A Food Editor’s Review of Giada De Laurentiis’s Gnocchi with Butter Thyme Sauce Recipe

I weighed my potatoes to ensure I had exactly one pound (I couldn’t find a single one-pound spud at the supermarket, so I used two and trimmed one down). It felt wasteful to toss the potato skin (and later, the leftover egg) away, but whatever you say, Giada. Making the dough ended up being way easier than I anticipated; as someone who avoids kneading at all costs, it was fast and rather therapeutic. However, rolling each dumpling over the back of a fork to get grooves was 1) tedious, 2) time-consuming and 3) lowkey ineffective. Blame it on user error, but I’d skip this step next time around.

Next, I boiled the gnocchi for about 5 minutes. The only thing I did differently from the recipe was prepare the sauce last. The recipe says to do it first, before preparing the gnocchi. Knowing the gnocchi would take me the longest (aka forever), I waited until they were boiling to prepare the sauce. It took about 6 minutes to brown the butter, versus the 2 suggested in the recipe. Beware of the splatter once you add the thyme and be sure to kill the heat as soon as the butter goes brown; if it burns, you’ll have to start over.

They were tasty…but not worth the elbow grease. The gnocchi were very soft and mushy. I anticipated this but thought frizzling them in the brown butter would crisp and firm them up. Unfortunately, they were too delicate and mushy to even properly toss. I think next time, I may refrigerate the gnocchi ahead of sautéing so they can dry out, instead of taking them straight from the pot and adding them to the sauce. (I did pan-fry the leftovers in more thyme butter, and they crisped up nicely after chilling in the fridge overnight.) I would also use salted butter for the brown butter sauce rather than unsalted; of course, you can salt your bowl to your liking after the fact instead.

I feel like what most people seek in brown butter gnocchi is a crisp-on-the-outside, pillowy-on-the-inside texture, so you may be better off just using the store-bought stuff and saving yourself the time and effort of kneading and shaping the dough. The sauce is simple and seasonal, as well as impressive (leave it to fresh herbs to deliver the wow factor ten out of ten times). Unless you’re a pro at making gnocchi—this was my first time, for the record—just lean on the sauce and your go-to supermarket brand to make this recipe a zillion times easier. Don’t hate me, Giada!