Gnocchi substitute
Fresh cheese tortellini or small ravioli
Use the same amount by weight as the gnocchi you are replacing
For a soup or a saucy skillet dish, fresh cheese tortellini or small ravioli is the best swap, because it is the only supermarket ingredient that is also a soft filled dumpling that cooks in three minutes. For a baked or sheet-pan dish, chunks of parboiled potato tossed in oil roast up crisp and creamy in much the same way. Sturdy short pasta such as shells, orecchiette or cavatappi works in any brothy or baked recipe as long as you accept a chewy bite instead of a pillowy one. And gnocchi is genuinely quick to make at home from three ingredients if you have potatoes. What gnocchi brings to a dish is soft starchy body: it is filling, it soaks up sauce like a sponge, and in a soup it thickens the broth slightly as its surface starch dissolves. Pasta gives you the bulk but not the softness or the thickening, so if your soup relied on gnocchi for richness, expect it to taste thinner and add a splash of cream or a handful of grated parmesan.
Other gnocchi substitutes
Ranked, with the exact amount to use
Substitutes for Gnocchi with ratios
2Homemade potato gnocchi
Close matchWhat changes
- Best for
- butter and sage sauce, tomato sauce, any gnocchi recipe, when the shops have failed you, gnocchi that are better than shop-bought
Worth knowing because it is genuinely a forty-minute job with things most people already have, and homemade gnocchi are far lighter than the vacuum-packed kind. Bake or boil floury potatoes such as russets or Maris Piper whole, rice or mash them while hot so the steam escapes, cool slightly, then work in a beaten egg and the smallest amount of flour that gives you a workable dough. Roll into ropes, cut into pieces, and boil for ninety seconds until they float. The single rule is to handle the dough as little as possible, since kneading develops gluten and turns light dumplings into rubber bullets.
3Ricotta gnudi or ricotta dumplings
Taste and texture differWhat changes
- Best for
- butter and sage sauce, tomato sauce, brothy dishes, when you have no potatoes
Faster than potato gnocchi and even more tender, since there is no boiling or ricing to do: mix drained ricotta with egg, parmesan, a little flour, salt and nutmeg, roll into balls and poach for two or three minutes. They are softer and creamier than potato gnocchi, more like a cloud than a dumpling, and they taste distinctly of cheese, which is lovely with butter and sage and less appropriate in a tomato and sausage skillet. They are also more fragile, so poach them in barely simmering water and lift them out with a slotted spoon. Drain the ricotta well or the dough will need too much flour and go heavy.
4Spaetzle or small egg dumplings
Different tasteWhat changes
- Best for
- brothy soups, butter-fried dishes, creamy sauces, dishes with sausage or braised meat
The closest cousin in texture, since spaetzle are also small soft flour dumplings that are boiled and then very often fried in butter, which is exactly the best treatment for gnocchi too. They differ in being egg-rich rather than potato-based, so they taste faintly of egg pasta and have a springier, more resilient chew than gnocchi's yielding softness. They also hold their shape better in soup and do not thicken the broth. Fresh or homemade spaetzle cook in two to three minutes; the dried packets take closer to ten.
5Sturdy short pasta: shells, orecchiette or cavatappi
Taste and texture differWhat changes
- Best for
- gnocchi soup, tomato and sausage skillets, baked dishes, creamy sauces, budget cooking
The pragmatic answer, and fine as long as you know what changes. Any of these gives you the filling starchy bulk gnocchi provided and holds sauce well, and orecchiette in particular are close in size and shape. What you lose is the softness: pasta has a firm springy bite where gnocchi is pillowy and yielding, so the dish feels less comforting and less rich. You also lose the thickening, so a soup that leaned on gnocchi for body will taste watery. Cook the pasta separately and add it at the end if the soup is going to be reheated, since pasta left in broth swells and turns soft.
6Parboiled potato chunks, roasted
Taste and texture differWhat changes
- Best for
- sheet-pan gnocchi, crispy pan-fried gnocchi dishes, roasted vegetable traybakes, gnocchi with pesto
The right answer for the whole family of sheet-pan and crisped-gnocchi recipes, because in those dishes what you actually want is a crunchy exterior and a soft starchy interior, and potato does that better than anything. Parboil for six or seven minutes, drain, shake the pan to scuff the surfaces, then toss with oil and roast hot. The difference is that there is no dumpling chew and no flour, so the pieces are creamier inside and more distinctly potato-flavoured, and the dish reads as roast potatoes with vegetables rather than as gnocchi. It takes considerably longer, around forty minutes against twenty.
What is Gnocchi?
Gnocchi is Gnocchi are small soft Italian dumplings, most often gnocchi di patate made from mashed potato bound with a little flour and sometimes egg, sold vacuum-packed on the shelf, fresh in the chiller or frozen.
Cooking tips
- Know which kind of gnocchi your recipe assumes, because they behave differently. Vacuum-packed shelf-stable gnocchi is dense and slightly chewy and is the best of the three for pan-frying. Fresh chilled gnocchi is softer and lighter and cooks in about ninety seconds. Frozen gnocchi goes straight into boiling water from the freezer without thawing, and thawing it first is the fastest route to a sticky mess. A recipe that promises crisp edges was almost certainly written for the vacuum-packed kind.
- For crisp gnocchi, do not boil it first. The single best trick with shelf-stable gnocchi is to tip it straight from the packet into a hot pan with a good film of oil or butter and leave it alone for three or four minutes a side until it blisters and browns, then finish with sauce. Boiling first makes the surface wet and it will steam rather than crisp. If you are substituting potato chunks, the same logic applies: dry surfaces brown, wet ones do not.
- Add gnocchi and any substitute to soup at the very end. Gnocchi cooks in two minutes and then keeps drinking up broth, so a pot of soup that sits with gnocchi in it turns into a thick porridge of bloated dumplings. Cook it in the soup for the last two or three minutes and serve immediately, or cook it separately and add it to each bowl. This is even more important with pasta, which swells hugely if it is left in liquid overnight.
- Handle homemade dumplings as little as you possibly can. Whether you are making potato gnocchi or ricotta gnudi, every extra minute of mixing and kneading develops gluten and adds flour, and the result is heavy and rubbery rather than light. Use the minimum flour that lets you roll the dough, work quickly on a floured surface, and boil a single test dumpling before you shape the rest so you can adjust.
- Compensate for the missing starch when you substitute. Gnocchi quietly thickens the sauce or broth around it as its floury surface dissolves, which is a large part of why gnocchi soup tastes so rich. Nothing else on this list does that. If a soup or skillet tastes thin after you have swapped in tortellini or pasta, the fix is a splash of cream, a handful of grated parmesan, or a spoonful of the starchy pasta cooking water rather than more salt.
Frequently asked questions
What can I use instead of gnocchi in a soup?
Is gnocchi pasta or potato?
Can I make gnocchi at home quickly?
Can I just leave the gnocchi out?
Is cauliflower gnocchi a good substitute for regular gnocchi?
Related substitutes
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