Recipe: Ixta Belfrage’s Sweet Potato Gnocchi With Spiced Aubergine Ragout

Ixta Belfrage is a trailblazer when it comes to fusion cooking. The London-based chef and author – who co-wrote Flavour with Yotam Ottolenghi – famously blended flavours from Brazil, Italy and Mexico in her debut cookbook, Mezcla. In 2025, she returned with her follow-up book Fusão (pronounced “foo-zow”).

If Mezcla was about Belfrage casting her culinary net wide, Fusão is about going deep. In it, the chef pays homage to the melting pot of cuisines in Brazil – which broadly takes influence from Indigenous, Portuguese and West African food. In this book, dedicated to her mother’s homeland, Belfrage serves 80 bold and “untraditional” recipes – spanning flavour-bomb marinades, comforting stews, seafood cooked in banana leaf, whole-roasted fish and more.

You mightn’t expect to find a gnocchi recipe in there, too, but Belfrage pulls it off with aplomb. And she already knows what you’re thinking about the cooking time. “Making gnocchi from scratch can be a bit of a faff, but this recipe keeps things simple,” she writes.

The Brazilian twist lies in the potatoes. “In Brazil, batata doce – sweet potato – is the variety with the pink skin and yellow interior – in the UK it’s sometimes known as ‘Japanese sweet potato’ or ‘red sweet potato’. This is the variety I grew up with and love; it’s less sweet than the orange variety,” she writes. Finally, to bind the gnocchi, she uses masa harina (the powdered, rather than fresh, cornflour used in Mexican cooking). “It works really well here and keeps the gnocchi gluten-free.”

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Sweet potato gnocchi with spiced eggplant ragout

Serves: 2
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 1 hour 25 minutes

Ingredients

500g sweet potatoes (with pink skin and yellow flesh)
1 egg yolk
50g masa harina
½ tsp fine sea salt
Plenty of freshly cracked pepper
Plenty of freshly grated nutmeg

Ragout
2 medium eggplants (500g)
2 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for greasing
10 fresh basil leaves, plus extra to serve
25g salted butter
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp ground coriander
2 tbsp tomato puree/paste
200g canned tomatoes
½ tsp fine sea salt
Plenty of freshly cracked pepper
Plenty of freshly grated nutmeg

To serve
Grated parmesan (or vegetarian equivalent)
Zest of 1 lemon

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°C fan (220°C conventional). Line a baking tray with parchment paper.

Leaving the skin on, cut the sweet potatoes into 170g pieces. Halve the eggplants lengthways, brush with oil, and place cut side down on the tray with the sweet potatoes.

Roast until both eggplants and potatoes are soft and well browned on the bottom, about 45–50 minutes. Remove from the oven, cut the potatoes into pieces, and set aside to cool.

While the potatoes are cooling, scoop out the eggplant flesh (discard the skins) and place in a bowl with basil, olive oil, butter, cumin, coriander, tomato puree, canned tomatoes, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Mash together with a fork.

Scoop the sweet potato flesh into another bowl (discard the skin) and mash. You should have about 300g of mash. Add egg yolk, masa harina, salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and mix until just combined.

On a floured tray lined with parchment, roll the dough into long ropes and cut into gnocchi pieces. Dust lightly with masa harina.

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil. Drop the gnocchi in in batches; when they float to the surface, cook for 30 seconds more before removing with a slotted spoon. Transfer to an oiled tray.

To serve, warm the ragout in a saucepan, then toss through the gnocchi. Finish with parmesan, extra basil leaves, lemon zest, pepper, nutmeg, and a drizzle of olive oil.

This is an edited extract from Fusão by Ixta Belfrage. Photography by Kim Lightbody. Published by Ebury Press in 2025, $65.00.