Nothing says love like homemade vegan potato gnocchi. Tender pillows of cooked russet potato, flour, and olive oil tossed with a savory and bright kale sauce make for the perfect cozy plant-based dinner. In this post, I show you all the steps, from baking the potatoes and grating them with the small holes of a box grater (no need for a potato ricer!) to combining with olive oil and flour into a smooth dough. You wind up with perfectly supple homemade gnocchi, beautifully coated in the bright green sauce. Perfect with vegan parmesan on top!
I love to make homemade vegan gnocchi for a special dinner. I find the process very calming and almost meditative. You get a feel for the dough mixture, roll it out, chop into pieces, and indent with the back of a fork. Growing up, we always enjoyed these little dumplings with tomato sauce. I thought I’d give a little kale sauce remix for this post, inspired by the legendary pasta recipe in Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons cookbook.
I prefer to bake russet potatoes directly on the oven rack for gnocchi. Russet potatoes are a bit more floury and dry, which I find works to our advantage with this recipe. Once the potatoes are tender, allow them to cool until you can safely handle them and remove the peel.
Making vegan gnocchi, step by step
- Once baked and peeled, you run the potatoes over the small holes of a box grater to get tiny, fluffy shreds. A potato ricer is great to use if you have one! I’ve used this box grater method for as long as I’ve been making gnocchi and it works great.
- Spread all of your grated potato out on a cutting board and let it cool before drizzling olive oil and sprinkling flour.
- Once you bring the dough together, it will be smooth and ever-so-slightly tacky feeling (not sticky!!)
- Then, you can start rolling out logs and portioning the gnocchi. Rolling the portions over the tines of a fork will give you nice little grooves for the sauce to catch onto. Set the finished gnocchi aside on a parchment-line baking sheet that’s been dusted with flour.
For the sauce, I boil the kale (stems and all) in the gnocchi water first. From there, we can transfer it straight to the blender and start building it up. Miso, nutritional yeast, garlic, and lemon make for a punchy, silky, and savory sauce.
The vegan gnocchi only require about a minute of boiling time before draining and stirring up with the kale sauce. Always reserve about 1 cup of the gnocchi cooking water to thin out the sauce as needed upon combining. Hope you love these! They are a labor of love, and it’s so worth it.
Vegan Gnocchi with Kale Sauce
These homemade vegan potato gnocchi are supple and tender. You need less than 10 ingredients to make these, but they are a labor of love. Perfect with a velvety, tangy and garlicky kale sauce. You can alternatively serve them with tomato sauce for a more classic feel!
Servings 2
Ingredients
Vegan Gnocchi
- 2 medium russet potatoes (about 500 grams total)
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- ⅔ cup all purpose flour
Kale Sauce
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 2-3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
- ½ bunch (about 100 grams) Lacinato kale, chopped (stems and all)
- 1 ½ tablespoons nutritional yeast
- 1 tablespoon light miso
- 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice, plus extra to taste
- sea salt and ground black pepper, to taste
- kale/gnocchi cooking water
Notes
- The kale sauce is lightly adapted from Joshua Mcfadden’s Six Seasons cookbook.
- I call for a box grater to deal with the potatoes because this seems like a more common piece of kitchen equipment. If you have a potato ricer though, go ahead and use it instead!
Instructions
Make the gnocchi
-
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Pierce holes in the potatoes with a fork and bake directly on the oven rack until tender, about 1 ½ hours. Let potatoes cool slightly before peeling.
-
Set up a box grater on a cutting board. Grate the potatoes on the small shredding holes of the grater. You will likely have tough, slightly dry outer pieces of potato that are hard to get through the grater. It’s fine to abandon those bits and enjoy them as a little cook’s snack.
-
Once the potatoes are grated, spread them out on the cutting board slightly and let them cool completely.
-
Once cool, sprinkle salt over top of the potatoes. Drizzle the olive oil after that, and then sprinkle ¾ of the flour on top (I like to save some for rolling out the gnocchi). Using a spatula, start bringing everything together. Eventually the ingredients will be combined enough that you can use your hands to knead the dough. You want a smooth ball of dough that is slightly tacky (but not full-on sticky!!). Try not to handle it too much!
-
Line a baking sheet with parchment and sprinkle it with a bit of flour. Cut the dough ball into 4 equal portions. Sprinkle a bit of flour on your board and on your hands before rolling out a portion of the dough into a log. You want a log of uniform 1-inch thickness. Cut the log into 2-inch pieces. Roll each piece along the tines of a fork to get grooves on each gnocchi. Set the gnocchi onto the prepared baking sheet and repeat with remaining dough. Set finished gnocchi aside while you make the sauce.
Make the kale sauce
-
Fill a large pot with water and start bringing it to a boil on one burner of your stove. On another burner, set a small sauté pan over medium heat. Pour in the olive oil and add the sliced garlic. Sizzle the garlic for about 30 seconds, or until very fragrant. Transfer garlic and oil to an upright blender.
-
Once the large pot of water is boiling, drop in the chopped kale and stir. Boil until stems are slightly tender, about 2-3 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer cooked kale to the upright blender. To the blender, add nutritional yeast, miso, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Add about ⅓ cup of the kale cooking water to the blender as well. Blend the mixture on high until completely smooth, adding more water by the tablespoon if necessary. Check the sauce for seasoning (more salt, lemon etc) and adjust if needed. Pour the kale sauce into a large bowl and set aside.
Assemble the gnocchi and kale sauce
-
Bring the kale cooking water back up to a boil and drop in the gnocchi. Boil until they start rising to the top, about 1 minute. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the cooked gnocchi to the bowl with the kale sauce. Toss to combine, adding more cooking water if necessary.
-
Serve the gnocchi hot with vegan parmesan and red pepper flakes if you like.