Prep time: 45 Mins
Cook time: 20 Mins
Serves: 2
Ingredients
- Cooked Beetroot with juices
- 1kg potatoes
- 1 Large Egg
- Half a cup of potato starch
-
Roasted Hazelnuts
- Salt and pepper
- Fresh Sage
- 100g Butter
- Rocket or Salad leaves
- Parmesan cheese
First thing’s first, fill a medium/large pan halfway with water, add a little salt and bring to the boil, cover with a lid to speed up the process. Once rolling add your unpeeled potatoes and let them cook whilst you prepare the other ingredients.
We used a mortar and pestle to grind the roasted hazelnuts together but you can just add them to a sandwich bag and crush with the back of a wooden spoon if you don’t have those to hand.
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Take 5 or 6 fresh sage leaves and place them on top of each other, roll them tight and gently slice thin (this will prevent all of that gorgeous flavour from ending up on your chopping board) add them to the hazelnuts with a few more whole sage leaves and grind together until you have a coarse mixture, set this aside and weigh up half a cup of potato starch and get a large mixing bowl ready for your gnocchi dough.
Open your cooked beetroot but keep the juice, halve each one and halve again then very roughly chop them into large dice.
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Once the potatoes are soft enough to easily skewer with a fork, remove them from the water with a slotted spoon, but keep the pan on the hob, bring the heat down until it’s no longer rolling.
While the potatoes are still hot remove the peel, its surprisingly easy to do this with a pair of forks, add the peeled potatoes to your mixing bowl, season with salt and pepper and mash them, push the mashed potatoes to the side of the bowl and let them cool for a few minutes to prevent from cooking the egg.
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Once the potatoes are cool enough to touch you can add your egg and your potato starch, mix well either by hand or with a spoon, you want the dough to lose its stickiness but not develop any cracks so add a little more starch if you need to.
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Take half of the mix and set it aside, add the juice from your cooked beetroot to the bowl and have some starch ready as this will make the dough sticky again. Mix well, you should have a vibrant pink gnocchi dough (try to match the consistency of the dough you set aside).
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Now the fun bit, take half of the plain gnocchi dough and roll into a sausage, you can shape it as you like and be creative as you want but the easiest and quickest way is to press at regular intervals along the rolled out dough to create small pillows, cut at the indentations and place on a plate ready to be finished.
Take half of your pink dough and repeat the process unless you want to make something extra special, we gently starched a heart shaped cutter and made pink valentines gnocchi to go with the white pillows, if you want a bigger portion there’s plenty of dough left, it can be wrapped and refrigerated or you can shape the dough as you like and freeze the gnocchi for up to a month.
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Now to finish, put a frying pan on the hob on a medium/high heat and take a good large spoon of your butter or margarine of choice and heat it until it starts to froth, add your sage and hazelnuts and a little salt and pepper, turn the heat down to medium and add your gnocchi to the steaming water, stir your butter gently with a wooden spoon and adjust the heat if your butter stops frothing.
Once your gnocchi is floating its ready to add to your seasoned frying pan which should be beautifully aromatic by now, use a slotted spoon and gently place them into the frothing sage butter (if your gnocchi isn’t sizzling then the heat’s too low).
Prepare your bowls or plates with some rocket or any leaves of choice, add your roughly diced, cooked beetroot.
Check the underside of the gnocchi, if they have browned turn them over to finish. Once they’re crispy on both sides dish them up and make sure to drizzle over all of that flavourful goodness from the pan, add parmesan cheese and cracked black pepper and treat your partner and yourself to something extra special today.
