Parsnip Gnocchi with Pancetta & Crispy Sage.
Plus an introduction to Black Garlic: how it is made & how to cook with it.
This month on ingredient we’re focusing on parsnips: the bland looking winter root vegetable that disguises a wonderful sweet, earthy flavour.
You can already find the recipe for both my Sri Lankan-inspired Curried Parsnip Soup and the Sri Lankan Roasted Curry Powder I use to make it here. Stay tuned for what I’m hoping will be a slightly left-of-field way of using a parsnip in a salad coming later in the month. Do upgrade your subscription to unlock every recipe in the ingredient archive, and of course to help fund the free part of what I post here! No creative likes asking for money, but without it ingredient can’t function.
When I introduced parsnips as this month’s ingredient last week I mentioned that over Christmas I’d made a delicious plateful of parsnip gnocchi from Borough Market’s second cookbook Borough Market: The Knowledge by food writer Angela Clutton. It was exceptionally easy to make (I whipped up a batch whilst simultaneously prepping New Year’s Eve’s Beef Wellington and making a beef and stilton pie from leftover festive cheese), fantastically hearty and wonderfully earthy, showing off a parsnip’s both root-y and sweet flavours in pillowy, toothsome bite after pillowy, toothsome bite.
Brainstorming what exactly I was going to cook this month to best show off the humble parsnip and it’s best attributes (I’m sadly still oven-less, though fellow Substacker
was inspired by my introductory essay to take up the task of testing parsnip’s relationship to baked goods baking batches of both parsnip and carrot muffins, and parsnip biscuits, apparently delicious served warm with soup) I knew some sort of parsnip mash had to be on the table.I have now tried Diana Henry’s Parsnip & Roasted Garlic Mash (pg 69) from her 2023 re-issued edition of Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, pairing it on a weeknight with an excellent recipe for braised short ribs which also arrived in my Christmas cookbook haul by way of Julius Robert’s so far excellent The Farm Table. In her recipe parsnips - by themselves without the assistance of potato - are boiled until tender, mashed, then mashed again with roasted garlic, butter and double cream. I loved the rich, luxurious, earthy, but because of the addition of garlic no longer quite that sweet mash (a little went a long way) but J found it way to creamy. One to experiment with pairing down a little, I think.
But that gnocchi I made from a base of mashed parsnips and potatoes still captured my imagination: it had so much potential, and I had so many notes for it from the first time of making, such as how because I don’t own a potato ricer I simply mashed the vegetables and all came out fine, and how I gave up weighing the flour bringing together the dough. And then there were the accoutrements: yes to the butter sauce and the fried sage (how I usually serve autumn / winter gnocchi dishes - see my pumpkin gnocchi recipe above) but as I did not have any of the smoked garlic the recipe originally called for to hand, I subbed in black garlic instead.
What is black garlic?
Black garlic is garlic that has been aged at a medium heat (around the 70C mark) to the point where it turns a very, very dark brown - almost black - and it has taken on a jammy texture. This process also breaks down the enzymes that make raw garlic taste sharp, and deeply increases garlic’s natural sweetness. Obviously tubs of black garlic have use by dates on them, but in all honestly I’ve never had any go bad over the span of years because I use it quite sparingly.
In the kitchen, my favourite way to use it is to mash it into butter to give it a deep, sultry taste that I’d liken to dates that had been given a predominantly savoury, rather than a sweet main flavour profile (it’s a good flavour pairing, there is also a recipe for Date & Black Garlic Barbecue Sauce (pg 59) as well as one for Dirty Cajun Rice with Black Garlic (pg 252) in Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage’s Flavour I keep meaning to try), and to beat it into mayonnaise for a similar effect but more acidity to go alongside things such as barbecue chicken - either with the addition of fresher garlic to make it a black garlic aioli - or without. Add it to yogurt, and it makes a brilliant, slightly more complex and acidic accompaniment to Middle Eastern dishes if you don’t have any fresh herbs or lemon about (though fresh lemon juice would be a great addition to this too!)
There are recipes online for making your own black garlic, but for my UK readers I’d recommend sourcing it from The Original Black Garlic who are stocked in most supermarkets, and online at both Sous Chef and Ocado.
In this recipe, using a black garlic butter to dress the parsnip gnocchi I think both accentuated the sweetness of the parsnips in the gnocchi, and added a deeply savoury note that made for a very satisfying dinner. But, in the recipe below, you’ll see that I’ve dispensed with garlic all together in favour of cubed pancetta.
The reason for this is simple: whilst I’ve given you a good introduction to black garlic above and it is relatively easy to get hold of, I know that using a Sri Lankan curry powder in my soup last week - even though I provided the recipe for making it yourself - made the dish less accessable. Now, ingredient is as much about learning as it is cooking so I don’t feel too bad about this, but I also wanted this gnocchi dish to be a bit more adaptable to people’s tastes and shopping habits both to compensate, and because I think parsnip gnocchi is such a wonderfully versatile thing to make.
So: pancetta. It adds that same deeply savoury fattiness, cuts through and compliments the sweetness of the parsnips in the same way as the black garlic, but you might already have some in the fridge thanks to it’s long use by date (I ordered the stuff in the picture at the start of the month, and it supposedly expires on my birthday, March 21st) or else some bacon you can snip up and substitute instead.
But, if you’re vegetarian, or you keep kosher, or don’t eat pork for any other reason religious or otherwise you can of course revert to using black garlic: simply mash 2 large or 3 small cloves into half the butter (make sure it is at room temperature, and reserve the other half for frying the sage) before melting it in the pan and tossing in the cooked gnocchi. And if you can’t get smoked garlic? Use regular garlic cloves instead.
Parsnip Gnocchi with Pancetta & Crispy Sage
Serves: 3-4, Preparation time: 25 minutes, plus cooling time, Cooking time: 30 minutes
To ease the pressure at dinner time, there are several stages at which this Parsnip Gnocchi can be made ahead of time. You can cook the potatoes and the parsnips ahead ready to be mashed, the dough can be made and kept as a ball in the fridge, and you can even shape the gnocchi a few hours ahead of when you plan to drop them into boiling, salted water simply leaving them on a lightly floured or semolina dusted plate or tray in the fridge.
We’re all about parsnips this month, but I do also plan this treatment for the swede I have lurking at the bottom of my vegetable drawer. I’ll report back if this goes well - do let me know if you get to trying this variation before I do!