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Gnocchiflette: Easy Tartiflette with Gnocchi

gnocchiflette in a bowl.
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Think of the best parts of a tartiflette (the cheese, the lardons, the cream) then combine it with gnocchi. This recipe is for Gnocchiflette, where gnocchi replace the traditional sliced potatoes to make a simple cheesy tartiflette-inspired gratin.

Ingredients

Scale
  • 500g gnocchi
  • 200g bacon lardons roughly chopped
  • 1 red onion, sliced
  • 2 garlic cloves, sliced
  • 60ml white wine
  • 200ml double cream
  • 150g creme fraiche
  • 400g Comté cheese, grated
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • Chives, to decorate, optional

To serve

  • Crisp green salad (e.g. some butter lettuce, cucumber and red onion thinly sliced and a punchy mustard vinaigrette)

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 180c.
  2. In a large, ovenproof pan, add the olive oil and the lardons. Cook over medium heat until crisping and turning golden. If you don’t have an ovenproof pan, just use any frying pan and you’ll need to transfer into a baking dish before placing in the oven. You don’t want the bacon fully crisp at this point. Then add the onion and garlic, season with salt, and cook for 5-10 minutes until softening and coated well in bacon fat.
  3. To the onion and bacon pan, add the wine. It should bubble aggressively at first, stir it and scrape up all the crispy bacon and onion bits from the bottom of the pan. Then add the cream and creme fraiche and stir together.
  4. Then, parboil the gnocchi for 2 minutes in salted boiling water. They shouldn't be cooked all the way through here as it's a parboil. Remove from the water once 2 minutes has passed.
  5. Then tip in the parboiled gnocchi to the sauce and stir. Add a large handful of comté and stir through, along with a heavy crack of black pepper. Cover with the remaining comté in the ovenproof pan or tip into a baking dish and then cover with the remaining comté. Bake for 20 minutes until bubbling and golden on top. I like to serve with a few fresh chives on top and of course, a crisp green salad. 

Notes

Comté: you could use another melty cheese but with a strong flavour so don’t go with mozzarella, as an example, as it’ll be too mellow and creamy without any real flavour. You could use taleggio, gruyere, even cheddar. Or use reblochon, which is used traditionally in tartiflette.

Gnocchi: this recipe is usually made with potatoes, so you can also do that.I like to slice the potatoes into flat, bitesize pieces and parboil them for 8-10 minutes until just tender. Then add them into the dish as you would with gnocchi. You could use a pasta shape too. Cook it a few minutes shy of the package instructions (as it will continue to cook within the sauce) and then add in as you would gnocchi.

Lardons: you can omit lardons if you want to make these vegetarian. I think they add a really key flavour to this dish but with a strong cheese, the gnocchiflette will still be delicious even without bacon lardons.

A note on seasoning: The cheese and the bacon in this dish are naturally salty so be mindful of that. Black pepper is great here to cut through richness. Or a grating of fresh nutmeg would be delicious too.

Serving suggestion: serving with a crisp green salad is almost non-negotiable here for me. The salad crunch with a tart, acidic vinaigrette is just perfect alongside the rich and creamy Gnocchiflette. Make sure you serve the dish pretty immediately (5 minutes resting is fine) as you don’t want the cheese to cool down and ruin the texture. 

Make ahead: you can make the full dish right up to adding comté to the top and baking it. Cover and place in the fridge for up to 1 day. When ready, add the grated comté on top, then bake for 30-35 minutes at 180c before serving. Make sure it’s bubbling and piping hot all the way through.

Wine options/hack: You can omit the wine. Where you would add wine in the recipe, add just a splash of water to help bring up the bits on the bottom of the pan and then go in with the cream. If you come across this issue a lot, I’d recommend buying an inexpensive bottle of wine, using what you need for a recipe/having a glass, and then freeze the rest of the bottle into a freezer bag. Because it’s alcoholic, the wine never quite freezes solid and I break apart the block of wine in the freezer bag and add to dishes as I would if it were liquid. It’s a quick hack to reduce waste.

Find it online: https://desertislanddishes.co/gnocchiflette/