If the baked gnocchi didn’t piss off enough Italian purists, we’re going to really get under their skin this time. In my spirit of radical honesty, I made this dish prior to the baked gnocchi. Today’s dish is homemade sweet potato gnocchi with a maple brown butter sauce. Hold on one sec. Okay now that the nonnas have either closed their browsers or fainted, we can get started. The combination of the sweet potato and maple brown butter sauce essentially made this breakfast for dinner. If you are in the mood for something sweet but also want to claim you’re making a fresh, homemade dinner, this is the dish for you.

The dough starts with peeling, chopping, and boiling sweet potatoes until tender. Once cooled, mash with a fork, add an egg, salt, and pepper, and stir until the egg is thoroughly mixed in. Using your unwashed hands, incorporate all-purpose flour until everything comes together into a workable dough. Here is where I never learn my lesson: boiling the potatoes adds a lot of moisture, so the soft sweet potatoes combined with the absorbed water requires a ton of flour to make a useable dough. You’ll stir in a half cup, and before you know it, you realize the mix needs another half cup. Repeat this a few times until you say “screw it” and decide to work with the sticky dough you have. In the future, I will try to make this by roasting the sweet potatoes first instead of boiling. My hope is that this will not only reduce the moisture content and required amount of flour, but it will also deepen the flavor.

Once the dough is rested, attempt to roll into sticky snakes and cut into pieces of your desired size. For me, the sweet spot is right around the length and diameter of a Bichon Frise turd. Transfer your gnocchi turds onto a floured baking sheet. Try to keep them separate since they will stick together after a few minutes. You can do this while your pot of salted water is boiling.

For the sauce, put some butter in a pan over medium-high heat. And while we’re at it, please get off your high horse and just use salted butter for everything. No one cares that you “want to control the salt levels in your baked goods.” Salted butter is more flavorful and really isn’t all that salty in th first place. If you can truly tell the difference in the finished product, then you probably eat so much butter that you don’t have much longer to live. Continue swirling the butter until browned. It would probably have been a good idea to separate the milk solids at some point, but I didn’t and was left with some charred bits in my sauce.

After browned, reduce the head to medium or medium-low and allow the butter to cool a little. Add salt, pepper, maply syrup, and cinammon and stir. The syrup might start boiling in the butter. Just relax and keep stirring. Since there isn’t much water in the butter or syrup, it won’t reduce much, so keep the heat low once incorporated to avoid burning the syrup. Due to the high sugar and fat content in the sauce, it may reach teperatures above boiling. So don’t be an idiot like Danny and dip your finger into the sauce or slurp a small spoonful straight from the pot.

Back to the gnocchi. Plop them into the boiling water, stirring constantly for a few minutes until they float. Drain and transfer back into the put. Add the sauce and carefully stir until all pieces are coated, then transfer onto plates or a serving dish and garnish with chopped parsley. But Danny, most of you are screaming, wouldn’t an herb like sage make more sense? Yes, probably. But parsley is what I had on hand and added a brightness to the dish that contrasted the sweetness of the pasta and sauce well. So give it a shot. This will fill you up and satisfy your sweet tooth at the same time. Let’s see the final product:

Do you have a favorite food you want me to make? Please provide suggestions below or contact me here.