Creamy vegan butternut squash pasta
Comforting, naturally creamy and nourishing. The perfect make-ahead sauce to liven up midweek pasta.
This sauce is deceptively creamy, comforting and a great way to incorporate butternut squash into a pasta dish. A great recipe to meal prep, this recipe intentionally uses half a squash, with the idea being you can use the other half for soup or curry and have a fridge full of made-ahead meals for the week.
I like to make this sauce at the weekend and keep it in a jar in the fridge. On those rushed mid-week days it’s as simple as boiling up some pasta and throwing in the sauce to give you a tasty, homemade meal packed with flavour.
Creamy vegan butternut squash pasta
ingredients:
- 1/2 medium sized butternut squash
- 1/2 onion
- 3 cloves garlic
- 1 tablespoon nutritional yeast
- 1/4 cup unsweetened plant milk
- 1 tsp vegetable stock paste
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- Pasta of your choice (I like linguine for this recipe)
- Parsley to garnish (optional)
instructions:
How to cook Creamy vegan butternut squash pasta
- Preheat oven to 200C (390F)
- Carefully slice the butternut squash in half. This recipe is designed to be useful for meal prep, so the other half can be used in soup or cubed and saved for a curry. Feel free to use the whole squash and you'll have plenty of sauce to store in the fridge or freeze for future use.
- Rub the cut side of the squash with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
- Place the squash cut side up on a baking tray and roast for 40-50 minutes depending on size.
- As the squash roasts, dice the onion and add to a pan with a small amount of olive oil.
- Sauté the onion until translucent and softened, then crush the garlic cloves and add to the pan until the release their scent and soften. Keep this garlic and onion mixture to the side until the squash comes out of the oven.
- When ready the squash should be lightly browned on the surface and a skewer should slide through without resistance.
- Remove the roasted squash from the baking tray and using a spoon, slide the flesh away from the skin, which should now be soft and easy to remove.
- Add the squash, onions, garlic, nutritional yeast, plant milk and stock paste to a blender and on high, blend until totally smooth.
- Add the blended mixture to the pan the onions and garlic cooked in, and keep warm on a very low heat while you take care of the pasta. Taste and season to taste at this point with salt and pepper.
- In a separate pan, bring salted water to the boil and add your pasta, cooking according to the directions on the packet.
- When your pasta is just al dente, use tongs or a slatted spoon to add the pasta to the sauce, allowing a small amount of pasta water to come with it - but not too much.
- Turn up the heat on the saucepan which now contains the pasta and sauce, as you toss the pasta to combine, the starch in the pasta water will thicken the sauce and help it stick to the pasta.
- Remove from the heat, serve in pasta bowls and garnish with chopped parsley, cracked black pepper and a little extra nutritional yeast.
NOTES:
My favourite concentrated stock paste to use is Vecon, but you can use a homemade stock concentrate or alternatively sub in bouillon or stock powder.
