Day 214: Today's Pick — A Cassio Wooden Gnocchi Board

A gnocchi board is, in some sense, the last kitchen tool you should buy.

You have, presumably, a chef's knife. A pot. A pan. A wooden spoon. A spatula. A microplane. Maybe a stand mixer if you bake. Possibly a food processor. By the time you reach the conclusion that what your kitchen needs is a grooved wooden paddle the size of a paperback book whose only purpose is to texture pieces of soft pasta dough — well, you have either become a person who cares deeply about pasta, or you should, immediately, become one.

I am here to gently push you in the second direction.

The board I want to recommend is from Cassio, an Italian woodworking shop in the Marche region that has been making cucina utensils — pasta boards, mattarelli (rolling pins), gramolini (cavatelli boards), and the gnocchi paddle in question — for three generations. Their boards are made from a single piece of beechwood, hand-grooved on one side, smooth on the other, finished with food-safe oil. The Cassio gnocchi board is about 11 inches long by 4 inches wide, with grooves cut at a precise angle and depth that produce, when you roll a piece of soft potato gnocchi dough across them, the small ridged peaks that catch sauce.

This is the entire point of the gnocchi board: catching sauce.

A standard, smooth, machine-extruded gnocchi has the surface of a smooth pebble. Sauce slides off. The eating experience is bland — your mouth gets pasta, then sauce, then pasta. A hand-rolled gnocchi from a board has small grooves on its surface that catch the sauce, hold a small reservoir of butter or tomato or pesto, and deliver pasta-and-sauce-together in every bite. The improvement is not subtle. The improvement is the thing that distinguishes Italian-restaurant gnocchi from grocery-store gnocchi. The board is the thing.

A short overview of the actual technique, since I owe one.

You make gnocchi dough — boiled and riced potato, flour, egg yolk, salt, light kneading until just smooth. You roll the dough into long ropes, about thumb-thick. You cut the ropes into half-inch pillows. Then, one pillow at a time: place the gnocchi on the upper edge of the grooved board, place a fingertip on the gnocchi, and roll it down the board with steady firm pressure. The dough catches on the grooves and, in a single fluid motion, the gnocchi rolls into a small ridged cylinder, with a soft thumbprint indent on one side from your finger. It looks, after a few practice rolls, like a small ridged seashell.

It takes about 25 minutes to roll a pound of gnocchi this way, which feeds four people generously, and there is no other practical method that produces the same texture. A fork-tine technique is a workable approximation but the grooves are coarser. A smooth gnocchi is, as I have said, sauce-resistant. The grooved board is the move.

A few practical notes. Cassio is not the only good board on the market — the Italian gnocchi-board scene includes Eppicotispai, Fante's Kitchen Shop's house brand, and a small handful of artisanal boards on Etsy that are quite lovely. Pricing across all of these falls in the $20–$45 range. Avoid plastic gnocchi boards; the grooves are too shallow, the gnocchi sticks, and the texture comes out flattened.

Care: dust the board with semolina (not all-purpose flour) before each use; semolina is coarser, doesn't gum up, and falls cleanly off the board into the trash after. Wipe the board clean after use with a slightly damp cloth, then dry. Do not put a wooden gnocchi board in the dishwasher (obvious, but stated for the record). Once a year, a light rub of food-grade mineral oil on the smooth side keeps the wood from cracking.

A note on the rest of the family. The same Italian woodworking shops generally produce a cavatelli board (smaller grooves, used for cavatelli pasta), a garganelli dowel (a thin wooden cylinder you press a square of pasta around to form a quill), and a malloreddus board (used for the Sardinian shell pasta). If you fall in love with the gnocchi technique, the same skills extend across most hand-shaped Italian pastas, and the boards are similarly inexpensive. A small drawer of pasta-shaping tools, in this house, has produced more guest-impressing dinners than any other purchase I've made.

This has been Day 214. The pick is wood with grooves. Make gnocchi.