I had come to believe that I didn't like gnocchi. Turned out, I'd just never had good gnocchi.

But my world view shifted suddenly one night in July. Gnocchi isn't bad. The people who usually make it are.

My transformational experience occurred at Prima in Walnut Creek, Calif., where my teeth melted through a pillowy and perfect version of the dish. They covered it with a chunky tomato sauce, spicy salami, shaved ricotta salata and thin slices of eggplant. But the buttery, tender pasta could have stood on its own.

In the ensuing weeks, I couldn't get that gnocchi out of my mind.

The problem with this newfound fascination is that I can't afford to eat at Prima every night. That, by my calculation, left two options: Win the lottery or learn to make gnocchi myself.

If one seems far more realistic than the other, you haven't seen me in the kitchen.

Sure, I can follow a basic recipe as well as the next guy: Chop, mix, fry, voila! But gnocchi, I would soon learn, required a certain sensitivity: kneading, but not too much kneading, and adding flour according to touch rather than the metric system.

I even stumbled across online tales of gnocchi that disappeared — poof! — once it hit the boiling water. But I assured myself the tale was a plant by agents of the fusilli industry and forged ahead.

For my first attempt, I relied on a recipe from Epicurious .com, which called for an egg, flour, salt, white pepper, nutmeg, Parmigiano-Reggiano and 1 3/4 pounds of potatoes. I had forgotten to weigh the spuds in the store, so, in a streak of what I considered MacGyver-like brilliance, I measured them out on my bathroom scale.

I baked them, riced them, added the other ingredients and rolled the dough into a tube under my palms.

Each time it neared the circumference of a Coke can, however, cracks formed (perhaps because, I would later realize, I had overlooked the cheese entirely). I re-kneaded, rolled more gently and eventually it all hung together — at least down to cucumber width.

Through a mixture of optimism and denial, I convinced myself that was about the right size. I sliced the dough and stuck the flour and potato lumps — it would be an ethical leap to call these things gnocchi — into the freezer.

The next evening, I boiled a pot of water and dropped them in. The water instantly became cloudy as flour flaked off, but I was encouraged to see that none vanished.

As they floated to the surface, I placed them in a saute pan with hot butter and sage.

Things didn't look right. Far from the compact dumplings Prima serves, these were liquidy blobs that barely hung together. I eyed my dinner guests, anxiously awaiting the meal, and decided I couldn't ask them to do what I wasn't willing to do myself.

I tasted one.

If you left grits lying around for several days, allowing them to dry and congeal, they would probably taste about like these if not slightly better.

TRY, TRY AGAIN

For my second attempt, I turned to that father of American gastronomy, James Beard. His autobiography, "Delights & Prejudices," includes a mostly straightforward recipe for a southern Italian version of gnocchi.

It calls for mixing boiled potatoes and milk over heat with semolina, grated GruyEre and egg yolks.

The problem was that Beard didn't specify how much semolina, saying only enough "to make a very stiff mixture." I added away until the mixture became too heavy to stir, but I couldn't be assured that constituted "very stiff," since I am very weak.

The next evening, I formed the dough into small balls and dropped them into boiling water. They floated up quickly and looked more or less right.

I fried them in butter, splashed them with tomato sauce and served my girlfriend, Elizabeth, the first bowl.

"It's pret-ty good," she said, vacillating in mid-word.

"Uh-oh."

"No, it's pretty good," she said, now rushing through the syllables reassuringly.

I took a bite. It pret-ty much tasted how I thought gnocchi was supposed to before I sampled Prima's: more potato than pasta and mealy, crumbling apart slightly in my mouth.

"They're certainly edible," Elizabeth said. That, I struggled to remind myself, was at least a big improvement over the first attempt.

GOING TO THE SOURCE

It was time to go to the source. I dialed Peter Chastain, executive chef and co-owner of Prima, and explained the situation.

"I was wondering," I said, "if there was any way I could come in and watch you or one of your chefs making the gnocchi, maybe even make them with you?"

Without a pause, he replied: "You're more than welcome to. They can be very tricky."

In fact, Chastain said that he recently attempted a batch at home that failed, too.

"Even a monkey can fall out of the tree," his wife had said.

Chastain did ask that I not reprint the recipe's proportions, since it was proprietary to Prima, taught to him years ago by a nonagenarian in Piemonte, Italy. But the ingredients themselves were the simplest I'd seen: unbleached wheat flour, russet potatoes, salt and nutmeg, all blended together in an industrial mixer. Prima's pasta cook Jesus Castaneda then kneaded together small batches of the dough and effortlessly rolled them into long, skinny tubes.

He let me take a crack. This time, despite the lack of eggs or any added moisture, the dough balled together neatly in my hands and rolled out easily.

Prima's gnocchi is so light precisely because they don't use eggs, Chastain explained. The water retained in the boiled potatoes is all that's necessary to bind the dough. The real trick is in the touch, he added, knowing how the dough should feel and adjusting the proportions accordingly.

I followed Chastain to the stove, where he submerged a gnocchi batch in boiling water. He then sauteed them in butter, added Parmigiano-Reggiano and handed me the dish.

They tasted delicious, just as I remembered.

Watching the demonstration alone didn't qualify me to crank out a dish of this caliber, I realized. But with that flavor echoing on my taste buds as I walked out, I knew I had all the motivation I needed to keep trying.

Unless, of course, my lottery numbers hit.