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Crock Pot Gnocchi Soup

Sausage, spinach and a cream broth built over four hours. The gnocchi go in for the last thirty minutes.

Prep
15 min
Cook
4 hr 30 min
Makes
Serves 6
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A pan of gnocchi in a creamy broth scattered with chives
Photo: moerschy / Pixabay

Gnocchi are potato dumplings held together by very little flour, and they are designed to cook in two minutes. Four hours in a slow cooker dissolves them completely — you end up with a thick potato broth and no dumplings, which is a real result people report and then assume they did something wrong.

They did not. The gnocchi simply go in at the end, for the last thirty minutes on high, which is long enough for them to heat through and swell slightly without disintegrating.

It is tortellini soup with dumplings instead of pasta.

Everything else follows the usual slow-cooker rules. Brown the sausage first in a pan, because a slow cooker cannot; deglaze and tip the browned bits in, because that is where the flavor is; and add the cream off the heat at the end, because held at temperature for hours it separates.

Shelf-stable vacuum-packed gnocchi hold up better than fresh chilled ones, which are softer and break down faster. Frozen are the sturdiest of all and need no extra time.

A bowl of uncooked gnocchi surrounded by potatoes
Photo: congerdesign / Pixabay

Italian sausage soup with gnocchi: the card

Sausage, spinach and a cream broth built over four hours. The gnocchi go in for the last thirty minutes.

What goes in the pot

  • 1 lb (500 g) Italian sausages, casings removed
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 3 carrots, diced
  • 3 celery sticks, diced
  • 4 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1.2 liters (5 cups) chicken stock
  • 14 oz (400 g) tin chopped tomatoes
  • 1 tsp dried oregano
  • ½ tsp chilli flakes
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 18 oz (500 g) shelf-stable gnocchi
  • ¾ cup (180 ml) heavy cream
  • 5 oz (150 g) baby spinach
  • ¾ cup (60 g) grated parmesan

Four hours, then the gnocchi

  1. 1 Brown the sausage meat hard in a frying pan, breaking it up, until there are dark patches. Move it to the slow cooker with all the fat.
  2. 2 Soften the onion, carrot and celery in the same pan for 6 minutes, add the garlic for 30 seconds, then scrape everything in.
  3. 3 Add the stock, tomatoes, oregano, chilli and bay. Cook on low 4 hours.
  4. 4 Stir in the gnocchi, turn to high, and cook 25–30 minutes until they float and are tender.
  5. 5 Turn the cooker off. Stir in the cream, spinach and parmesan and leave 5 minutes with the lid on.
  6. 6 Fish out the bay leaves, season, and serve.

Timing the dumplings

  • Do not put the gnocchi in early. Four hours turns them into the broth.
  • For leftovers, cook the gnocchi separately and add per bowl — they keep swelling overnight otherwise.