soak the dried or cured pork to remove some of the intense curing-and-smoking flavor. If you like it intense, just rinse the pork under cold water before adding it to the soup.)

Salt cod is expensive. This salad is a good way to use trimmings from a whole boneless or bone-in side of baccalà you bought to make the Marechiara on page 298. If you trim the baccalà before you soak it and save the unsoaked trimmings in the refrigerator, you can take your time making the salad. If you trim the baccalà after soaking it, you’ll have to make the salad within a day or two. I picture this dish as part of a beautiful buffet, but it would make a nice first course at dinner, or a lunch dish all by itself. The directions below will give you a warm salad—the way I like it. If you’d rather have a room-temperature salad, just let the potatoes and beans cool all the way. But please don’t make this with chilled potatoes. Cooked potatoes should never see the inside of the refrigerator. They become waxy and tasteless.

What makes this frittata different is the bread. It soaks up the egg and cream and gives the frittata a firm but still tender texture. It also makes it easier to slide onto a serving plate, if that’s how you want to serve it.

This is a healthy version of one of the greatest inventions of the 1980s: the hollowed-out deep-fried potato skins filled with sour cream, bacon, and cheese that first appeared on the menu at T.G.I. Friday’s in New York City. There are a few differences, though. Here, the potato skin is baked until crisp, not fried, and the fillings are all reduced-fat products. The result is a pretty spectacular loaded potato skin at one-third of the calories and less than one-fourth of the fat of the original.

Bacon, Leek, and Tomato Soup is a soup for all seasons! So easy and too delicious; you’ll make this one January or August, year after year. It is especially welcome on rainy nights.

We created this ice cream on a whim one day. We were debating what to do with a batch of grilled potatoes that were striking for their sweet, smoky flavor. Aki tasted and joked that they would make an amazing ice cream, and Alex took the idea and ran with it. We were both surprised by how good the resulting ice cream tasted, and it has since become a staple in our repertoire. Ice creams with a savory slant are becoming more common, especially in warm weather. We like to serve this with caviar, steak tartare, and as a garnish for chilled potato leek soup.

One summer we worked as private chefs on a ranch in Montana. One of our jobs was to oversee the chefs in the employee kitchen. We watched as they lamented the crew’s love of ranch dressing, culminating one evening when a guy poured it on his lasagna. We were fascinated by how much people loved the flavor of ranch and slowly began to weave it into our repertoire just for fun. These gnocchi were one of our first experiments and are still one of the best.

Old cookbooks of Jewish families from Provence and descendants of the Juifs du Pape contain a famous dish combining spinach and morue (salt cod; see page 290). Morue is also blended with mashed potatoes to make brandade, a typical dish of the south of France. The preserved fish is rehydrated in milk or water, and then grilled, fried, or baked. Fritters were particularly common, and are still prevalent throughout Spain and Portugal. This recipe, a modern interpretation of a traditional salt-cod-and-potato brandade, was created by Chef Daniel Rose (see page 68). He uses fresh cod, salting it briefly to remove the excess moisture, seasons it with thyme and garlic, and then cooks it in milk and olive oil. Mixed with mashed potatoes and fried, the result yields a sort of latke that can be served as an appetizer, a side dish, or a main course, with the fennel-and-citrus salad on page 110.

Although potato pancakes (or latkes) go by many names in France—palets de pommes de terre, pommes dauphines, the Alsatian grumbeerkischle, and matafans, a mashed-potato latke typical of Savoie—a latke by any other name is still a latke. In Poland, these egg-free latkes are made with older potatoes, whose increased starch helps bind them together. You can just dress the traditional latke with a dollop of applesauce, or you can try a variation made with apples and sugar.

Use mealy potatoes for this Tunisian salad, which is served as an appetizer and also as an accompaniment to grilled fish.

Mild and light, this is a good introduction to nearly any kind of meal. Use sweet, fresh carrots that aren’t the least bitter. Organically grown carrots are a good bet for optimal flavor.

Slice the potatoes right before you assemble the dish so they don’t turn brown.

Roast the potatoes along with hamburgers, steaks, pork chops, boneless chicken breasts, or any other meat you choose. I use the highest oven setting, and they are done in about 15 minutes. Roast the potatoes in the center of the oven if that’s all you are cooking. You can also roast three pans of potatoes at once, on evenly spaced oven racks if you’re cooking for a crowd. If you are roasting meat, place it on the center or upper rack and roast the potatoes on a lower rack.