Air Fryer Crispy Gnocchi

Gnocchi have been around longer than dried spaghetti — Italians were rolling flour dumplings by hand centuries before the potato showed up from the Americas and northern kitchens folded it in, creating the pillowy potato gnocchi the world knows now. And in those same northern kitchens there's a long, unglamorous tradition of taking yesterday's boiled gnocchi and crisping them in a pan of butter until the outsides go golden and crackly. That leftover trick — not the delicate primo in sage butter — is the ancestor of this recipe.

Here's the part that feels like cheating: the vacuum-packed gnocchi from the pasta aisle, the ones purists sniff at, are the best possible candidate for the air fryer, and you don't boil them first. Straight from the packet, tossed in oil, they crisp into something genuinely great — a blistered, golden shell over a dense, chewy middle, closer to a roast potato crossed with a pretzel than to boiled pasta. Fresh or frozen gnocchi, for the record, don't work here; they're too wet and turn to glue. The shelf-stable kind's low moisture, the very thing that makes them rubbery when boiled, is exactly what makes them shatter when air-fried.

An honest word about what this is and isn't. Boiled-then-sauced gnocchi are soft, delicate, and about the sauce; these are crunchy, snackable, and about the shell. Nobody in Bologna would call this a traditional plate, and we're not claiming otherwise — it's a pantry dinner that happens to descend from a real Italian habit, and it gets a hot, satisfying meal on the table in twenty minutes with one bowl to wash. The parmesan tossed on at the end (with the wheat in the gnocchi, one of the two allergens in this dish) melts into the ridges and does the job a sauce would have done.

Test-kitchen notes: shake more than feels necessary — the dumplings that hide in the corners stay blond — and eat them within fifteen minutes, because the crust softens as they sit. Neither of those has ever actually been a problem in our house.