Pumpkin gnocchi

"As for the gnocchi family, their merits as inexpensive, attractive, and original little dishes will be quickly perceived" Elizabeth David

I'm being a bit lazy today with a compilation of recipes for pumpkin gnocchi - the dish which is going to be tonight's vegetarian dinner. This is one of the prettiest photos I found - just to suck you in - and is from Dan Churchill on the delicious. website. It also shows the classic presentation with a sage butter sauce - well a slightly modified sage butter sauce and plated with rocket just to make it look pretty. I'm making pumpkin gnocchi tonight because I had some butternut pumpkin going off in the fridge. Indeed I probably had to throw away about half of it. Black mark to me, although the gone off bits will go to compost, so not quite wasted.

I also had some leftover potatoes from last night's disastrous sausage and sauerkraut dinner. Disastrous because although I did rinse the sauerkraut I clearly didn't rinse it enough because it was so salty that really the dish just tasted of salt. Very depressing. Anyway the leftover potatoes have been mashed into the pumpkin. The potatoes were not very salty - well I hope not anyway. They didn't taste salty last night.

Anyway back to pumpkin gnocchi and the variations thereof. Felicity Cloake, whose Perfect pumpkin gnocchi are shown here covers most but not all of them. The main variations seem to be whether to add flour, ricotta, potatoes, or eggs to the mix, and of course, how much of each of those things. How you serve them is much more variable and where you will find most of the fanciful additions. Apparently whether you use butternut or round pumpkin varieties may also make a difference as many said that the butternut was more watery. Which I can't say I agree about. Flour and eggs in particular seem to cause the most controversy.

With the flour you have those who only mix pumpkin with flour and nothing else - just a touch of nutmeg - and those who add varying quantities - which is tricky.

"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" Felicity Cloake

As to the eggs, apparently the bible of Italian cooking - The Silver Spoon adds many eggs, which Felicity Cloake says made her:

"end up with a mixture so liquid that, when it’s dropped into a pan of boiling water with a teaspoon, as the directions suggest, it dissolves into a froth."

In the end she just adds one egg yolk to here 'perfect' ones. I'm not sure what I shall do yet. I must confess I find the addition of an egg somewhat reassuring - reassuring in the sense that it will glue everything together and they won't all fall apart in the boiling water, which is always my nightmare. Perhaps if I leave it to last I can then perhaps judge whether I need it or not. The mix will definitely need flour and cheese however, as there is just not enough there at the moment.

Now that I think of it the gnocchi we saw being handmade by an almost archetypal Italian nonna in a tiny restaurant in Lerici, Liguria, had no egg in them. I think they were just flour, cheese and potato. Probably ricotta was the cheese, but then again there may not even have been any cheese - just potato and flour because it was all about the sauce which was gorgonzola based.

Cheese - well it will have to be Parmesan because I have no ricotta. I should have bought some this morning when we went shopping.

And I don't think I shall be doing the sage butter thing, as I'm currently leaning to a creamy mushroom sauce, because I also have mushrooms that are drying away into something that looks like dried porcini. I'm guessing the will revive with a little bit of boiled water. I could, however, add some sage to the sauce, or even to the gnocchi themselves, as I recognize that sage does go well with pumpkin.

So what did I find? Well a couple of fundamentally classic versions in addition to the two I have already talked about, that vary a little bit as described above: Easy Pumpkin gnocchi with sage butter sauce from Nagi Maehashi of Recipe Tin Eats, who also does a kind of Felicity Cloake thing on the variations although she goes for ricotta and an egg; and Three ingredient pumpkin gnocchi from Woolworths, although they do squash theirs a fair bit to make them look more like Gnocchi alla Romana. Which is not necessarily a criticism and which also reminds me to say that somebody added semolina to their mix - instead of the flour perhaps.

When I had almost given up I found these Pumpkin and sweet potato gnocchi from the Australian Good Food Guide, which I have to say had a really different way of cooking the gnocchi. When the paste is made you squash it into a baking tray to about a 2cm depth and cook it in the oven. To serve you cut the sheet of gnocchi dough into the right size and then you reheat the gnocchi - they don't say how - and toss in a sauce. No boiling in water and praying they don't fall apart. They don't say whose recipe this is but it came up when I was trying to see if Guy Grossi had a version. And no he didn't. Unless this is it. I wonder if this is how gnocchi are prepared in restaurants. It has a touch of large-scale cooking to it doesn't it? Interesting anyway. and yes it has sweet potato in the mix, which is not very radical really. There are lots of recipes for gnocchi made with other root vegetables - but not carrots - well not so far.

I also tried to find some more way-out versions, and I did find some, but yes, I'm afraid it's all Ottolenghi and co. Readers I tried to find somebody else who experimented a bit more. And I did find that Bert Greene - long dead, and so from long ago, had a recipe that included prosciutto in his gnocchi mix. I have not seen anybody do that. But nobody else other than Ottolenghi and co. really is experimenting today. Jamie wasn't even that into pumpkin gnocchi at all. Ottolenghi and co however had three - Squash gnocchi with caraway and black garlic; Swede gnocchi with miso butter; and Miso butter butternut gnocchi from Ottolenghi's protégé Ixta Belfrage. Yes, I know that the swede one is just a difference in vegetable really, but nobody else did swede - and miso butter? And I guess the experimentation was mostly, but not exclusively with the sauces.

As well as pumpkin gnocchi there are of course, lots of recipes out there for gnocchi - ready made from the supermarket - in pumpkin based sauces.

I had never heard of gnocchi until I read Elizabeth David's Italian Food. We didn't dine out in Italian restaurants much - our cheap meals out were Indian. Now, as I have said, you can buy them either fresh or frozen in the supermarket. A pity really as they are easy to make. But they make a quick and easy dinner.

And really it's all about the sauce. I have yet to master the brown butter and sage thing. My sage leaves just go soggy.

At least I've cleaned out the fridge a bit. I've got a few softening beans in there too. Maybe I should add them to the mushrooms. I think those green things in Ottolenghi's swede version are shredded beans.