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Lindsay, I loved this recipe! It was such a hit at our house last night, you always come up with the best recipes 🙂 Thank you
Jennie
This recipe is sponsored by Land O’Lakes
I know. You might need a minute. I get it.
Just breathe it in… breathe in that sage, garlic, butter, pumpkin-gnocchi-pillow combo.
It is honestly too good to be legal. Are we breaking the law here? Because it feels suspiciously like we might be breaking the law.
How To Make Our Pumpkin Gnocchi:
Here in Minnesota we’re in that season now where fall is fully upon us and we’re starting to get days that require our Fall Selves to show up. Full force. Wearing sweaters. Swapping iced coffees for hot ones. Raking leaves out of our yards (I have done this zero times).
When my Fall Self shows up to the party, it does not show up empty handed. It says: I see you, Sweaters. I see you, Hot Coffees. I see you, People Who Rake. And it says: I am going to feed you something yummy.
Hints:
- Pumpkin
- Butter
- Sage
- Garlic
- Parmesan
Naturally we will use the most adorable stick of butter you’ve ever seen for this recipe, because a) ADORABLE, and b) it is just the right size for a date-night-size recipe like this one. The convenience of the Land O Lakes® Butter in Half Stick is one of my favorite developments to butter in the last… well… in my lifetime. It’s hard to improve on a perfect thing, but in this case, BUTTER WAS JUST IMPROVED. So long, random three-tablespoon remnant sticks of butter that like to make themselves at home in our fridges. So long.
When I get my hands on that salty, creamy butter packed into tiny paper-wrapped vessels of love, the romantic fall recipes just start flowing.
And romantic indeed. Kids, cover your eyes now.
The thing about the sauce for this gnocchi is that I didn’t want it to be a sauce in the way that a sauce normally is. I would almost call it a SHEEN sauce. I just wanted a SHEEN of something on those gnocchi – a little kiss of a coating – and the melted butter alone wasn’t doing it for me (says no one ever, but I’m a fall food diva).
So after melting and INFUSING THE BUTTER WITH SAGE AND GARLIC and fending off everyone in Minneapolis who came running to my kitchen to find out what smelled like literal food heaven, I added just a pinch of flour and a splash of cream and then thinned that baby out with some of the leftover gnocchi-boil water. You know, the stuff that turns cloudy because it’s got all the remnant starch in it from the gnocchi? It looks scary, but do not drain! Save that for your sauce. Your sheen sauce.
Are you picking up what I’m putting down here?
There really is nothing quite like fall.
God bless you, and God bless pumpkin gnocchi.
PS. Worth mentioning: this gnocchi is also very delicious hot off the pan, sans sauce, topped with a quick sprinkle of parm, for a little afternoon snack, as I found out during about 1500 rounds of recipe testing. 😘
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Pumpkin Gnocchi with Sage Butter Sauce
- Total Time: 35 minutes
- Yield: 4 regular servings or 2 extra-generous servings 1x
Description
Pumpkin Gnocchi! So incredibly pillowy and delicious. Topped with a 5 ingredient sage garlic butter sauce that will blow your mind.
Ingredients
Pumpkin Gnocchi:
- 1 medium-large russet baking potato
- 1 cup pumpkin puree
- 1 egg
- 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour (more as needed)
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons Land O Lakes® Salted Butter in Half Sticks (for pan frying)
Sage Butter Sauce:
- 2 tablespoons Land O Lakes® Salted Butter in Half Sticks
- a few sage leaves and a smashed clove of garlic
- 1 tablespoon flour
- 1 tablespoon heavy whipping cream
- 1/2 cup starchy water (leftover from boiling the gnocchi)
Instructions
- Potato Prep: Bake the potato – see notes – and pull off the skin. Let the potato rest for a while to cool down. Once it’s cool enough to handle, grate it until you have about 1 1/2 cups of very fine potato shreds.
- Gnocchi Dough: Mix potato shreds with pumpkin puree. Measure flour onto a clean surface and put the potato/pumpkin mixture in the center. Make a well and crack your egg into it. Sprinkle salt on top. Grab a fork and whisk up the egg real quick. Using your hands, mix all ingredients into a dough. Don’t overmix. When it starts to come together, form the dough into a mostly-smooth, rounded little loaf.
- Gnocchi Prep: Cut off slices of the mound and roll each one into a long rope. Cut the rope into bite sized pieces. Place the gnocchi pieces on a plate (make sure they’ve got a little flour coating so they don’t stick).
- Cooking the Gnocchi: Bring a large pot of water to boil. Add the gnocchi, carefully, one at a time, to the water. You may need to work in batches. When the gnocchi rise to the top of the pot of boiling water, immediately remove them with a slotted spoon. Set aside. Melt your butter in a large nonstick skillet. Pan fry the gnocchi, undisturbed, to get one side lightly crispy and leave the other side soft. Remove from pan and set aside to wait for saaaauce.
- Butter Sauce: In the same pan, add butter, sage leaves, and garlic clove. Let the garlic and sage cook for a few minutes over low heat. When the sage leaves are starting to get crispy, remove from heat. Remove garlic as well. When it’s melted, add the flour and whisk. Add the heavy cream and whisk. Add the starchy water slowly, whisking to make a sauce that is the consistency you want. Toss with gnocchi, top with sage leaves and Parmesan, and BE HAPPY AND PROUD BECAUSE LOOK WHAT YOU MADE! Now pour yourself a glass of wine and feast.
Notes
I baked my potato in the microwave. Yes, that’s right folks, I’m classy. Poke holes in your potato, wrap with a paper towel, and micro for 5-6 minutes. Voila. Less flour is better, so if your potato is small and you only get 1 cup of potato shreds out of it, then don’t add quite as much flour. I found the magic amount to be something between 1 1/2 cups and 2 cups, but it is a little different every time depending on the water content of your potato, your pumpkin, etc. You want to be able to handle the dough, but you do not want it to be overly stiff. A delicately soft dough, while it requires a little more TLC, is a good (delicious) thing. We are looking for soft pillows here. Your gnocchi might not be pretty. That’s okay. They get prettier once they are pan fried and covered in sauce and topped with parmesan and fried sage. ❤ Trust.
- Prep Time: 20 minutes
- Cook Time: 15 minutes
- Category: Dinner
- Cuisine: Italian-Inspired
Keywords: pumpkin gnocchi, sage butter sauce, gnocchi recipe
Thank you to Land O’Lakes for sponsoring this post!
One More Thing!
This recipe is part of our easy pumpkin recipes page. Check it out!
These are sooo delicious! They have gone into the regular fall rotation. I pick the leaves off my sage before it gets too cold, and if I’m not making this right away I just throw the leaves in the freezer so that I can keep making this wonderful dish. Yum! Also, they gnocchi are easy to make. I double the recipe and freeze the uncooked gnocchi for another day.
Can you make gnocchi without an egg? Can you substitute with something?
We did this recipe before and my son likes it a lot. However, he cannot take it to school as no eggs are allowed due to allergy of some kids.
We’ve never tried without an egg. I’d recommend checking out a vegan recipe like this one!
This was great. I used King Arthur Measure for Measure gluten free flour. The gnocchi turned out yummy.added a bit of poultry seasoning. Served with my browned butter maple walnut sauce. Thank you for a great recipe. Definitely making again.
I really appreciate a website that makes intimidating recipes incredibly easy with clarity of direction. Thank you for that! Mine turned out lovely, and the sage butter sauce was unimaginably simple and tasty. Thanks!
ok this looks amazing and i want to do this. but. where do i get pumpkin puree? do i just… crack open a pumpkin?
Yes you can use canned pumpkin!
Unless you want to waste a lot of time for a meal with no flavor skip this recipe! I added nutmeg and extra salt and still have flavorless food! There is absolutely no sage or pumpkin taste, what a waste
Sorry to hear that, Ashlee. We appreciate the feedback!
Ok, so I’m having a teeeny birthday party for my girl consisting of us and one other family. I thought it would be fun for the almost four year olds to roll and cut the gnocchi as a little activity since they are both super helpers in the kitchen.
Have you ever made the dough ahead and rolled and cooked it later?
Thanks for any suggestions!
Also, this is a fantastic recipe! I’ve made it several times already.
Yes, you can prep the dough ahead of time and keep it in the fridge. Love the party idea, Jessica! Enjoy!
Hey there!
Was going to make this but I don’t have a microwave. Ha, Ha!
Has anyone made this? There isn’t a single review that is helpful.
If you want to make ahead and cook/boil the gnocchi later, what is the best way to store it?
It’s amazing! Love it every time I make it!
So glad you enjoy the recipe, Joy!
There are two types of recipe reviews that really irk me: those where the author doesn’t follow the recipe at all and then complains when it doesn’t turn out ‘the way it was supposed to’ and those where the author hasn’t even made the recipe at all and then raves about it. Guess which one predominates in these reviews?
I have made this recipe, suckered in by the combination of ‘pumpkin’ and ‘gnocchi’ and its apparently high star rating. (See above. My fault, I suppose, for not reading enough to see that the five-star ratings are mostly from people writing ‘OMG!!! Yummmmm! I love fall!! I can’t wait to make this!!!!!’)
I have made gnocchi before, I did follow the recipe, and the result was… awful. The dough was so obviously slurry-like that I did not (could not!) even add all the pumpkin the recipe called for, so there was very little pumpkin flavour. And despite cutting down the amount of moisture by not adding all the pumpkin, I still had to add a ton of extra flour to make the dough handleable. Not surprisingly, adding all that extra flour made the gnocchi unappealingly tough (no ‘fluffy little pillows’ here, sadly).
I tried to salvage things by refrigerating half of the dough, but after over 24 hours in the fridge it was still so sticky that I could barely peel any of the plastic wrap off of it. At that point, I decided to cut my losses (wasting that food being less of an evil than wasting even more trying to make it useable…).
All I can think is that my pumpkin puree was notably wetter than the recipe author’s (though I have made a lot of pumpkin puree in my time, being the official family Thanksgiving pie-master, and it did not seem amiss) or that my baking potato was notably smaller (though I did read the bit about quantity of potato shreds). So… who knows?
TL;DR: I won’t be trying this recipe again.
Sorry to hear this recipe didn’t work out for you. We really appreciate the feedback!
Thanks for the information. It is helpful for nutrifymeals.
I cannot believe you made gnocchi. Almost the same way as my grandmother’s. Except that you don;t roll the cut gnocchi off the tines of a fork to give it little lines designed to hold the sauce. Why? Because our sauce was always tomato sauce. So Tuscanno of you to make it with the butter/sage sauce. I have blog envy and I am trying not to because envy is a sin. I think I need to call it blog admiration. Unbelievable that you actually made gnocchi!!!!!
We absolutely loved making this recipe- it was so fun and gourmet feeling, but the flavor was LACKING 🙁 I was so excited to have that punch of sage, but lo, the blandness of the gnocchi seemed to underwhelm the whole thing.
Sorry to hear that the flavor was lacking, Alyssa. We appreciate your feedback!
I just made this today and I have to say, this is REALLY really good. Thank you so much <3
So glad to hear you enjoyed this, Kim!
This recipe is fantastic! I had some left over roast pumpkin, and it worked beautifully. The saucy sheen was lovely on the crispy edges of the gnocchi. I was too lazy to go to the shop, so I substituted thyme and some sour cream which I had in the fridge. Delicious!
So glad you enjoyed this, Kate!
Really good. Was I extremely nervous about the whole “make your own gnocchi and don’t use lazy pre packaged gnocchi”? Uhhhh, yes is an understatement. It was so easy! Would use a more than a “few” sage leaves, maybe 2 cloves of garlic, and a few shakes of parm to add some more flavor to the sauce. Crumbled fried sage leaves on top you say? Do. It.
So happy to hear you enjoyed this, Brooke!
I made this recipe. I have a ton and a half of leftover pumpkin that I’m trying to use – if I make a bunch of these gnocchi, can I keep ‘em in the freezer? I’m already preparing to make your pumpkin bread recipe; I just have so much pumpkin to use and we really like the gnocchi (which is surprising because my husband “hates dumplings,” but when you call them gnocchi he LOVES it lol).
Hi, LaDonna! We haven’t tried freezing the pumpkin gnocchi yet, but we think it should work. We’d suggest laying them out in a single layer on baking sheet and freezing them until they’re firm. After that, you can toss ’em in a freezer safe container or plastic bag.
Made this for dinner. Although it was quite good, the dough was sticky. Followed the recipe to a T. The only difference I made was my pumpkin puree was homemade. Because it was so sticky, I kept adding four and four, but it was not helping at all. Any ideas why?
Just to help out the person above my comment: I’ve made the recipe a few times with my homemade pumpkin purée. The first time I had to use a ton of extra flour, BUT I discovered some instant mashed potatoes in the cabinet so I used the recommended amount of flour plus maybe an addition 1/4c and then I managed the stickiness of the dough by using the instant potatoes which soaked up the extra water. By doing that I finally discovered the wonderful pillowy goodness that this recipe is meant to embody. The previous 3 times they were harder and a little more chewy.
Hi, Lisa! It’s hard to say without seeing the dough. Depending on how “wet” your dough is, it’s normally to use more than the listed amount of flour.
Can use youse gluten free flour instead if regular flour
I love this recipe! I’ll try anything pumpkin and this looks awesome!
I cannot even tell you how good this looks right now! I haven’t had gnocchi I think in at least a year and that’s way too long to go without it!
Julia // http://www.thesundaymode.com
Made this for dinner tonight. It was so good!!! The flavors are simple but delicious. We had it as a main dish and it was very filling, but this would also make a great festive side dish for thanksgiving.
I made this last night at our house but realized too late that I was out of all purpose flour. I used whole wheat pastry flour instead and to my surprise, there wasn’t one little gnocchi left at the end of the meal! I had no idea gnocchi was so easy to make. Thanks for this.
Glad it worked out! 🙂