Pasta With Butternut Squash and Sage Brown Butter

In this fast and flavorful pasta dish, the hardest thing is dicing the squash.

Why It Works

  • Lemon juice adds flavor and halts the butter from over-browning when forming the sauce.
  • Concentrating the pasta starch by using a small amount of cooking water helps the sauce emulsify into a creamy coating.

I love pasta dishes that are served with sauces-that-aren't-really-sauces. Not that browned butter or aglio e olio aren't really sauces, but they aren't really sauces in the same sense that, say, tomato sauce is a sauce or ragù Bolognese is a sauce.*

Top down view of a bowl of pasta with butternut squash and sage brown butter.

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

*If you're about to pipe in and say "but ragù is ragù, not sauce!" you can. We all know how much you know about Italian cuisine already.

Nope. They're simple emulsions made with a flavorful fat and pasta cooking water that serve the function of a sauce, coating the pasta in a thin, creamy sheen of flavor. Throw in some sautéed squash and some sage and you've got yourself a great 30-minute meal. It's a classic fall and winter dish that can be made right on the stovetop.

Brown Butter Sauce: Simple Yet Flavorful

Butternut squash and browned butter pasta in a dish, covered with parmesan cheese.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

The beauty of a brown butter sauce is that you almost always have the ingredients on hand: butter and a splash of lemon juice. Some salt and pepper if you want to get technical, and okay, some frizzled minced sage if you want to get fancy. But that butter and lemon juice is really all you need. I'm gonna give you the instructions for how to make one. Ready? Heat the butter in a skillet until it's as dark as you want, toss in some sage (if you'd like), then add lemon juice.

Ta-da!

Okay, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but that's the basic premise.

Diced butternut squash and a chef's knife.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

The hardest part of the recipe is peeling and dicing that squash uniformly. Luckily, we've got you covered in that department. Just check out our video and guide here.

Once that's done, I start by sautéing the squash in olive oil. I know this is a brown butter dish, but if I were to add the butter right from the start, it runs the risk of burning before the squash is completely done. I prefer to save the butter for later, adding it after the squash has browned and tenderized, which takes only about five minutes.

When the butter goes in, I add some minced shallot with it, then cook it all together, stirring constantly and keeping a careful eye on how dark the butter is getting.

If you've ever browned butter in a skillet for a recipe before, you know that as the butter heats up and its milk proteins slowly undergo the Maillard browning reactions, it can take on a wide variety of colors and flavors, a spectrum that goes from mild, milky, and pale to medium brown and nutty, all the way to nearly-black and roasty (and we're not counting actual black here because, trust me, except in rare circumstances, you don't want to make a sauce out of burnt butter). So brown butter sauces can vary accordingly in flavor and intensity, as well. That splash of lemon juice at the end not only adds brightness and flavor, it also plays the equally important role of regulating the sauce's temperature: When it hits the pan, everything cools down, halting the butter-browning process in its tracks.

To make mine, I cook it to a nutty blond before adding in my sage for a brief sizzle, followed by my lemon juice.

Brown butter sauces can also vary in texture. In some cases, like in a classic sole meunière, the sauce is served broken, with pools of glistening butterfat speckled with bits of browned butter solids to drag your fish through. In other cases, it's more thoroughly emulsified. When I'm making it for a dish like this butternut squash pasta, I like it to be emulsified into a creamy sauce that really coats the pasta and squash.

Keep Your Pasta Water

How do you make that emulsion? The secret is pasta water, the starchy cooking liquid left in the pot after your pasta is done cooking. It's the extra starch that does it. A few splashes of pasta water added to the browned butter as you toss it with the pasta adds just enough starch to keep the emulsion stable. That is, if there's enough starch in your pasta water to begin with.

In restaurants using fresh, handmade pasta cooked in a large pasta-boiling machine, that's not an issue. As batch after batch of pasta cooks throughout the night, that pasta water gets very starchy, making sauces simple. At home, most cooks are only cooking a single batch of pasta, and they're doing it in a large pot. What's more, modern pasta—extruded through teflon dies and dried at high temperatures—simply doesn't release as much starch as homemade or traditional dried pasta. In order to get your starch concentrated enough to really make a difference, I always recommend cooking dried pasta in a minimal amount of water—just enough to cover it by a couple inches.

As we've shown in countless recipes and tests, using a large volume of water for pasta is simply not necessary and can actually be worse for modern pastas. I cook the pasta, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking, until it's a little shy of al dente (about two minutes less than the package directions indicate). I drain it, reserving a couple cups of the starchy pasta water, and then I toss it and a few splashes of water with the squash, bringing it all to a violent simmer over the highest possible heat to allow the mechanical action of bubbles to do the work of emulsifying the sauce for me.

A close-up of butternut squash pasta.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

See how nice and creamy it gets? I keep simmering it hard until the pasta is fully cooked, splashing in extra pasta water as necessary to keep things nice and loose. If your pasta ever starts to stick, your sauce starts to look greasy, or you hear the ssssszzzzzzz sound of something being fried rather than the pthshsppphhsshpphtthtphps sound of a simmer, it's time to add a splash more pasta water.

Once the pasta is tender, I pull the whole pan off heat and add grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, tossing it all together and seasoning with salt and pepper.

Butternut squash pasta in a skillet, covered with parmesan cheese.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

It might not be quite as easy as opening up a jar of tomato sauce, but it's delicious and seasonal and hey—if you've got yourself an extra-large squash, you'll even have enough leftover to make some easy stovetop squash soup the next day.

A dish of butternut squash pasta with browned butter sauce, covered in parmesan cheese.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

February 2017

Recipe Details

Pasta With Butternut Squash and Sage Brown Butter

Cook 25 mins
Active 30 mins
Total 25 mins
Serves 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil (30ml)

  • 1 pound butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into 1/2-inch cubes (450g; about 1/2 large squash)

  • Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter (30g)

  • 1 small shallot, finely minced (about 1 ounce; 30g)

  • 1 handful fresh sage leaves, finely minced (about 1/2 ounce; 15g)

  • 1 tablespoon juice from 1 lemon (15ml)

  • 1 pound small cupped, tubular, or ridged pasta such as orecchiette, penne, farfalle, or rotini (450g)

  • 1 ounce grated fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (30g)

Directions

  1. Heat olive oil in a large stainless steel or cast-iron skillet over high heat until very lightly smoking. Immediately add squash, season with salt and pepper, and cook, stirring and tossing occasionally, until well-browned and squash is tender, about 5 minutes. Add butter and shallots and continue cooking, stirring frequently, until butter is lightly browned and smells nutty, about 1 minute longer. Add sage and stir to combine (sage should crackle and let off a great aroma). Remove from heat and stir in lemon juice. Set aside.

    Butternut squash sautéing in a skillet.

    Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

  2. In a medium saucepan, combine pasta with enough room temperature or hot water to cover by about 2 inches. Season with salt. Set over high heat and bring to a boil while stirring frequently. Cook, stirring frequently, until pasta is just shy of al dente, about 2 minutes less than the package directions. Drain pasta, reserving a couple cups of the starchy cooking liquid.

  3. Add pasta to skillet with squash along with a splash of pasta water. Bring to a simmer over high heat and cook until the pasta is perfectly al dente, stirring and tossing constantly and adding a splash of water as needed to keep the sauce loose and shiny. Off heat, stir in Parmigiano-Reggiano. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper and texture with more pasta water as needed. Serve immediately, top with more cheese at the table.

    Overhead view of just finished butternut squash pasta.

    Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

Special Equipment

Large stainless steel skillet or cast-iron skillet, medium saucepan

Read More

Nutrition Facts (per serving)
251 Calories
11g Fat
33g Carbs
7g Protein
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Nutrition Facts
Servings: 4 to 6
Amount per serving
Calories 251
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 11g 14%
Saturated Fat 4g 20%
Cholesterol 15mg 5%
Sodium 410mg 18%
Total Carbohydrate 33g 12%
Dietary Fiber 4g 14%
Total Sugars 2g
Protein 7g
Vitamin C 13mg 63%
Calcium 87mg 7%
Iron 2mg 9%
Potassium 283mg 6%
*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.
(Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate.)