Recipe of the Month: Vegan Butternut Squash Pasta

It's the last day of September, so I have just enough time to get in my Recipe of the Month. This one has a bit of a story attached to it: I occasionally watch a webseries on YouTube called "Good Mythical Morning," which is a little bit like "Mythbusters" without all the elaborate construction work. In one of these videos, the two hosts conduct a blind taste test in which they try vegan and non-vegan versions of the same food and try to guess which was which. One of the foods they had the easiest time identifying correctly was macaroni and cheese (compared against two vegan versions, one made with cashews and one with coconut milk). This got me wondering: is it really that hard to make a vegan mac and cheese that's convincing? I mean, the mac and cheese I grew up with came in a box, and the "cheese" was an orange powder in a little envelope that was only distantly related to dairy. How tough would it be to simulate that?

I started searching around, and I came across an intriguing-looking recipe on my favorite vegan food blog, It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken, which used butternut squash in the sauce. It looked interesting and not too complicated, but it called for one ingredient we didn't have: white miso paste. It didn't seem worth buying a whole container of that just to use one tablespoon in this recipe, and I assumed leaving it out would remove an essential element of the dish's "cheesiness." So, on the whole, it didn't seem worth the effort.

However, there was a note on the recipe saying it had been "adapted from my butternut squash pasta recipe." Clicking through to that one, I found that it did not require white miso paste or anything else we didn't have on hand. There was only one catch: the butternut squash we had was cooked and frozen, rather than whole. But since the squash eventually ends up as a puree anyway, Brian figured that wouldn't matter too much. He just sauteed the onion and garlic as the recipe required, added the cooked squash to the pan with the other ingredients, and let it all simmer together before pureeing it and mixing it with the pasta. And for the finishing touch, he fried some fresh sage leaves in veggie butter until they were crisp and sprinkled them on top.

The finished product looked and smelled good, but the taste was somewhat underwhelming. There was nothing objectionable about the flavor; there just wasn't much to it. Even the sage didn't contribute much. Frying the sage leaves made them smell very aromatic, but it seemed to rob them of most of their actual flavor. As an experiment, Brian picked a few more fresh sage leaves and sprinkled them into the dish raw, and he found they made a much bigger impact that way.

I wouldn't go so far as to say this dish was a disappointment. I certainly had no trouble eating it up or polishing off the leftovers the next day. But it wasn't good enough to earn a place in our regular collection of butternut squash recipes—particularly with a squash harvest as pitifully small as the one we expect to get this year. If we were simply rolling in butternut, the way we were the year we let the squash vine grow wild in our side yard, maybe it would be worth making this simply for the sake of variety. But with only a handful of squash to get us through the winter, I think we'll want to save them for our favorite dishes, like pizza, lasagna, and soufflé. If we really crave a butternut squash pasta, we'll pull out this old recipe for Brown Butter Butternut Squash Rigatoni and have a go at making that vegan. (This technique from A Virtual Vegan for convincing plant butter to brown might do the trick.)