TikTok star Danny Loves Pasta makes a crispy gnocchi recipe that takes 30 minutes and only has 8 ingredients. Here's how to make it yourself.

• Danny Freeman is a fan-favorite cooking influencer known as Danny Loves Pasta.
• Freeman told Business Insider how to cook his crispy gnocchi with Italian sausage and fennel.

Danny Freeman's foray into internet virality is relatively new, but his love for pasta is lifelong.

"I'll admit that growing up, I was not a foodie," Freeman told Business Insider during a conversation in October. "I was definitely a picky eater as a kid and even into my adulthood, but pasta was always my favorite food."

Freeman, more commonly known as Danny Loves Pasta online, is a cooking influencer who gained fans for crafting intricate designs with pasta dough and sharing pasta recipes. The father-of-two, who amassed more than 1.7 million followers across social media since 2020, recently published his first cookbook — Danny Loves Pasta — in June.

Freeman told BI his recipe for crispy gnocchi featuring Italian sausage and fennel while discussing his cookbook, which he said was a "big project."

"My family ate a lot of pasta those months," he said. "A lot of this book is fresh pasta and how to make different shapes.

The cookbook also features a sweet potato gnocchi recipe that he shared with BI.

Freeman's gnocchi recipe has only eight ingredients, including red pepper flakes

Ingredients

• 1 pound ground sweet Italian sausage

• 1 fennel

• 1 16-ounce package of gnocchi

• 3-4 kale leaves, chopped

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper

• 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes.

You'll also need a saucepan and a baking sheet. Freeman's recipe makes 2 to 4 servings with a 10-minute prep time and a 20-minute cook time.

Instructions

1. Place Italian sausage in a large saucepan and break up with a spoon. Cook over medium heat until no pink remains.

2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

3. Remove the stalks from the fennel and thinly slice the bulb.

4. Add gnocchi, fennel, sausage and kale on a baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes and then mix together. Spread the ingredients out on the baking sheet so they form a single layer.

5. Bake for 15-20 minutes until gnocchi is cooked through.

Freeman's cookbook is available on Amazon.