How to Make Sausage and Peppers Even Better? Add Gnocchi.

Adding crispy sheet-pan gnocchi makes for an easy, texturally delightful one-pan meal in this recipe from Melissa Clark.

Maybe it’s because I grew up on small, chewy matzo balls rather than big, fluffy ones. Or perhaps it’s my adult penchant for mochi, boba and spaetzle. But given a choice, I’ll take a dense, elastic texture over an airy, cloudlike one almost every time.

So, it’s not surprising that I have an outsize love for shelf-stable supermarket gnocchi.

Canonically, properly made gnocchi are fluffy and light, holding their shape just long enough to dissolve into a savory billow as they hit your tongue.

Shelf-stable gnocchi, on the other hand, are compact and firm, more like what the Italian word “gnoccho” originally meant, as Marcella Hazan will tell you.

In what has become a bible of Italian cuisine, “The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” she describes a gnoccho as “a little lump, such as the one that might be raised by sharply knocking your head against a hard object.” Yet gastronomically speaking, she declares, “gnocchi should be anything but lumpish.”

This may be true when it comes to making gnocchi from scratch. But toss those shelf-stable lumps in oil, then roast or pan-fry them until their edges turn brown and crisp and their insides molten and chewy, and heretical though it may be, that’s my idea of perfect gnocchi.