Food

Food for gay men: Gnocchi

Surprisingly simple and a great base for a delicious meal.

Gareth Johnson

24 Aug 2025 • 4 min read

Gnocchi is one of those things where the thought of making it can be a bit intimidating, but the reality is that this is simple and straightforward.

Although gnocchi is often described as a pasta dish, it's more accurate to think of them as Italian dumplings. They're a base to carry whatever flavourful sauce that you're going to pair them with.

Because it stores well, it's sensible to make more gnocchi than you need for the meal that you're preparing.

There's a range of variations that you'll see with a basic gnocchi recipe, but this is a vegan version - just to make it easier to serve to anyone who is at your table.

Basic ingredients

Potatoes (about 1kg of cooked potato)
Flour (somewhere between 1/2 cup and 1 cup)

Extra ingredients

Baking powder: adding 1/2 tsp of baking powder into your dough should help to keep your gnocchi light and fluffy, but it's not essential.
Nutritional yeast: because I'm often cooking for vegans, nutritional yeast is a good source of B vitamins and adds some creaminess to the potato - you can add a couple of tablespoons into the gnocchi dough.

Method

Cook your potatoes. Leftover baked potatoes work well for gnocchi but it's generally easier to boil them. The advantage of baked potatoes is that they'll hold less water so you'll need less flour to make your dough.
Mash your potato in a big bowl. Add the baking powder and nutritional yeast, and then slowly add flour to bring the dough together.
Once your dough is holding in a loose ball, tip it out onto a floured surface. Give it a light knead to make sure that it's a firm enough consistency to hold together.
To make it easier to manage, divide your dough into 2 or 4 and then roll into thick snakes. You can then cut the snakes into gnocchi size, shape with a fork, and place on a floured tray. [If you're storing your gnocchi, you can freeze them at this stage]

Cooking the gnocchi

Bring a large saucepan of water to a gentle boil
Add in the gnocchi - a few at a time, you need to keep them separate from each other.
The gnocchi will sink to the bottom of the pan. When they rise to the top, they are cooked - remove from the water and place them on a plate drizzled with some olive oil (to prevent sticking)
[You can store the gnocchi at this stage - drizzle with olive oil and store in a container in the fridge if you're going to use them the following day]
When I'm serving a gnocchi dish, I'll take the amount of cooked gnocchi that I need and then finish it off in the sauce so that they're served hot and coated in the sauce.

Roasted cherry tomato sauce

This is a super-easy sauce that's bright and tasty and works well with gnocchi.

This is a vegan-friendly sauce but there isn't any protein in it, so you'll need to think about that in your meal-planning. Non-vegans can add pancetta into the sauce or top with cheese to get their protein fox.

In a roasting dish, combine halved cherry tomatoes, peeled cloves of garlic, fresh thyme, olive oil, and salt. Roast until everything is cooked and starting to caramelise.
When you're ready to plate your meal, transfer everything in the roasting dish into a frying pan or saucepan, bring to heat, add in your gnocchi, add in some fresh basil, and serve.