Prosecco Pear Glazed Ham Hock with Sweet Potato Gnocchi
Melt-in-the-mouth, fall-off-the-bone, sous vide Ham Hock coated in a Prosecco Pear Glaze, served with Sweet Potato Gnocchi and Purple Sprouting Broccoli, garnished with Deep Fried Sage Leaves
This meal looks/sounds fancy, but it offers room to be as easy or as complex as you want it to be.
We are not professional chefs. We are both just massive foodies, and I enjoy experimenting and practicing new cooking techniques.
Anyone can make this dish easily, especially if you use the shortcuts I’ll give you. Alternatively, if you’re a purist, you can make it all from scratch.
For me this was more about learning how to make gnocchi, since the theme of this blog is about dumplings of the world, and I’d never attempted gnocchi before. So whilst my first attempt at this dish was spent mostly sweating and kneading dough, I cheated on the sous vide step and used 8-hour sous vide ham hocks from M&S. Having said that, if we didn’t already have these ham hocks in our fridge at the time, this dish may not have came to exist.
Constraints aid creativity!
Similar to my cherry glazed salmon dish, this dish came about by seeing what ingredients I had at my disposal at the time. The only set goal was to make a gnocchi dish. The ingredients I had at hand, included pears, sweet potatoes, pre-sous vide-cooked ham hocks, sage etc. I opted to try a sweet potato gnocchi, as it would work better with the ham hock, since pork generally loves sweetness. It also loves fruitiness, so I decided to use/incorporate the pears somehow. Since I had just done a cherry glaze a couple days prior that worked really well, I decided to play on that and up the ante by using something with a little more fizz. Enter prosecco.
[side bar] I tossed between using champagne or prosecco, but decided prosecco would work better with pork and pear due to it being sweeter and already having tasting notes of pear and/or green apple.
Prosecco Pear Glazed Ham Hock with Sweet Potato Gnocchi, Purple Broccoli & Deep Fried Sage Leaves
Serves 2
Easy-Medium
Ingredients
for the ham hocks
2 ham hocks
pinch of salt
pinch of white pepper
4 sage leaves (for garnish)
glug of rapeseed oil
for the glaze
1 large ripe pear
1 small/20cl bottle of Prosecco
2-3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (essence, vanilla beans, or vanilla bean paste)
3/4 teaspoon allspice
pinch of salt
pinch of white pepper
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
for the gnocchi
225g sweet potato
125g ricotta
50g Parmesan
3/4 teaspoon salt
80g flour (plus more for dusting)
for the sauce
4 tablespoons butter
40g double cream
1 clove garlic, minced
4 sage leaves, thinly sliced
325g purple sprouting broccoli, chopped
1/2 teaspoon Maldon sea salt
25g Parmesan cheese
Method
for the ham hocks
Soak hocks in cold water for 8 hours. Place the hocks in a vac-pac and cook in a water bath for 8 hours at 85°C (optionally, add 20g fresh thyme and 4 star anise).
Once cooked, remove from the bag and discard juices. Transfer to oven dish and pour over glaze and cook for final 10 mins, until glaze caramelises over hocks.
⏩ Shortcut: Use ham hocks that have already been sous vide slow-cooked for 8-hours. These are very popular now and available in most major supermarkets. Cook until last step, which is usually adding the store made glaze. Replace this final step with the Prosecco Pear Glaze.
Before serving, heat oil in a pan on high heat and add sage leaves until crisp, about 30 secs to 1 min.
for the glaze
Peel pear and thinly slice. Bring apple cider vinegar and prosecco to boil and add the pear. Add the allspice, vanilla and seasoning, and boil until about half the liquid has evaporated. Add the sugar and stir constantly. Take off heat once it starts to thicken and caramelise. Caramelisation should be finished off in over once poured over hocks to prevent burning.
for the gnocchi
Bake the tats (~50mins)
⏩ Shortcut: Microwave the sweet potato instead of baking. Prick the potato, wrap in damp paper towel and blast until soft (~5-7 mins, depending on size).
Then just scoop the flesh out the skin (discard skin), mix with both cheeses and flour, form into a loaf shape, slice like a loaf, roll slices into tubes, cut tubes evenly and form into cute little gnocchis. Boil them until they float, and Bob’s your uncle!
I wish it was that easy, haha! On my first go I struggled to get the consistency of the dough right. Largely due to not having any frame of reference—it would’ve helped to have tried a standard gnocchi recipe first. The issue was that I knew with traditional gnocchi you could roll them on a fork or a gnocchi press to give it detailed lines/impressions, which are used to trap sauce. However, these little fellas were too soft to hold any impressions. This made me doubt the recipe and want to add more flour.
Luckily, to cater for any error, I made extra dough and cooked them in batches of varying quantities of flour. In the end, the ones I thought were going to turn out best actually were too tough, since I’d added too much flour in order to try and get them to the consistency of being able to hold the impressions of the fork.
DOH! 🔑🥡 Do NOT over-knead the dough!
// Note: At this point gnocchi can be reserved for later in fridge or frozen.
for the sauce
Heat butter on med heat until foaming, then add sage and garlic. Once fragrant, add the gnocchi.
Fry until golden and add the broccoli for 2 mins. Add cream and parmesan. Lower heat so sauce thickens, then serve.
Next steps
I am going to keep experimenting until I find the best way to make gnocchi. Perhaps a more traditional approach of potatoes, flour, and egg (such as this) will provide better results than substituting egg for the cheeses.
Other ideas would be to try butternut squash or parsnips in place of sweet potato, or a combination.
Or a vegan version, such as this.
I will keep you all posted as my journey of potato dumplings unfolds, so make sure to subscribe and not miss out!