Having opened restaurants such as Rotorino, Craft London, Palatino, and Sardine over the past decade, Stevie Parle now primarily focuses on JOY, a plant shop and café in Marylebone, and Pastaio, his casual fresh pasta brand. With locations in Soho and Westfield London, Pastaio is renowned for serving modestly priced pasta dishes. The restaurants also offer a range of regularly-changing mains, sharing pastas for the table, wines on tap, house-made limoncellos, and seasonal prosecco slushies.
This gnocchi recipe uses greens such as raw spinach, chard, nettles, or any other available greens. Once boiled until soft, they’re then blended with egg yolks and mixed with mashed potato before the small gnocchi are formed. After a quick boil, the gnocchi are then finished in a pan with olive oil, butter, parmesan, crispy sage leaves, and an enthusiastic sprinkling of ground nutmeg.
On his greens and potato gnocchi recipe, Stevie Parle says: “I had these with just with sage butter and nutmeg but a slow tomato, or a meat ragù would be great if you have it. I used nettles and slightly worse-for-wear spinach because that’s what I had in the fridge/garden, frozen spinach would work fine too as long as you squeeze it out well. Mine were gluten free.”
200graw spinachchard, nettles or any greens, stripped of tough stalks and stems
2egg yolks
200-300gflour
A few sage leaves
70gbutter
50gparmesan
About ¼ of a whole nutmeg
Instructions
Scrub but do not peel the potatoes and leave them whole.
In a large pan of well salted cold water, bring the potatoes to the boil and cook until soft but not falling apart. Remove from the water and set aside to cool.
Boil the greens in the potato water until soft. Drain.
Dunk the cooked greens in cold water until cool and then squeeze them hard to remove moisture.
In a blender, blend the greens and the egg yolks together until smooth.
Once the potatoes have cooled a little, but are still warm, scrape off the skins with a small, sharp knife. Mash (or ideally mouli, but who has a mouli) until smooth.
Boil a large pan of fresh, well-salted water.
Put the mashed potato onto a clean worksurface. Mix the greens puree in with your hands. Add about 2/3 of the flour and bring the mixture together into a dough. Add more flour if it is sticky.
Take a small piece and drop into some boiling water. If it falls apart add more flour.
Roll the dough into long sausages no thicker than a finger and chop into pieces a couple of centimetres long.
You can indent each gnocchi, roll over a ridged gnocchi board, or just leave them as they are.
Boil for 2 minutes.
While the gnocchi boil heat a large frying or sauté pan and add a little olive oil.
When the oil is hot add the sage leaves and allow them to crackle. Remove from the pan and set aside.
Add the butter and allow it to melt.
Add the gnocchi to the melted butter, grate over some parmesan and toss in the butter.
Spoon onto a plate and place a few sage leaves on top. Grate some more parmesan over the top and finish with an enthusiastic grating of nutmeg.
Jonathan is Food Editor for The London Economic.
Jonathan has run and contributed towards a number of blogs, and has written features for publications such as Eater London, The Guardian, i News, The Independent, GQ, Time Out London and more.
