Roll Up: Nine Recipes for When You Need Gnocchi

For little lumps of dough, gnocchi are mighty versatile. Though the base recipe simply calls for water, flour and potato, there are myriad sauces to pair with gnocchi, and more than a few ways to make the pillows themselves. Here we’ve compiled eight recipes for gnocchi spun all sorts of ways – Chinese-inspired by Analiese Gregory, classic à la Matt Moran, and even made with bread crusts for extra sauce-soaking capabilities courtesy of Karena Armstrong. Hello, dumplings.

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Karena Armstrong’s spinach and bread crust gnocchi

Karena Armstrong – chef-owner of Salopian Inn in McLaren Vale – is dedicated to cutting down on waste. Appropriately, this recipe harnesses an ingredient that often finds its way into the bin: bread crusts. Here, she incorporates them into gnocchi to make them extra-absorbent, a sort of hybrid of gnocchi and Eastern European-style bread dumplings. Her sauce of choice for this recipe is a classic tomato-based number. Bonus: it’ll be on the table in less than an hour.

Ixta Belfrage’s sweet potato gnocchi with eggplant ragout

Fluffy pillows in a pool of eggplant-studded tomato sugo, sprinkled with parmesan, sounds like a great time to us. That’s the end result of this recipe from Ixta Belfrage, the London chef and author behind Mezcla (she also co-wrote Flavour with Yotam Ottolenghi). Belfrage is a trailblazer when it comes to fusion cooking – and it’s all on show here. In this recipe from her second cookbook Fusão, she nods to her Brazilian heritage with the use of sweet potatoes. She also binds the gnocchi with masa harina (the powdered, rather than fresh, cornflour used in Mexican cooking). “It works really well here and keeps the gnocchi gluten-free,” she writes.

Garum’s gnocchi passata

Guy Grossi knows good Italian food – and this gnocchi absolutely fits the bill. It’s one that was served at his Italian osteria, Garum, in Perth. Grossi’s take leans trad: he serves it with a classic passata loaded up with basil and a good amount of garlic. But the real key here is the potatoes. You want something waxy and weighty like Spunta or Royal Blue potatoes, which will hold themselves together nicely when being moulded into gnocchi-shaped lumps.

Analiese Gregory’s potato gnocchi with lap cheong and kombu butter

Analiese Gregory’s gnocchi recipe may make puritanical Italians squirm: it blends her Chinese heritage with traditional European techniques she learnt while working in Spain, Paris and London. This buttery, umami sucker punch of a dish livened up with Chinese sausage was a crowd favourite during Gregory’s time leading the kitchen at Sydney’s Bar Brosé. And while it might sound like an unusual combination, “it works,” she says. “Trust me.”

Matt Moran’s pumpkin and sage potato gnocchi

Matt Moran, chef-proprietor of Sydney restaurants including Aria and Chiswick, reckons this gnocchi is perfect for a light lunch. Pumpkin, sage and burnt butter are a classic combination, so the key to nailing this dish is perfecting the gnocchi itself. Moran prefers a Dutch Cream or King Edward potato for a pillowy ball that dissolves in your mouth, and says it’s essential the potato is cooked through before you begin turning it into gnocchi.

Julie Goodwin’s gnocchi with pea and speck

Masterchef winner Julie Goodwin learnt how to make this dish from a lady in Florence named Patrizia, who taught her that very little handling will result in a perfectly light and fluffy pillow of dough. Most of the ingredients for this weeknight-friendly dish are ones you’ll likely find in your cupboard and freezer, making it entirely viable to whip it up after a day at work.

Jayden Casinelli’s Dutch Cream gnocchi with mushroom crumb

Jayden Casinelli’s recipe draws from the chef’s forebears in the mountainside Italian town of Arpino, south-west of Rome. It is a surprisingly textural take on the dish, with crunchy parmesan crisp, soft mushrooms and firm gnocchi made the classic way with flour, water and potato. Earthiness comes courtesy of the mushrooms, while duck stock amps up the depth of flavour. This fancy take is one to serve at your next dinner party.

Adrian Richardson’s nonna’s pork ragout with potato gnocchi

The pork ragout is the star in this rustic dish, inspired by chef-restaurateur Adrian Richardson’s (Melbourne’s now-closed La Luna and Bouvier, and Bos in Brisbane) nonna’s recipe. While it’s made here with gnocchi, you could swap it out for a pasta shape that’ll hold the chunky sauce well, like rigatoni or ridged penne. It takes several hours to cook, so makes an ideal project for a long weekend in the kitchen.

Samuel Goldsmith’s pan-fried gnocchi with peas in a creamy tarragon sauce

If you’ve ever looked at a bag of frozen peas and felt uninspired, Samuel Goldsmith is here to help. The UK-based food writer’s The Frozen Peas Cookbook features 100 recipes where frozen peas are the star or the wingman. They’re used in mac’n’cheese to “break through the beige”. They bulk out salmon fishcakes and take on a lead role in a pea pesto. And in this recipe, they add a complementary element to the flavour of tarragon, as well as a bit of texture in a melange of gnocchi and bacon.