How to make the perfect pumpkin gnocchi – recipe | Food (2024)

If there’s one compensation for the loss of summer’s glossy harvest, it’s the sweetness of so many autumn vegetables – most notably, of course, the pumpkins and winter squashes that have become indelibly associated with Halloween. A relatively recent addition to the European menu, they represent a welcome rush of sugar among all the bitter greens and starchy root vegetables that will inevitably dominate our diets over the next few months.

Though it generally turns up on menus as pumpkin gnocchi, possibly due to the word “squash” conjuring up visions of bland and watery marrows, you would be well advised not to try this with an actual pumpkin, unless you’re very sure of the variety. According to Janet Macdonald’s authoritative guide, Pumpkins & Squashes, “pumpkins are the round jobs with delicate or bland-tasting flesh, almost always orange coloured and more or less spherical”, while winter squashes tend to be denser, with a “nutty and sometimes almost sweet taste”. For this recipe, you want as much flavour and as little water in your gnocchi as possible, which strongly suggests the use of a winter squash.

River Cafe chef Joe Trivelli writes that they’re best made with “a dry, sweet [variety]. Butternuts don’t tend to work as well.” Recommendations include the blue-skinned crown prince, the dark green Italian delica or Japanese kabocha, and the red onion, or kuri, squash. Sadly, few of those are available in your average British supermarket, but if that’s your only option, don’t despair – I make some very satisfactory gnocchi out of butternut squash following Steve Farrow’s recipe for The Wine Society (excellent wine pairing recommendations, too).

It’s useful to understand that the more flour you add to gnocchi dough (up to a certain point), the easier it will be to work with. The trade-off, however, is that it will also be stodgier and taste less of pumpkin (or ricotta, or potato, or whatever else you put in there). Even as someone who cannot be persuaded to see stodge as a pejorative term, I must concede that pumpkin gnocchi are better when they actually taste of pumpkin (or squash – you get my meaning), so I’ve used as little flour here as practical. The consistency of soft mashed potato is roughly what you’re aiming for: Joe Woodhouse has some sensible advice in his new book, Your Daily Veg: “I like to pull off a piece of the dough and cook it before shaping to test the flour ratio, as all pumpkins are not made equal and some retain more water than others. If the gnocchi floats to the top and holds together, then I carry on. If it breaks apart or is too loose, then I knead in another 50g of flour and try again until it holds together.”

Farrow adds ricotta to his gnocchi mix, which, while diluting the flavour, gives them a lovely lightness. I want mine to be as emphatically flavoured as possible, so I won’t be including any, but it is a great idea if you have a yen for a milder and creamier dumpling. The classic binder, however, is egg, often used whole, but I prefer Bull and Richard Corrigan’s yolk-only approach, which cuts out the boring, watery white altogether.

I’m sad the Silver Spoon recipe doesn’t work out, because it includes crushed amaretti biscuits, a detail that reminds me of some delicious porky tortellini I was taught to make in Bergamo. If you happen to have some biscuits in need of using up, and don’t fancy trifle, try adding some to the mixture below instead of some of the flour. Here, however, I’ve stuck with the classic nutmeg, along with Bull’s dash of cinnamon to bring out the sweetness of the squash, and a good grating of parmesan to balance things out. (Other hard cheeses will also do the job.)

Bull and Del Conte both pipe the dough into the pan, but I find it easier to roll my slightly more robust version into sausages and cut them individually. If you’d prefer to pipe, by all means do that, chopping off each gnoccho with a wet knife as you go.

Heat the oven to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4. Peel the squash, and deseed (I find a serrated spoon useful, if you have one), then cut the flesh into large chunks.

Put these on a lightly greased baking sheet and roast, turning once halfway, for 35-40 minutes, until tender but not coloured.

While the squash flesh is still warm, puree or mash it, or pass it through a potato ricer – you should have about 500g (if there’s a lot more, you’ll probably need to add more flour in the next step; if a lot less, reduce the flour accordingly). If the puree looks very wet, heat a large frying pan, either lightly greased or nonstick, on a medium-high heat, add the puree and cook, stirring regularly, for about five minutes, until it looks dry and slightly darker in colour. If it’s already fairly dense, like mashed potato, you can skip this step.

Lightly dust a work surface with flour and dust a tray with more flour. Take a handful of the gnocchi mixture and roll it into a thick sausage about 2cm in diameter.

Cut this into roughly 2cm lengths and lay them on the floured tray, keeping them spaced out. Repeat with the remaining dough.

Bring a large, deep pan of lightly salted water to a boil. Cook the gnocchi in batches until they bob to the surface, then scoop out and drain in a sieve, tossing to ensure they don’t stick together.

Melt the butter in a large frying pan on a medium-high heat, then tear in the sage leaves. Add the drained gnocchi and cook, stirring gently and tossing, until coated in butter and lightly coloured all over.

Serve with the butter poured over the top, another grating of nutmeg and a little more parmesan.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share via Email
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on WhatsApp
• Share on Messenger