Ingredients
Dressing ingredients
- nutmeg
- Extra virgin olive oil (in Tuscany)
- 1/2 glass of white wine
Author of this recipe
Vin Santo or Vino Santo is a style of Italian dessert wine. Traditional Tuscany, these wines are often made from white grape varieties such as Trebbiano and Malvasia. The wines can also be described as straw wines, as they often produce by drying freshly harvested grapes on straw mats in a warm and airy home. Although technically a dessert wine, wines vary in sweetness levels from dry (like a fino sherry) to extremely sweet.
Pecorino di Pienza: This sheep's milk cheese named after the ancient city of Pienza, situated a few kilometers from Montepulciano. It is cooked with milk cheese made with whole milk, raw sheep of the Sardinian race. The sheep are raised outdoors and feed exclusively on the local flora. The aromas of rare plants that grow in clay soil of the Crete Senesi (absinthe, meadow salsify, juniper, broom, burnet ...) can be detected in the milk of sheep.
Preparation
Use a casserole where the artichoke bottoms can lay. Put some olive oil with the two garlic cloves cut in the middle and let brown them for some minutes. Gently add the artichoke bottoms, flavour with salt, pepper and nutmeg and cook over a medium flame. Pour some white wine (half of a glass) over the artichoke bottoms, let the alcohol evaporate and cook for ten minutes under a lid. Keep warm. For the gnocchi: Wash and boil the floury potatoes, peel and sieve them. Mix the potatoes with the flour, the chicken liver paté and the eggs. Knead into dough and divide it into equal portions. Extend the dough with your hand's palm over the floury pastry board to get long cords of 1 cm diameter. Cut them on the length into 1 cm pieces, so that you will get small gnocchi. Let the gnocchi cook into salty boiling water stiring them with a wooden spoon. When they will come to the surface, they will be ready. Take them out of the water with a skimmer and add them to a sauce made of chopped sage, olive oil and vinsanto, boiled together till it gets thick. Toss the gnocchi with the sauce and flavour with grated pecorino and some more olive oil after shutting down the flame. Divide the gnocchi within the artichoke bottoms and put them on a serving plate. Decorate with sage leaves, fried on a low temperature, so that they will keep their natural colour.