Gnocchi + Secret Vegetable Sugo

For the gnocchi:

A large handful of rock salt
500g potatoes (you can ask your greengrocer for high starch mashing potatoes)
2 free-range egg yolks
A handful of freshly grated parmesan cheese, plus extra to serve
1 to 2 cups of plain flour.

For the Sugo (sauce):

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion
1 medium carrot
Half a red capsicum
2 sticks celery
3 to 4 medium mushrooms
1 or 2 tins of peeled Roma or chopped tomatoes*

*Use 1 tin for a thicker sauce or 2 tins for a more ‘tomato-ey’ sauce.

Preheat oven to 220 degrees C. Spread the handful of rock salt onto a baking dish to make a ‘bed’ of salt for the potatoes to sit on. The salt will draw out the moisture from the potatoes and leave the starch to help make your dough firmer. Oven bake the potatoes for 60 minutes until soft inside when poked with a fork or skewer. If you don’t have rock salt or don’t have an extra hour to spare, potatoes can just be boiled in this part of the process.

While potatoes are cooking, make your Sugo. This sauce should just look like a plain tomato pasta sauce but I like to hide vegetables in it. Warm a saucepan or deep frypan over medium heat. Finely chop your onion, capsicum, celery and mushroom and grate your carrot.

Add onion and celery to your warm pan, add a sprinkle of salt and cover. Let it sweat and start to soften. Once the onion is translucent add capsicum and grated carrot and let this sweat and start to soften and caramelise too. Keep the heat medium to low, to avoid burning. The longer you let this caramelise the better.

Remove from heat and let it cool a few minutes before adding it all to a food processor. Process into a smooth paste. All these veggies will now become invisible in the sauce!

Transfer this past back to the saucepan. Now add your tin of tomatoes to the food processor. Blend until smooth then also add into the saucepan with the vegetable paste. Add salt to taste and let simmer on a very low heat until gnocchi is ready.

Once the potatoes are baked, let them cool to touch. Peel the skins with a knife and your hands. While they are still warm, mash them in a bowl with a pinch of sea salt and add the two egg yolks. You should have a sticky potato mash.

Dust a clean dry bench with a little flour and turn the mash out onto the bench. Start to add flour to the mash by dusting it over the top and gently kneading. It is much softer than pizza or bread dough so just use slight pressure and gently form the dough as you add flour. You may not need all the flour, just keep adding and gently kneading until the dough is no longer sticky and doesn’t easily break up in your hands.

Once your dough is ready, cut it up into fist-sized balls. Then using your hands just gently start to roll it into a long sausage shape. Keep sprinkling flour on the dough and the bench to stop the dough from sticking. Make the sausage about 20 to 30cm long and about 3cm thick.

Cut the dough sausage into roughly 3cm pieces. If you want to get tricky you can roll them off the end of a fork to create the indents in the gnocchi but this may require guidance from a Nonna. Totally OK to leave them as is. Prep and cut all your gnocchi in advance as they cook quickly.

Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil. Take a plateful of gnocchi and plunge them into the boiling water. They are ready once they rise to the top of the water (this can be about a minute or less). Using a slotted spoon remove this first batch into a bowl and keep adding a plateful at a time to the boiling water until all done.

Dish up into plates, spoon a dollop of sauce on top and sprinkle with grated parmesan.

Recipe taken from Family #6 profile with Leo Moscicki
Photography Kelli Morris
Art Direction Hayley McKee