Perfect Sweet Potato Gnocchi

Pasta may be a weeknight staple for many of us, but fresh, homemade pasta and gnocchi are definitely a special treat. Want to show someone you care? Make gnocchi! With only five simple ingredients for the actual gnocchi themselves, this is a calming, tactile project for two. You don’t need a grooved pasta board or any special flour — just a bowl and some other simple tools and ingredients you likely already have at home.

In the rusticity lies the appeal. If your gnocchi are a little bigger or smaller or slightly misshapen, it simply doesn’t matter! Once they’ve been gently crisped in some butter, it will all taste delicious. The ricotta sauce in the recipe is a rich, lactic blanket to the gnocchi but you can easily forgo it and just use the pesto instead. Another alternative is to finish the gnocchi with a mountain of freshly grated Parm and cracked black pepper. 

These gnocchi are surprisingly filling. This amount easily serves two as a main along with a simple salad, or suits four if served as part of a more elaborate menu with one or more sides and some roasted meat.  

These simple sweet potato gnocchi have only five ingredients! Sweet potatoes (of course!), butter and egg to enrich the dough, plus flour and cheese to provide structure and binding.

As the star ingredient in these gnocchi, sweet potatoes bring all their powerhouse nutrition to the party. The high fiber content of sweet potatoes helps you stay full for longer and, being a complex carbohydrate, they are also slower to digest.

In the biggest surprise discovery, the answer is neither! It turns out the microwave is the best way to cook the sweet potatoes for this recipe. I cooked the sweet potatoes multiple ways, weighing them before and after cooking to determine how much water they lost (or gained!) in the process. All sweet potatoes were cooked whole, in the skin, with four small, shallow cuts along their length to prevent any potential bursting. Below are the results.

• Electric pressure cooker: I love my pressure cooker for lots of things, so this was my first option for cooking the sweet potatoes quickly. It was certainly efficient. So efficient there was minimal moisture loss of only 3%! Usually a good thing, but not when it comes to gnocchi. 
• Boiled: Cooked in a pot with plenty of water until tender, I expected the sweet potato to weigh more than it did before cooking. I was pleasantly surprised to note a 7% moisture loss. 
• Steamed: Thinking it might be better if the sweet potato was not fully submerged in water, I steamed one and the results upheld my thinking: It weighed a full 16% less than at the start.
• Roasted: Most gnocchi recipes call for roasted potatoes, especially those made with regular ones, so I knew this would work well. The potato took a long time to cook, but it emerged weighing 25% less than before. 
• Microwave: The long cook time in the oven seemed inefficient and I was impatient (gimme gnocchi now!) so I threw a sweet potato in the microwave just to see what would happen. Behold! A whopping 32% moisture loss, making for a much drier sweet potato than any other cooking method! This would translate into tender gnocchi because it would need the least amount of flour to bind.