Briannas' Blog

In science class, to learn how to cook and about food chemistry, we did a cooking project. I was in a group with Maxx and we made Gnocchi. The way we chose this was that our whole class decided on a cuisine and guidelines for the project that each group had to follow. We decided that we had to make something Italian and you had to make noodles, and pasta sauce to go with it. So Maxx and I, like I said before, we made Gnocchi (pronounced nyo kee) which is pasta with potatoes in the pasta. Other ingredients are parmesan cheese, flour(duh), egg yolks, and some spices. After the potatoes were cooked, we had to grade them and then put them into a pile on a cooking board. We then mixed in the eggs, cheese and spices.After we made the dough, we kneaded it then molded it into a long snake-like thing. Then we cut half and inch to an inch pieces all along the snake. And that was the pasta. Our sauce was far more simple than the dough. It was just cheese, milk and butter mixed together in a pan until melted (Not very healthy, but whatever). We chose a simpler sauce because we knew that the pasta would take a long time because we had to bake the potatoes for 45 minutes. In the end I am glad we did. 

The hardest part of this project is getting the timing right. Carwai warned us about this in the beginning, and she was most definitely right. Like I said before, we and to put the potatoes in the oven for forty five minutes, It turned out to take an hour since we took the wrong potatoes, and got the ones from another group. So we decided to make the sauce during that time. Making the sauce did not take that long at all, so we decided to lay and measure out all the ingredients we need for the dough. Even then we had some time, so we started to clean up the mess we accumulated over the past hour or so. It was really a great learning experience. So during this project, I learned how to pronoun gnocchi for one, I also learned organization skills, the pasta snake method that I mentioned before, how to bake potatoes, clean as I go, handle eggs better, and much more. I learned so much in 3 hours its kinda amazing. I would really like to do another cooking project, but maybe a competition this time, and maybe something Japanese or Chines, because the food I know as Chines, is probably not as good as the real stuff. 

I don’t know if I would have change anything I did in my group or as a full group. It turned out so well. But the funny thing is, I was so exhausted afterwards. It was amazing how tired I was, I was about to beg Rosana to let us sleep during Spanish. I would though, would have boiled the Gnocchi for longer, because the first batch was a bit undercooked, but we got the hand of it because the second batch was perfect. It was so good. And the other were really good as well. We had quite a feast at the end of our cooking period. I was stuffed afterward. Ours was really way better than I expected. It was so fun, and I really hope we can do another project like this in the future.