Pumpkin Pasta Recipe: this pumpkin manicotti with sage browned butter sauce is comfort food at its best, a great fall and winter recipe.
This easy pumpkin pasta recipe is a favourite of ours. With a rich, creamy pumpkin filling inside tender manicotti, and the perfect browned butter and sage sauce this pasta dish is so delicious.
We recently had a Cinderella Dinner and A Movie Night. We're watching Disney Princess movies this summer and pairing them with a dinner inspired by the film -see the whole Cinderella party here. When we decided to do a Cinderella themed dinner, we knew that we had to include pumpkins, as a nod to the famous pumpkin turned into a carriage by the fairy god mother.
This pumpkin pasta dish is creamy and mild in flavour. I think most kids will love it too. The addition of the sage browned butter sauce is just what it needs. This dish is especially perfect in the fall. It is comfort food at its best.
Pasta
This pumpkin pasta recipe is an adaptation of a favourite of ours. It was originally a recipe for pumpkin ravioli with sage browned butter sauce. It's delicious, but making your own pasta from scratch and turning it into ravioli is very time consuming, labour intensive, and fiddly hard work. We loved the flavours, but wanted an easier method for putting this together. We thought about a few different options, like lasagna, or pasta sauce, but manicotti ticked all the boxes for us, since it allowed for the addition of the sage browned butter sauce, that really makes the dish. This was much easier to make than making your own ravioli from scratch, and had all the great flavours of the original dish.
We used manicotti for this recipe. You could also use cannelloni pasta. The difference between manicotti and cannelloni is that manicotti has ridges that give the pasta some bite, vs cannelloni which is smooth and more tender. If you can't find manicotti shells or cannelloni at the grocery stores, you could also use jumbo pasta shells, or use large sheets of fresh pasta to make your own by wrapping around the filling.
Pumpkin
The pumpkin filling in this pasta is so good. It has a richness and creaminess to it. It's a little bit sweet, but savory too. The pumpkin has a great texture, and the softness pairs perfectly with al dente pasta with a little bite to it. We used canned pumpkin puree for our filling. If you're using canned pumpkin be sure to get pure pumpkin instead of pumpkin pie filling. Pumpkin pie filling has sugar and pumpkin pie spice added to it, so it won't work in this recipe. You can use fresh pumpkin too, if you wish. Just roast your pumpkin and puree it to a smooth consistency in your food processor.
Burnt Butter and Sage Sauce
The burnt butter in this recipe adds a wonderful nutty flavor, and the fresh sage cooked in the butter is delicious.
You could use a white sauce instead for this recipe as another option. I would not use a red sauce. The pumpkin and red sauce won't be a great combination. The pumpkin is quite a mild flavor and pairs better with the burnt butter or Alfredo sauce.
If you have any leftover pumpkin pasta, you can store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
This manicotti recipe with pumpkin and the browned butter and sage sauce is so good. It's perfect for pumpkin season and you'll definitely want to add it to your fall repertoire. The pumpkin is smooth and creamy and little bit sweet and the butter and sage is so rich and flavorful. It's a taste of home, and real comfort food.
I like to serve this with a sweet Italian sausage, a green salad and some nice crusty bread for a lovely dinner. A grilled meaty sausage is a great accompaniment, or keep it a vegetarian meal and serve it on it's own. We didn't add cheese to our dish, but serving with some grated parmesan cheese would be delicious over the top.
Recipe
Pumpkin Cannelloni with Sage Browned Butter Sauce
Ingredients
- ⅓ cup butter
- ½ onion diced
- 1 tablespoon fresh sage chopped
- 1 teaspoon fresh thyme chopped
- 796 mL can pure pumpkin not pumpkin pie filling
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ¼ pepper
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 2 tablespoon brown sugar
- ¾ cup butter
- 24 sage fresh sage leaves
- 325 g manicotti, or cannoli or fresh lasagna sheets
Instructions
- To make the pumpkin filling for the pasta, begin by melting ½ cup butter in a large skillet, and saute diced onion, sage, and thyme over medium heat until the onion is softened and translucent.
- Add the pumpkin purée, salt, peper, cream, and brown sugar to the pan. Stir to combine and heat through. Remove from heat and set pasta filling aside.
- To make the burnt butter and sage sauce, melt ¾ cup of butter over medium-high heat in a medium sauce pan. Once the butter is melted and begins to foam add 24 whole sage leaves. Let the butter brown. Remove it from the heat when it begins to smell nutty, but isn't burnt black.
- To prepare the manicotti noodles, boil it in a large pot of salted water until it's tender, according to the recommended cooking time on the package instructions. Unlike some stuffed pasta, this dish doesn't really get more cooking in the oven -just heated through, so make boil your pasta until it's as tender as you like to eat it, and then drain pasta shells.
- Once pumpkin filling is slightly cooled, add to a piping bag and use it to fill the cooked pasta tubes.
- Layer filled pasta in a large baking dish, and pour the sage browned butter sauce over it the top of the manicotti, and between layers.
- Lastly heat the pasta dish in a preheated oven at 350 until the manicotti is heated through, around 15 minutes, and enjoy.
Nutrition
With our pumpkin manicotti with sage browned butter, life really is a party!
This recipe was part of our Cinderella themed Disney Princess Dinner and Movie Night -check out all the details about the whole party here. We had so much fun creating this Cinderella themed dinner menu.
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Dannyelle Nicolle-Ramjist says
Any pumpkin lover will adore this savoury pumpkin recipe.