Ingredient

Parmesan Recipes

37 recipes with parmesan for weeknights, meal prep, and quick ingredient searches. Choose by time, cuisine, and what is in your kitchen.

37 recipes

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Asparagus and Marinated Artichoke Galette

🇺🇸USAAdvanced

Vegetable and Mushroom Dishes

Asparagus and Marinated Artichoke Galette

Savory free-form tart with asparagus spears and oil-packed artichoke hearts on a lemony herbed cream cheese base. The dough takes five minutes and no food processor — just cold butter grated directly into flour. Once it comes out of the oven with the crust dark and blistered and the cheese puffed at the edges, it looks like something you'd pay $18 for at a spring brunch spot.

75 min385 kcal6 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌶️Spicy

★4.7

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Breakfast and Brunch

Vegetable Frittata

Eight eggs whisked with cream and Parmesan, poured over sautéed courgette, red pepper, onion, and cherry tomatoes, cooked on the stovetop for a few minutes and finished in the oven until just set. The Italian frittata is the blueprint for every crustless egg bake that followed it — simpler than a quiche (no pastry, no water bath), more structured than a scramble, and easier to serve because it holds its shape and slices cleanly. It is the correct answer to the question of what to do with vegetables that are a day away from being past their best.

30 min280 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌾Gluten-free⚡Quick

★4.5

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Penne alla Vodka

Penne in a creamy tomato sauce with pancetta, vodka, and a hit of chilli. The sauce is the color of a sunset — somewhere between deep red and pale pink — and the texture is what happens when heavy cream meets a reduced tomato base: thick, glossy, and rich enough that the pasta takes on its own weight. Penne alla vodka became a cult dish in Italy in the 1980s and hit American restaurant menus shortly after. Its origins are genuinely disputed between Rome, Bologna, and New York. What nobody disputes is that it works: the vodka doesn't add alcohol flavor (it mostly cooks off) but it unlocks aroma compounds in the tomato that neither water nor oil can dissolve, making the sauce smell and taste more intensely of tomato than a standard tomato cream sauce.

30 min620 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick🌶️Spicy

★4.9

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Creamy Tuscan Chicken Pasta

Pan-seared chicken in a rich garlic cream sauce with sun-dried tomatoes, baby spinach, and Parmesan — all done in one skillet in 30 minutes. This dish is inspired by the flavors of Tuscany and loosely connected to Florentine sauce (cream, white wine, spinach), with sun-dried tomatoes added for the characteristic sweet-concentrated punch. It is not a traditional Italian dish but an Italian-American one — popularised in American restaurants and home kitchens. What makes it work is the layering: the chicken fond in the pan, the oil from the sun-dried tomatoes for the sauce base, the pasta water to bind everything. Done right, it is genuinely restaurant-quality.

30 min650 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick🌶️Spicy

★4.8

🇮🇹ItalyAdvanced

Soups

Lasagna Soup

All the flavors of a layered lasagna — rich meat ragù, herb-tomato broth, and three cheeses — cooked together in a single pot with lasagna noodles broken into pieces and simmered directly in the sauce. The noodles release starch into the broth as they cook, naturally thickening it into something between a soup and a sauce. The finishing move: a generous cold dollop of ricotta-mozzarella-Parmesan blended together, plopped into the center of each hot bowl. It melts and streaks through the red broth as you eat. No layering, no béchamel, no baking dish.

45 min540 kcal6 serves

🌶️Spicy

★4.7

Butter Gnocchi (Gnocchi al Burro e Salvia)

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Butter Gnocchi (Gnocchi al Burro e Salvia)

Soft potato dumplings boiled until they float, then pan-fried in brown butter with crispy sage until golden at the edges. The sauce is four ingredients: butter, sage, starchy pasta water, and Parmesan. The pasta water is not optional — its starch emulsifies the brown butter into a glossy, light sauce that coats every piece rather than pooling at the bottom of the bowl. This is the classic northern Italian preparation, served in Veneto and Friuli with every autumn meal. Use store-bought gnocchi for a 20-minute weeknight dinner, or make your own for a project that rewards the effort.

50 min480 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian

★4.4

🇫🇷FranceMedium

Meat Dishes

Rack of Lamb with Herb Crust

Carré d'agneau — rack of lamb — is the apex cut of French fine dining: the loin section of a young lamb with eight rib bones, frenched (trimmed bare to the bone) and roasted until the eye of meat is a uniform rose-pink medium-rare throughout. The herb crust — breadcrumbs, rosemary, thyme, garlic, parsley, and Parmesan bound with olive oil — is pressed onto the meat after an initial sear, then baked until crackling golden while the lamb underneath stays tender and juicy. The frenched bones fan out on the plate creating one of the most photogenic presentations in classical cuisine. Served resting or crossed (guards of honour), it signals celebration.

50 min560 kcal4 serves

💪High protein

★4.4

Asparagus Risotto with Lemon, Dill and Goat Cheese

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Asparagus Risotto with Lemon, Dill and Goat Cheese

Spring asparagus, fresh dill, a hit of lemon, and a pile of goat cheese stirred in at the end — this is risotto that actually tastes like the season. The technique is the same as any risotto: soften aromatics, toast the rice until it smells nutty, add wine, add warm stock ladle by ladle, stir often enough to keep it moving. Where this version diverges is the finish. Goat cheese instead of the usual Parmesan-only approach gives a tang that cuts through the starchiness; dill, stirred in off the heat, stays bright and grassy. The asparagus goes in two ways: the stalks get folded into the risotto in the last few minutes so they stay slightly firm, and the tips get reserved and sautéed separately so they have some color and texture for the top.

45 min480 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian

★4.8

🇺🇸USAMedium

Sauces and Dips

Spinach and Artichoke Dip

Hot, cheesy, and straightforward — this is the version that disappears first at any party. Cream cheese is the base, mozzarella provides the gooeyness, parmesan does the seasoning work, and sour cream keeps the whole thing from being too dense. The two non-negotiables: squeeze the frozen spinach until your hands ache, and let the cream cheese reach room temperature before you try to mix anything. Watery spinach ruins the texture. Cold cream cheese makes a lumpy mess. Everything else is flexible.

35 min290 kcal8 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌾Gluten-free🌶️Spicy

★4.5

Sauce Mornay (Classic French Béchamel Cheese Sauce)

🇫🇷FranceMedium

Sauces and Dips

Sauce Mornay (Classic French Béchamel Cheese Sauce)

Sauce Mornay is the classic French cheese sauce — a béchamel enriched with grated Gruyère and Parmigiano-Reggiano. The name traces to either a 19th-century Parisian restaurant (Le Grand Véfour) or the Marquis de Mornay, the exact attribution still debated. Mornay is the workhorse of French haute cuisine: the base for cauliflower au gratin, eggs Mornay, sole Mornay, endives au jambon, fish gratins, cheese soufflé, and the cheesier version of croque monsieur. Silky, glossy, pale-cream — never bright yellow (that means the cheese broke). Vegetarian, ready in 20 minutes. Yields about 500 ml of sauce, serves 6 with vegetables, fish, eggs, or pasta.

20 min180 kcal6 serves

🌿Vegetarian⚡Quick

★4.4

Italian Pesto al Limone (Ligurian Basil and Lemon Pesto)

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Sauces and Dips

Italian Pesto al Limone (Ligurian Basil and Lemon Pesto)

Pesto al limone is the Ligurian variation of classic Pesto alla Genovese with the addition of lemon zest and juice — turning the herb-paste into a fresh citrus-herb sauce. The combination of fresh Genovese basil, toasted pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano, garlic, lemon, and delicate Ligurian olive oil produces a bright emerald-green sauce with a floral-citrus lift that classical pesto lacks. Origins are the Liguria coastline (Cinque Terre, Portofino, Genoa region), home to Italy's finest basil DOP and world-class olive oils. Lemon is the key differentiator: the acid balances olive oil richness, brightens the basil, stabilizes the emerald colour longer than classical pesto, and turns the sauce into a versatile year-round condiment. A separate Procida-style lemon pesto exists from southern Italy (parsley + mint + walnuts, no basil), but this is the Ligurian school. Active 15 minutes including pine nut toasting. Yields about 250 ml, serves 6 as pasta sauce or condiment.

15 min210 kcal6 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌾Gluten-free⚡Quick

★4.8

Frittata di Spaghetti (Neapolitan Spaghetti Frittata with Leftover Pasta)

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Breakfast and Brunch

Frittata di Spaghetti (Neapolitan Spaghetti Frittata with Leftover Pasta)

Frittata di spaghetti (also called frittata di maccheroni in Naples) is the iconic Italian dish for transforming leftover pasta into a new meal — a thick, golden disc of cold cooked spaghetti bound with eggs, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and melted scamorza, pan-fried until crispy on the outside and tender inside. Born in 19th-century Naples as a quintessential example of cucina povera (peasant cuisine), where nothing is ever wasted. The Italian saying 'La pasta non si butta mai' (pasta is never thrown away) finds its purest expression here. Today, frittata di spaghetti is a mandatory dish for Pasquetta (Easter Monday), the Italian day of countryside picnics, and a staple of beach baskets along the Campania, Calabria, and Sicily coasts — sliced into squares, wrapped in parchment, eaten with hands. The Magnifico Food blog calls it 'omnipresent in the backpacks of Italians on out-of-town trips.' The dish has even spawned a Neapolitan street food relative: frittatina di pasta, small breaded and deep-fried rounds sold at every Naples friggitoria. Key technique: cold pasta is mandatory (hot pasta destroys the egg-cheese binding), the pan must be moderately heated with olive oil, and the frittata is flipped using a plate for the second side — or finished in the oven at 190°C for the timid. Yields 4 servings in 25 minutes. Best at room temperature, served as a main dish with green salad, as antipasto cut into squares, or as picnic food with a glass of Falanghina or Greco di Tufo.

25 min400 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian⚡Quick

★4.7

Ingredients

Goes well with

Other ingredients that appear most often alongside parmesan across the archive. Pick one to drill deeper.

garlic onion tomato mozzarella eggs lemon olive oil butter basil chicken breadcrumbs zucchini