Sweet Potato Gnocchi, Whipped Mascarpone and Brown Butter Sage Sauce

So today my good friend Chef Claudio Quezada and I wanted to make something authentic and fun from the north of Italy. A recipe that boasts sweet, herbaceous, and savory.

Sweet potato gnocchi with a brown butter sage sauce and a creamy mascarpone.

There are so many dishes like gnocchi which is just a form of dumpling, almost every culture can boast a good dumpling, The French have their Merda de Can (yes the direct translation is shit of the dog, but it’s just a potato and Swiss chard dumpling, not the next viral 2girlsonecup video), the Germans have their kartoffelkloesse, the Austrians have Knodel (probably the Germanic word which gave birth to the word noodle). The dumplings from northern Italy have something mysterious about them similar to their wines. They aren’t dense, chewy, in fact if you’ve had authentic gnocchi’s you would know they are the exact opposite, pillow like, fluffy and light.

Most people never knew that other kinds of gnocchi exist other than the potato gnocchi or the “ricotta gnocchi” but there are many other types. So higher up in the Piedmont region of Italy they use potatoes, as you head south east they start to use ingredients available like, butternut squash and sweet potato...

Chef Claudio Quezada and I recreated this amazing dish following no recipe and only our love for traditional and authentic Italian cuisine.

So here is what we did.

First, we took whole sweet potatoes and wrapped them in foil to retain water. And baked them at roughly 500 degrees F. until soft.

We then let them cool just enough so they can me skinned and handled.

After the skinless potatoes were done we put them through a food mill to remove the fibers and lumps.

We FOLDED in some ricotta, nutmeg, homemade blueberry gastrique for sweetness, salt and pepper.

Maybe ill make a blog about my blueberry gastrique.... Its basically homemade blueberry vinegar made by fermenting blueberries with acetobacter and taking a 1:1 ratio of the vinegar and sugar, then boiling it down to the consistancy of honey.

We then folded in AP flour until just pliable enough to roll and cut.

You can then cook them in SALTED boiling water until they float, and then set them aside while we make the sauce and mascarpone (yes I like them big and the shape of Merda De Can).

To make the sauce we added butter and sage leaves to a pan and cooked until the butter browned and the sage leaves were crispy.

To make the whipped mascarpone we mixed lemon zest, salt, pepper, honey, heavy cream and mascarpone until a paste like consistency. (sorry no photos)

Bringing the dish together, 9-13 pieces of gnocchi tossed in sauce then plated in an asterisk shape, pour the sauce over the gnocchi evenly reserving the crispy sage leaves, put a dollop of the whipped mascarpone in the center and then place the crispy sage on top.