Butternut Squash & Peach Puff Pastry Recipe

You know what goes really well together?  A bite of very ripe peach, with that sharp flavor of raw red onion.  Not too much onion, just enough to really cut into that very sweet peach flavor and to help break up the more unctuous texture that very ripe fruit can sometimes have.  A few hours later, I hit the store on the way home and had acquired the necessary goods for my foray into baking.

I decided that, with fall in the air, this would be a great recipe to make in anticipation of the coming seasonal change.  What will you need for this recipe?

Ingredients:

    1 butternut squash, sliced in half length-wise

    1 very ripe peach, diced

    1/2 a large red onion, finely diced

    butter (a little bit goes a long way here)

    1 sheet of puff pastry dough, thawed

    fresh goat cheese

    1 egg white, beaten.

To start, slice the butternut squash in half lengthwise.  Start the oven at 350F, place the sliced squash on a baking sheet, sliced side down, and pour about 1-2 cups of water in the baking sheet.  Bake this in the oven for ~30 minutes, or until the insides are cooked well enough that you can easily spoon them out.  In the meantime, pit and dice your peach, add them to a small pot along with 3/4 cup of water and very slowly simmer them.  Try not to burn them and mix them fairly often until you have a nice simmer going, and the peaches are rendering their juices.  A tiny dash of salt will help here as well.

Next, once the butternut squash is cooked and cooled a bit so you can handle it, spoon out the insides into a blender/food processor/magic bullet (we had one handy), add a little bit of butter, maybe 1 tablespoon per half of squash, and puree it.  Just go to town and try to ensure a relatively smooth consistency, and that you’ve pulverized all the large chunks.  Once this is done, taste it, and if it needs a bit of salt, go ahead and add a bit of it.

Next, preheat your oven to whatever the temperature your puff pastry dough recommends, in my case, it was 430F.  On a cutting board, you may begin making your puff pastries, essentially as you would a ravioli.  Use the butternut squash as the main filling, but spoon over top of it the saucy and reduced peach mixture.  Crumble a little bit of goat cheese, then coat the edges with the beaten egg white, close it up, and place it on a baking tray.  I tried a few sizes and shapes for these pastries, and I think the ones that worked the best were long and thin, which allowed me to later on, slice them on a bias and serve.  It makes for a nice dinner presentation (although if you want these for appetizers, you can easily make smaller finger food sized ones).  Once they’re all prepared, begin baking!

In my case, after the puff pastry was golden brown (about 30 minutes) I added my diced red onion to the top of the pastry, which worked well for dinner.  But I might recommend for the future, to somehow combine make a binding agent to allow them to stick to the pastry a bit better maybe use some of that egg white or butter or something, in the final few minutes of baking.  However, how did this all come out?

It was, very delicious.  The lightly sweet and butteredness of the butternut squash really benefited from the peaches, and vice-versa.  However, both of them needed a more thicker textured and salty component, which is exactly where the goat cheese came in to play.  But, with all these rich flavors (puff pastry included!), it needed something with a bit to lighten it all: enter the red onion.  Honestly, this might be one of the best foods I’ve made in a long time, it’s not necessarily simple, but it was a bit thought out which led to a very tasty meal.  I served it alongside some pan-seared cat fish, which was not nearly as interesting (salt, pepper, olive oil) as this puff pasty!

With that said, this puff pastry dish went exceptionally well with a Pinot Gris from Panther Creek.  The wine brought out the touches of peach inside the pastry, and had an acidity that worked very well with the butter pastry and squash.  It might have clashed a bit with the red onions, as they both really had the same job in this meal, so if you’re looking to serve this as a wine pairing option, maybe leave the red onions to the side so people can alternate bites with sips.