Farm to Table: Purple Gnocchi

We have a great colorful recipe that will help brighten the winter days as we look forward to spring. Today we’ll be sharing a Food52-inspired recipe of purple gnocchi with a rosemary butter sauce. At the end of the recipe we will share other ways to have the gnocchi as we’re sure you’ll have lots of leftovers! Local markets and farmers markets around the Hudson Valley are a great place to get amazing fresh produce. For this recipe we found some purple potatoes and bleu cheese.

Farm to Table: Purple Gnocchi

Ingredients

Gnocchi

• ~1 lb of purple potatoes (we used 9 small potatoes)
• 3 tbsp of olive oil or unsalted butter
•  1-2 cups of all purpose flour and extra for shaping the gnocchi
• 1 egg
• salt

Sauce

• 3-4 tbsp of butter (depending on the serving)
• 1/2 cup of heavy cream
• 2-3 fresh rosemary sprigs
• 2-3 slices of bleu cheese (or any cheese of choice)
• flakey salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Gnocchi

First boil the potatoes in salted water until soft.

Next, drain and let the potatoes cool enough to peel the skins.

Place the potatoes in a bowl with 1 tbsp of olive oil and/or butter and mash. Look at that vibrant purple!

Stir in the egg and 1 tsp of salt. Add a half cup of flour at a time as you kneed. Make sure you don’t over flour- you want the dough to still be tacky and able to roll. Remember that you’ll add a bit more flour as you roll so less is more.

Once your dough has reached the right consistency, roll out a portion of the dough onto a floured surface into a rope and cut 3/4 inch pieces.

Next, roll the pieces on a gnocchi roller with your thumb or pointer finger. If you don’t have a gnocchi roller board, a fork works the same! You mainly want to create ridges to hold the sauce.

Boil the gnocchi in batches in salted water until they rise to the surface (around 3 minutes). Remove them from the pot with a slotted spoon.

Then, pan-fry the gnocchi until it gets golden brown spots with the remaining olive oil or butter.

Sauce

Now for the sauce, heat up the butter on a sauce pan with the rosemary. Add the slices of cheese and heavy cream on low heat until the cheese melts.

Finally, plate the gnocchi with the sauce and enjoy! (It helps to add the gnocchi into the sauce first and then plate it for the perfect ratio of sauce to pasta)

Leftovers

Now you’ve probably made more gnocchi than you know what to do with. Don’t worry, there are other ways to enjoy the purple treat!

For lunch, quickly pan-fry a handful of gnocchi and place them over a bed of spinach for a colorful salad.

You can also have them as a side to a protein and greens. The sauce will also works well on the protein!

We really enjoyed the natural purple color that these gnocchi have. Like all pastas you can really experiment with any type of sauce, but we found that a white sauce allows the purple color to stand out.

Since making gnocchi from scratch is a bit labor intensive, treat yourself to a cocktail before you get started. We hope you give this recipe a try!