Pasta Recipes

Pasta lands in this category when the pasta is the point, not when a handful of orzo is floating in a soup.

Start from the sauce you want. The creamy ones build on cashews and nutritional yeast instead of cream, and vegan mac and cheese, vegan fettuccine Alfredo and pasta with tofu sauce are all on the table in about thirty minutes. Vegan lentil bolognese takes longer and gives you something with more chew to it. Vegan pasta salad is served cold, which makes it the one to reach for when you are packing a picnic or a week of lunches.

The thread running through the creamy ones is pasta water. Starch from the pot is what makes a cashew sauce cling to the noodles instead of sliding off and pooling at the bottom of the bowl, so none of these recipes want you to drain the pasta and walk away. Vegan spaghetti carbonara goes a step further and builds its sauce off the heat, because cashew sauce over a live flame splits.

The badges on each card tell you which recipes are vegan, gluten-free or dairy-free, so you can sort by diet before you open anything. The cashew sauces are dairy-free by construction rather than by substitution, which is why they behave like sauces instead of like compromises. Gluten-free pasta works with any of these, though the window between firm and soft is narrower, so keep back more cooking water than the recipe asks for and loosen the sauce at the end.