Transport your family to Hawaii with this Hawaiian-restaurant style meal! Tropical macadamia nuts and goat cheese are unique ingredients as reminiscent of Hawaii as their fresh fish! Enjoy this Hawaiian gnocchi pasta-it’s restaurant level fancy and yet simplified for easy home cooking! 

THE INGREDIENTS: 

Gnocchi: Homemade or store bought gnocchi works amazingly well in this recipe! This Hawaiian Gnocchi is an easy way to use up leftover potatoes, but buying store bought gnocchi makes this meal go so quickly that you could pull it off on a weeknight. We recommend using 4 servings of gnocchi in this recipe. One important note is that this is the fresh gnocchi recipe that we use. We have found that, although it says it makes 2 servings, it definitely serves 4.

We have only used russet potatoes to make our gnocchi for this recipe, so we cannot comment on how using another type of gnocchi would work. If we were to guess, though, it would work just fine. Recipes are meant to be adjusted for you and your family’s tastes! The chew and flavor of gnocchi is what really takes this dish to the next level, so we don’t recommend replacing the gnocchi with another pasta. If you must, however, we recommend pasta with a larger size. Good examples are pappardelle, tagliatelle, or ravioli (filled with what you like).  

Cherry Tomatoes: Step aside canned tomato sauce, cherry tomatoes are in town! Cherry tomatoes make the perfect sauce in this recipe, giving a tomato sauce that coats your gnocchi without drowning it. Although we recommend using 12 ounces of cherry tomatoes in this recipe, we have had success with as little as 10 ounces. Don’t worry if you are two ounces off! Also, feel free to increase the amount of cherry tomatoes if that’s what you like.

A good strategy for when you want to use more cherry tomatoes is to use 12 ounces to break down into the sauce, and then add more sliced cherry tomatoes near the end. The extra cherry tomatoes soften but don’t break down. That way, you have a cherry tomatoes sauce AND cherry tomatoes to bite into throughout your meal.

Don’t have cherry tomatoes on hand? It’s okay to let that canned tomato sauce back in town. Other good substitutions include canned whole tomatoes (San Marzano!), canned crushed tomatoes, canned diced tomatoes…you get it. We would use about 14.5 ounces (1 can) of whatever canned tomato product you have on hand. If you don’t have 14.5 ounce cans, use your best judgement for how much you want to add! The recipe still turns out great, regardless of being a little less saucy or a little more saucy. 

Onion: Onions and garlic pair incredibly well together and add more flavor to this Hawaiian Gnocchi recipe. We often have yellow onions on hand, so we use those. However, the yellow onion can easily be replaced with a white onion or almost any other type of onion. Just avoid the red onions! If you use shallots in this recipe, you will have to use at least 2. Shallots are smaller in size and have a more mild flavor. Otherwise, reach for roughly 1 tablespoon of onion powder or 2 tablespoons of dried minced onion.  

Garlic: Garlic is one of the key seasonings in this recipe. The number of cloves can be easily adjusted depending on if your cloves are larger or smaller than normal, or if you just really prefer more or less garlic. When we say 4 garlic cloves, we mean 4 medium-to-large cloves, not small ones! If you don’t feel like mincing garlic cloves, reach for 1 tsp of garlic powder. 

Salt: What a necessary ingredient! Salt may not seem very special, but it’s key to having a flavorful meal. In this recipe, we go slightly light on the salt for our pasta sauce due to the increased presence of salt throughout our gnocchi pasta and easy macadamia nut pesto. All together, it balances out! Feel free to adjust the amount of salt in this recipe to your preference. 

Black Pepper: Everyone likes a little bit different amount of black pepper, so feel free to adjust this to your preference. Using freshly cracked black pepper is not key in this recipe, but always adds a sharper bite and deeper flavor. 

Butter: Butter helps us to cook down our onion and garlic in this recipe. In addition to that, what doesn’t taste better with a little butter? Good replacements include neutral oils or plant-based butter. Replace them 1:1 and you’ll do just fine! 

Basil Paste: Sometimes fresh basil isn’t at the store, sometimes you have extra basil paste to use up, and sometimes you don’t feel like messing with fresh basil. Whatever the reason, basil paste is the key to our mega-easy macadamia nut pesto. No washing, no cutting, no mincing, no grinding into a paste ourselves, how awesome! Basil paste is also helpful in that you don’t have to worry about your basil spoiling in the fridge before you get to this meal in your week’s cooking rotation. If you do want to use fresh basil, however, we recommend using ¼ cup of minced basil (not 1/4 cup of basil before it is minced!).

Macadamia Nuts: Traditional pesto uses pine nuts, but we decided to do something a little different! Macadamia nuts are big in Hawaii and taste delicious both ground into our pesto and topped on our Hawaiian Gnocchi. We like to toast the macadamia nuts to really elevate their flavor, and we recommend that you do the same.

For the macadamia nut topping, if you want smaller pieces of macadamias, you can roughly chop them after toasting until they are your desired size. For the pesto, we recommend keeping the amount of macadamias right where they are at.

If you don’t have macadamia nuts on hand, good replacement nuts include pine nuts (for the pesto), almonds, Brazil nuts, or cashews. Besides adding flavor to our pesto, macadamia nuts are the key source of a crunchy texture on our dish. The nuts pair well with the chewy gnocchi and the soft goat cheese. If you don’t want toasted nuts on your pasta, feel free to replace it with toasted breadcrumbs or even leave them out all together (but you’d be missing out!). 

Garlic Powder: Why is garlic powder in our pesto besides fresh garlic? Easiness! Our goal was to make our pesto recipe as easy as possible. Shaking a spice container is definitely easier than even just peeling a fresh garlic clove. However, feel free to replace the garlic powder in this recipe with 1 clove of garlic, if that is what you have or want to use. Raw garlic is what is used in pesto traditionally so don’t feel the need to cook the garlic in any way beforehand. 

Goat Cheese: We have acidic cherry tomatoes, fresh pesto, and crunchy macadamia nuts. So, what else do we need? A little richness! The goat cheese helps to balance and tie this Hawaiian Gnocchi all together, so we don’t recommend skipping it. Feel free to adjust the amount as desired. Feel free to replace the goat cheese with any soft cheese that you have on hand. We like to use goat cheese due to its presence in Hawaii, really making this meal feel as if you are on one of the islands at a nice lunch spot.  

KEY INFORMATION: 

What Tools Do I Need to Make Pesto? Pesto can easily be made using a mortar and pestle or an electric food processor. If a blender is all you have on hand, that can work too! Just keep in mind, though, that blenders can be a little tricky to get everything fully blended. If you use a blender, you might have to make a large batch of pesto so that there is enough stuff inside the blender. Another solution would be to add a little lemon juice or olive oil, as blenders work better with liquid mixtures, and then add in extra macadamia nuts to make up for any runny consistency. 

What Goes with Gnocchi? Although this Hawaiian Gnocchi is already a full meal in our opinion and does not need to be served with anything else, we always have a few ideas in mind. Charcuterie boards (use any leftover goat cheese!), homemade bread (especially garlic bread!), and side salads are a few good ideas. Make a little bruschetta or extra pesto to serve with any crackers or bread you have on hand. For a sweet bite afterwards, consider making Banana Bread with Macadamia Nuts or eating a little Haupia (Hawaiian Coconut Pudding). 

How do I Make Gnocchi? We like to use this recipe. One important note is that the recipe says it serves 2, but we find it to serve 4. Another thing to know is that you can use a variety of tools to roll your gnocchi, but if you can’t figure it out, that’s ok! Unrolled gnocchi still tastes just as good. The back of a fork or a gnocchi paddle are two common tools-and we hope you have at least one of those in your kitchen! 

Two Cherry Tomato Tricks You Need to Know: If you aren’t using a serrated knife to cut your cherry tomatoes, you might notice it gets a little annoying! The juice splats everywhere and you’re nervous you aren’t evenly cutting the cherry tomatoes in half. However, if you don’t have a serrated knife (or don’t want to use it), do not fear! Before you cut your cherry tomato in half, use the sharp point of your knife to make a slit in the cherry tomato. Then, make sure your knife goes into this slit as you cut the cherry tomato in half. Ta-da! You don’t lose all the juice and it doesn’t take long to cut them, either.

For our next trick, it has to do with cooking cherry tomatoes. Our Hawaiian Gnocchi recipe says to cook the cherry tomatoes down into a sauce, which we totally are all for! However, what if you want bites of cherry tomato in your pasta? How do you achieve both? The answer is simple: follow our recipe for the cherry tomato sauce, and then add sliced cherry tomatoes during the last couple minutes of cooking. That way, the cherry tomatoes soften without losing their shape. If we have more than 12 ounces of cherry tomatoes on hand, you can guess that’s what we are doing. 

Why are Macadamia Nuts and Goat Cheese Hawaiian? Pineapple, Ahi tuna, coconut…these are the first three Hawaiian ingredients that come to our mind. However, Hawaii is more than its fishing industry and its fruit! According to Honolulu Magazine, 1920’s Hawaii had limited cow’s milk, leading to the importation of cream-of-the-crop goats and the beginning of a large goat dairy industry that is still present in Hawaii today. 

To be honest, macadamia nuts are actually Australian! However, a Hawaiian sugar cane farmer named William Herbert Purvis saw the trees in Australia and ended up bringing some over to Hawaii to add to his plantation. Commercially, 1925 was the year the macadamia took off in Hawaii, and there are still plenty of macadamia nut farms in Hawaii today.