Dumpling delights

Clodagh McKenna’s Midweek Meals

This week our chef Clodagh McKenna rustles up light and fluffy sweet potato bites

EVEN when I lived in Turin in north Italy, I was never a fan of gnocchi, and being part of Slow Food (an organisation which promotes local food and traditional cooking), I got to taste the best. I always felt they were a bit too dense and lacking in flavour. But what I did love was the idea of using up leftover mashed potato.

In Ireland we grow some of the best potatoes in Europe, so I got to thinking we should be making the best potato dumplings because, being more floury, our potatoes create a much lighter and fluffy texture. And there began my obsession — hello light and fluffy potato dumpling, and so long to bland dense gnocchi.

The first time I served up potato dumplings I was hosting a pop-up at the Whitney Museum in New York. I was creating a contemporary Irish supper and so added nettles to the dumpling mix and served them with a Cashel Blue cheese sauce spiced with cayenne pepper. They were sensational.

There are so many ways to serve potato dumplings and delicious flavours you can add.

Another one of my favourites is to add crumbled black pudding to the potato and flour mix. For the recipe below you would add 200g black pudding and adjust the potato to 600g.

So just imagine your supper tonight being a plate of little cushions of sweet potato tossed in crispy sage and bubbling salty butter. It’s one of my favourite mid-week suppers. And they are so easy to make — it’s a dump, stir and roll situation.

I am using sweet potato in this recipe but you can use regular potatoes too — note that I don’t boil my dumplings, as I feel this takes away from the texture.