In Walla Walla, Wash., Creek Town Cafe serves Potato and Mushroom Manicotti. TRY THESE R&I RECIPES: Asparagus-and-Ricotta Ravioli Beef Cheek Ravioli Chestnut and Sausage Ravioli with Brown Butter And Crispy Sage Sauce Maitake Mushroom Agnolotti Porcini Ravioli with Wild Mushroom Broth Idaho Potato Ravioli with Minted Pea Sauce Ravioli with Mixed Greens and Mushrooms >> Search for more

This spring, the restaurant broke with cold-weather richness by serving Ravioli con Carciofi e Gamberi, a light pasta filled with braised artichokes and sheep’s-milk ricotta served with an herby rock-shrimp-and-white-wine sauce. Come summer, the kitchen turns toward local produce, including borage (a leafy, weed-like herb), zucchini, squash blossoms and tomatoes, for inspiration. The slowly simmered tomato sauce that is used in the winter is swapped for a briefly cooked tomato sauce comprising fresh tomato and olive oil or butter.

Seasonal variations are factored into the restaurant’s workflow naturally. “We’re making ravioli three days a week,” says Chef de Cuisine Liza Hinman. “When we’re running one version, we’re making the next version.”

Change also can be good for sales. When stuffed-pasta dishes are recreated with fresh sauces and seasonal vegetables, they can be light, refreshing and appealing to diners, even at the peak of summer swelter.

To satisfy diners during steamy Washington, D.C., summers, Matt Hill modifies his menu.

The executive chef of Charlie Palmer Steak DC served sheep’s-milk ricotta agnolotti with shaved almonds and an almond froth last winter and spring. Yet he pulled the dish once summer arrived. “In August, I don’t want to eat a big warm bowl of cheese,” he reasons.

Instead, he reaches for olive oil rather than butter, uses pesto instead of cheese for pasta fillings, and dresses pasta with warm vinaigrettes instead of dairy-based sauces. His stuffed pasta also becomes more fluid: An open-faced shellfish ravioli with pasta draped loosely over a ragoût of lobster, scallop and shrimp is a thoughtful appetizer.

At Spezie, another D.C. restaurant, Chef Cesare Lanfranconi switches from Tortelli di Zucca, a fall and winter dish where pasta filled with winter squash is served with sage brown butter, to a scallop tortelli served in a chive cream sauce. Lanfranconi slices large, U-10 scallops in half or in thirds to form thin medallions and then sears them briefly. Each round tortello contains a scallop medallion and a dollop of roasted porcini, leek and thyme purée.

Another summer-ready stuffed pasta served at Spezie is mezzelune filled with puréed San Marzano tomatoes. A touch of gelatin added to the purée facilitates shaping and storing the pasta—the filling stays firm when it is cold—but once the mezzelune are cooked, the purée liquefies. “For a filling, it is very, very delicate,” Lanfranconi says.

Yet lightening up stuffed pasta is more involved than swapping out a rich filling for something more delicate. Often the density of the filling dictates the thickness of the pasta. When Hinman makes ravioli, she ensures that when the ravioli boil, the pasta and the filling finish cooking at the same time.

“You want the filling to be perfectly cooked through, but you don’t want the pasta to be overcooked,” she says. She makes pasta for meat-based ravioli thicker than pasta for the artichoke and ricotta ravioli.

Changing a stuffed pasta’s sauce and presentation can be just as important as shifting its filling to something lighter. At Murano Restaurant & Lounge in Los Angeles, Executive Chef Kristi Ritchey composes the pasta dishes so that the pasta is never weighed down in sauce.

Murano’s spring pea agnolotti are served lightly sauced with beurre monte (butter emulsified with water) to ensure that the pasta’s surface stays moist. The pasta accompanies sautéed pea tendrils, pancetta and whole peas, all topped with shavings of ricotta salata. Then, explains Ritchey, pea emulsion is drizzled around the perimeter of the dish. “It’s not touching the agnolotti,” she says. “It gives it a slightly more sophisticated appearance.”

Recipe: Maitake Mushroom Agnolotti

“To me, it’s about keeping it really simple, to let [the pasta] speak for itself,” Niederkorn says.

For Corporate Executive Chef Bill Laychur, lightening up filled pasta is as much about minding his food budget as it is about minding diners’ tastes. He acknowledges that his audience, hungry students at Pennsylvania State University in University City, Pa., loves cheese-rich baked manicotti, but rising cheese costs have made the vegetarian entrée a cost-ineffective option. So Laychur prefers to serve cheese-filled tortellini or ravioli in salads, which require far less cheese.

“What’s wrong with poaching a ravioli, chilling it down, and serving it with chilled vegetables?” he asks. What’s more, tortellini salad combinations are nearly endless. Laychur likes using artichoke hearts, tomatoes and basil for one variation. He keeps sauces simple—vinaigrettes, chilled basil pesto or tomato coulis. “What we’re doing on our menu, if it is a pasta dish, [is] we’re trying to put more vegetables with it,” Laychur says.

Serving sauce on the side makes pasta more accessible to timid diners, says Russell Bry, chief culinary officer of the 11-unit, San Francisco-based chain Go Roma. Bry says children often prefer dipping plain ravioli in a side of marinara sauce to eating ravioli coated in a sauce.

The practice extends to adults who order Go Roma’s “toasted” ravioli—ricotta-filled ravioli coated with lightly seasoned breadcrumbs and then fried and served with marinara sauce on the side. Guests coming in for a sandwich or pizza often add the $2.99 toasted ravioli to their order to share at the table.

Chef Kristi Ritchey fills cannelloni with duck confit at Murano Restaurant & Lounge in Los Angeles.

Yet when stuffed-pasta dishes become vegetarian entrées, they also need to be satisfying.

“We have a large vegetarian population, so we try to maintain a number of vegetarian dishes on the menu,” says Chef Michael Kline of Creek Town Cafe in Walla Walla, Wash.

For potato- and mushroom-filled manicotti, he chooses to mix cream cheese into the filling instead of lighter-textured fromage blanc or ricotta. The mixture of cooked potato, egg and cream cheese puffs up in the oven like a cheesecake batter as the manicotti bake, giving the manicotti a lighter texture while helping them retain rich flavor.

“I was actually looking for something a little bit richer,” he explains. “Everything else in the dish was going to be light,” Kline says.