Pasta con zucca e funghi (Pasta with Winter Squash and Mushrooms)

An easy and versatile cold weather dish, pasta con zucca e funghi or Pasta with Winter Squash and Mushrooms, is the kind of pasta that you can prepare in 30 minutes or less. You just put the pot on the boil and start preparing the dressing for the pasta, which Italians would call a “condimento“— mushrooms and squash sautéed in olive oil and butter with shallots and fresh herbs. Toss it all together and you’re ready to eat.

It’s a match made in heaven. The woodsiness of the mushrooms and the sweetness of the squash play off each other delightfully.

An incredibly versatile dish, you can dress pasta con zucca e funghi up or dress down to suit the occasion, depending on your choice of ingredients (see Notes). And if you like, a bit of cured pork, in the form of prosciutto, Speck or sausage, adds a bit of heft and depth of flavor, while finishing with grated parmigiano-reggiano lends creaminess and extra umami. The recipe can can be varied for vegans, lacto-ovo vegetarians and carnivores.

Pasta con zucca e funghi makes a quick and easy weekend supper or, in its fancier incarnations, a lovely first course for a special occasion dinner.

Ingredients

Serves 4-5

350g (12 oz) pasta (see Notes)
250 g (8 oz) mushrooms, sliced or cut into pieces (see Notes)
250 g (8 oz) winter squash, peeled, de-seeded and cut into small dice (see Notes)
2 shallots, finely minced
A sprig or two of fresh sage or rosemary
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Optional:

50g (2 oz) Speck or prosciutto, cut into fine strips or dice
50g (2 oz) freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano
A sprig or two of fresh parsley, finely minced

Directions

Put a large pot of well-salted water on to boil for the pasta.

In a large sauté pan, brasier or wok, sauté the shallot gently in olive oil. Take care they don’t brown.

When the shallots have softened, raise the heat a bit and add the mushrooms and toss. Sauté over moderate heat until the mushrooms have softened and lost their excess liquid. (They will shrink quite a bit.) Add the diced squash, seasoning generously with salt and pepper. Continue sautéing for a minute or two.

Now drizzle in a few spoonfuls of water and cover. Simmer for 5 minutes or so, until the squash is tender, stirring from time to time and adding a few spoonfuls of water as needed to prevent things from drying out. When the squash is tender, remove the herbs.

While the mushrooms and squash are simmering, start cooking your pasta.

When the pasta is just ever so slightly underdone, add it to the pan with the mushrooms and winter squash, along with a ladleful of the pasta water and, if using, the freshly minced parsley and/or the Speck or prosciutto. Toss over low heat, perhaps a minute or two, until the condimento coats the pasta nicely.

If using the cheese, add it at the very end, along perhaps a half ladleful of the pasta water. Toss again until the cheese has melted into a creamy coating for the pasta.

Serve immediately sprinkled if you like with a pinch of minced parsley for color.

Notes

Like a lot of simple recipes with only a few ingredients, the results you’re going to get will depend on the care you take in choosing your ingredients. Here are a few tips for choosing the three main ingredients:

Choice of pasta

You can make pasta con zucca e funghi with a wide variety of pastas. For everyday family style meals, short dry pastas—casarecce (as pictured) or penne, pennette, rigatoni, gemelli, conchiglie (shells) to name just a few—work quite well. Fresh egg ribbon pastas like tagliatelle or pappardelle are particularly lovely and add a touch of elegance for a special occasion. I’d avoid long, thin pastas like spaghetti or linguini, as they don’t pair terribly well with this rather chunky condimento.

Choice of mushrooms

Classically, you’d make pasta con zucca e funghi with fresh porcini mushrooms. If you can find (and afford) them, then they’s an ideal choice, especially for a fancy dinner. Unfortunately, they’re practically impossible to find where I live currently. Some recipes for this dish call for easier to find dried porcini, but I wouldn’t recommend them. Dried porcini have a very assertive taste which, in my opinion, would tend to overwhelm the delicate taste of the squash.

As an alternative, you can really go with any fresh mushroom that strikes your fancy. Or a mix. I’m rather fond of those ‘medleys’ of various types of pre-cut mushrooms. For today’s blog I used oyster mushrooms I found in a local Chinese supermarket, and they worked very well indeed. The only ones I wouldn’t recommend here are “white” mushrooms, which tend to lack flavor.

Choice of squash

As for the squash, some advice mostly for our American readers: As I’ve mentioned several times before, although Italian zucca looks very much like pumpkin, zucca has a far more intense taste and a denser, more velvety texture than any pumpkin I’ve been able to find here in the US. Pumpkins tend to be unpleasantly fibrous and can be practically flavorless. The usual substitute you’ll in find in many recipes, butternut squash, isn’t much better. It has a more pleasant texture but scarcely more flavor. When I first arrived from Italy back in the mid-2000s, I resorted to baby yams (in reality, baby sweet potatoes) which approach zucca in flavor and texture. I still use them, but the good news is that nowadays we can also choose from a variety of quite edible winter squashes. Personally, I’m particularly partial to Kabocha squash. I’ve also hear good things about buttercup squash. (In fact, Kabocha is a type of buttercup.)

Admittedly, prepping winter squash is a chore. You need give it a good wack with a heavy knife or cleaver to open it up. Then comes the somewhat tedious work of peeling the tough skin and scooping out the seeds, before you proceed to cut the flesh into small dice. These days you can buy packaged pre-prepped winter squash in many supermarkets. You’ll save yourself time and effort, but be aware that it’s probably going to be the dreaded butternut squash. And you’ll still need to cut the chunks into small dice.

Variations

There are lots of ways to mix things up here. If you’re a carnivore, as indicated you might like to add a bit of cured pork such as chopped prosciutto or Speck to the condimento. Do this right before you add the pasta, to avoid ruining the sweet flavor of the cured meat. Or you could add some crumbled sausage meat, in which case sauté it first, followed by the shallots and proceed per the recipe from there.

And also as indicated in the recipe, you can add cheese or not, again at the very end. Many recipes don’t call for cheese, but I rather like the extra umami and creaminess lends to the dish. You could even double down with a pat of butter as well, which not only enriches the condimento but lends it a lovely ‘soft’ flavor and texture.

If you like more assertive, earthy tastes, try a clove or two of garlic instead of the shallot. You can vary the herbs as well. I particularly like rosemary, but sage is a classic pairing with mushrooms and would be lovely here. Could you even try both. A bit of parsley at the end is totally optional but add a welcome bit of freshness and color.

Finally, if you want to get really fancy for a special occasion, this same condimento can be used to make a lovely “white” lasagna called lasagne con zucca e fungi. Follow the basic technique laid out in our recipe for asparagus lasagna, layering pasta sheets, béchamel and the sautéed winter squash and mushroom one after the other. If you like, you can sauté some of the squash separately and purée it with a bit of béchamel, just as you purée the asparagus in that recipe.