Meghan Winkler
Raphael Vaccaro’s mother moved from Italy to the United States when she was 16, and he learned many traditional Italian cooking skills from her, including how to make pasta. He still does that at Vaccaro’s Trattoria, his family’s Italian restaurant featuring from-scratch food with twists.
“I learned her style, which is traditional to southern Italy,” says the now-owner whose father started the restaurant in 1957. “It’s the balance of what my mom and dad did at home, family Italian and then some cutting-edge creativity.”
One example of that is the fall butternut squash ravioli ($27), which Vaccaro makes from scratch when possible by creating two sheets of house-made dough in a process that takes days.
“That goes on a machine that marries them together and inserts filling as it goes through,” he says. “It’s a labor of love.”
That filling begins with roasting butternut squash, sourced locally when possible, that’s topped with salt, pepper and a little butter. He then peels off the skin and blends it into a puree. Ricotta, selected for its low sugar content and creamy texture, is mixed into that puree, but he ensures there is more of the sweeter squash so that flavor is dominant.
“I’m very true to flavors. Roasting low and slow brings out natural sugars,” he says.
Diners ordering the ravioli might encounter different variations. The butternut squash ravioli is often topped with a brown butter sauce with sage and a pinch of nutmeg and garnished with parsley for an herby, sweet dish. Toward the end of autumn when butternut squash gets harder to find, Vaccaro supplements it with roasted pumpkin and sometimes adds cinnamon. “It’s never the same,” he says, adding that he enjoys tweaking the sauce and pairing it with different proteins or veggies, such as seafood, crispy kale and blistered tomatoes, to explore fresh flavor profiles. Although he switches things up, the traditional methods he learned from his parents are still the foundation of his cooking.
“I’ve been doing this over 40 years, but I’m still having fun,” Vaccaro says. “I feel my parents even though they’re both gone. I feel them every day with what I’m doing.”
1000 Ghent Road, Akron, vactrat.com
