Pastafest: Day Two
Butternut Squash Ravioli
with Sage Brown Butter Sauce
A couple of weeks ago a friend and I were joking about how the lone vegetarian entree on restaurant menus is always Butternut Squash Ravioli (it's true!). The thing is, I really do like squash raviolis and I've been wanting to try making my own for over a year now, so today I finally did. And it was awesome.
Details and pics after the jump.
The thing about ravioli is that it's incredibly time and labor intensive to produce. Like two and a half hours+ cook time, most of it active. This is a lot; especially when one could conceivably just throw some frozen ravioli in a pot and open a jar of spaghetti sauce. It is, however, definitely worth the effort. I wound up with 19 ravioli, froze 11 (enough for two more dinners), cooked 8, and ate 6 (leaving 2 leftover for a nice-sized lunch tomorrow). I also have some of the filling left over, which I could repurpose as a soup or somesuch (I probably won't, but I could if I were better at using leftovers). This is all to say that 2.5 hours for 3 dinners and 1-2 lunches isn't too bad in the long run. Did I mention that they tasted pretty amazing too? Because they totally did.
Here's how I made them:
First, I preheated my oven to 375-degrees and peeled and seeded my small-ish butternut squash. Then I chopped it into about 1"pieces, tossed the pieces with olive oil, salt and pepper to coat, and put in the oven to bake for 35 min.
While the squash was in the oven, I made the same Bittman pasta recipe from yesterday: 2 c. flour, some salt, 2 eggs, 3 egg yolks, about 1/4 c. of water as needed; processed in food processor until everything starts to stick together; dumped on lightly floured counter; shaped into a ball and allowed to rest for 30 min. or so.
I had a few minutes before the timer on the squash went off, so I cleaned up a little and washed the food processor bowl, since I needed it for the filling. This is also the point when the yummy smell of roasting squash begins to fill the kitchen, so it's best not to wander off and miss it.
After the squash was tender (checked with a skewer), I pulled it out of the oven and dumped it in the food processor.
I added 1/2 tsp. of nutmeg (though it could have used more), and a little extra salt, then pureed until smooth.
The recipe I was riffing on (also Bittman) called for eggs, but the squash mixture was still quite hot and I didn't want to mess with tempering the egg, so I transfered the mixture to a bowl and set it aside to cool, stirring in one egg just before filling. This might have been unnecessary, but I didn't want to chance scrambled egg in my squash filling. While the squash mixture was cooling, I started rolling out the pasta sheets.
This is also when I had the brilliant idea to put my vat of water on to boil, so it would be ready when the ravioli was ready. This theoretically would've worked had I been making fettuccine and if H2O did not tend to evaporate, but since ravioli takes longer to construct than noodles take to cut, I wound up with half the water I started with and had to heat up more in a tea kettle to add to the pot. This might have been the most challenging part of the whole thing (see, mom, I still can't boil water!).
At any rate, after rolling out and trimming the flat pasta sheets, I made the ravioli by placing about a heaping teaspoon of filling every couple inches. Like so:
Then I brushed water between and around the lumps of filling and placed another sheet of dough on top, pressing around the filling to seal (the water turns the dough into glue).
Then I cut out each ravioli . . .
. . . and used a fork to press/seal the edges.
Pretty!
Boiling water at the ready, I started the sage brown butter sauce. I melted about 3 tbl. of butter in a large skillet and added a handful of sage leaves. While the leaves were sizzling at med. heat, I added the ravioli to the vat of water. They floated to the top almost immediately (one of the joys of fresh pasta is its crazy fast cook time)--I boiled them for maybe 2 min. At this point, the butter had started to brown, so I added the ravioli and a little of the pasta water to the skillet, tossed to coat, cooked for just a few seconds more, then plated. I topped with shredded parmesan cheese.
Voilà!
This tasted very, very good and the presentation was lovely with the wilted sage leaves. If I were to make this again I would probably just sauté the ravioli in the pan with the butter sauce and skip the boiling all together. I would also roll the pasta sheets out thinner. I rolled them to the second thinnest setting on my machine, because that's what I used yesterday with the fettuccine, but with the ravioli this made the edges (where the two sheets are sitting on top of each other) too thick and a tiny bit gummy. Overall, however, an excellent and filling Groundhog's Day dinner!
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