Pumpkin Ravioli with Brown Butter and Sage Sauce
Pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins! Last week it was an influx of apples, this week it's all about pumpkins. Unlike the CSA being the root of my apple predicament, I'm the creator of on my own pumpkin destiny, and when I see them just about every step I take right now, I just seem to want them all the more. Along with a few big fellas for carving taking up the majority of my kitchen table, I'm quite fond of the smaller sugar pumpkins, who can still undergo the transformation into a jack-o-lantern, but do even better in edible incarnations, like this pumpkin ravioli.
Pumpkin as a food stuff beyond pie is not something I grew up with, and only learned it recently after going through a pumpkin awakening. It started with carving one for work a few years ago, where the smell of cutting the top off, then scooping out its slimy guts and seed brought back sensations of from my youth that ignited a desire for these fall squash that I previously had never known. Since then I've never passed up a chance to do a little pumpkin carving, but that wasn't enough for me, so I turned to experimenting with them as an item to be cooked.
Most of my food experimentation begins with the grill (naturally), so my first inclination for pumpkin was to grill it, but how? Seeing as their quite tough and fibrous in their raw state, I thought the best approach would be to get them softened up nicely before working with them. This involved cooking them over indirect heat until the innards softened to a point that they could just be scooped out easily with a spoon—this took about an hour.
Meatwaver Marissa has been all about pumpkin ravioli in the past, and while I actually never had it before, her enthusiasm led me to the decision to turn my grilled pumpkin into these. The only problem standing in my way—I had never made pasta before. I was dead set on making my own pasta though because a wedding gift of a Kitchen Aid pasta roller had remained untouched for way too long.
I started off using the well method I had seem done so effortlessly on cooking show after cooking show, but this ended up being somewhat of disaster, with eggs and flour ending up just about everywhere except where I wanted them to be. I've since switched to doing the initial mixing in a bowl and haven't looked back.
After finally getting the dough together in one place, I was ill prepared for the job of kneading. This firm ball took a hell of a lot of effort to knead, requiring a full ten minutes to get the cohesive and smooth look I was going for. I could totally get some arms of steel if I could only commit to making a pasta dough a day.
With the dough and my arms ready for a rest, I was able to turn my attention to the filling. I wanted to create a complex, yet cohesive mixture to fill the raviolis and started it with sauteing shallots in some butter. Then I added in the scooped out pumpkin flesh, a nice helping of ricotta along with a little cayenne and nutmeg. I let this cook together until warmed through, then seasoned with salt and pepper to make a filling that was a sweet, earthy, creamy, and just a little bit spicy, and tasted just excellent together as a whole.
Rolling the pasta didn't come without its own challenges, but luckily I was quick to overcome them. After a few crumbly passes through the roller, I got the hang of folding and re-rolling to develop the gluten needed for the pasta to survive its arduous journey to becoming thin sheets.
With some nicely rolled pasta, I was in the home stretch in what was becoming a marathon of a weeknight meal. I placed a rounded tablespoon on each sheet of pasta, surrounded the filling with an egg wash, then set another sheet on top and formed the ravioli. As the production went on, I realized the easier method was line the filling up on side of a sheet of pasta, then fold over the other side, which was not only faster and easier, but produced far less excess pasta requiring re-rolling.
Now we've entered the home stretch—just a few minutes in boiling water, then a toss in my favorite brown butter and sage sauce, and it was eating time. What started as a mere desire to cook a pumpkin had now consumed all of my attention late into the evening, but the pay off was well worth it. The pasta had a freshness you just can't buy, and the filling was a unique and tasty combination that I had never quite experienced anywhere before. I've become a much more proficient pasta maker since starting out making these, but I owe a lot of my first experience to the pumpkin and my grill, both of which combined together in an initial pursuit that ended with learning something completely new and exciting. For this, I think we must all hail the pumpkin king!
