Ingredient

Pasta Recipes

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

29 recipes

Creamy Garlic Shrimp Pasta with large shrimp, linguine or spaghetti and garlic — USA recipe

🇺🇸USAMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Creamy Garlic Shrimp Pasta

Shrimp seared fast in butter, then a garlic cream sauce built in the same pan — white wine, heavy cream, parmesan, lemon. The pasta finishes in the sauce with a splash of its starchy cooking water. Twenty-five minutes. The only thing that matters is not overcooking the shrimp, which takes about 90 seconds per side and no more.

25 min520 kcal4 serves

💪High protein⚡Quick🌶️Spicy

One-Pot Lemon Asparagus Pasta with Shrimp with large shrimp, asparagus and linguine — Mediterranean recipe

🌊MediterraneanAdvanced

Fish and Seafood Dishes

One-Pot Lemon Asparagus Pasta with Shrimp

Pasta cooked directly in broth with lemon, garlic and white wine, so the starch that normally washes down the drain becomes the sauce. Asparagus and shrimp go in at the very end — two minutes, no more — so they stay bright and barely cooked. The whole thing comes together in one pan in half an hour. Works just as well with salmon or scallops if shrimp isn't your thing.

30 min520 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick🌶️Spicy💪High protein

Cacio e Pepe with spaghetti, Pecorino Romano and black peppercorns — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Cacio e Pepe

Three ingredients: pasta, Pecorino Romano, black pepper. No butter. No cream. No olive oil. The sauce is a natural emulsion of finely grated cheese and starchy pasta water — the starch prevents the cheese proteins from clumping and turning the whole thing into a grainy mess. Cacio e Pepe originated with the shepherds of Lazio, who carried dried pasta, hard cheese, and pepper because they lasted for weeks without refrigeration. It became a Roman trattoria staple, and now it is one of the most searched pasta recipes in the world. Its difficulty is entirely about temperature control and starch: get those two right and it takes fifteen minutes.

20 min520 kcal2 serves

🌿Vegetarian⚡Quick

Penne alla Vodka with penne, pancetta and vodka — Italy recipe

🇮🇹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

Pasta alla Puttanesca with spaghetti, anchovy fillets and olives — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Pasta alla Puttanesca

A bold, briny Neapolitan pasta sauce built entirely from pantry staples: anchovies, olives, capers, garlic, and canned tomatoes. The name translates roughly as 'in the manner of a prostitute' — the exact origin is disputed but the dish is genuinely Neapolitan, from the Spanish Quarter, and dates to at least the mid-20th century. What makes it work is the combination of four distinct salty elements — the anchovy dissolves into the oil, the capers add a floral brine, the olives add a fruity richness, the tomato provides acidity — and none of them taste quite right alone, but together they produce something complex and deeply savory in under twenty minutes. Do not worry about the anchovies: they disappear completely into the oil and leave no fishy taste. Only their umami remains.

25 min490 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick🌶️Spicy

Pasta all'Amatriciana with bucatini or spaghetti, guanciale and tomatoes — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Pasta all'Amatriciana

Pasta all'Amatriciana is one of the four classic Roman pastas, and the only one with a tomato sauce. Bucatini or spaghetti with guanciale, San Marzano tomatoes, a touch of chilli, and Pecorino Romano. The dish comes from Amatrice, a mountain town on the Monti della Laga (part of Abruzzo until 1927, now Lazio). Transhumant shepherds carried it through the Roman countryside, and in the 19th century emigrants from Amatrice who ran inns and food shops in Rome made it a Roman staple. The white version without tomatoes, Pasta alla Gricia, is the older dish. The key is in the guanciale: cured pork cheek with a higher fat content than pancetta, it renders into the pan and flavors the tomato sauce with a deep, porky richness that no substitute fully replicates. The rules here are strict — no garlic, no onion, no herbs — because the dish doesn't need them.

35 min700 kcal4 serves

🌶️Spicy

Baked Feta Pasta with pasta, cherry or grape tomatoes and feta cheese — Finland recipe

🇫🇮FinlandMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Baked Feta Pasta

A whole block of feta baked in the center of a dish of cherry tomatoes and olive oil until golden and soft, then smashed together with roasted garlic and fresh basil into a creamy, tangy sauce that gets tossed with pasta. This dish went viral in Finland in 2019 under the name uunifetapasta (oven-baked feta pasta), created by food blogger Jenni Häyrinen. It hit TikTok in 2021, and shops in several countries reported selling out of feta. The reason it works is simple: baking concentrates the tomatoes into something sweeter and more intense than fresh, and the feta bakes from a crumbly block into a soft, creamy, salt-forward mass that forms a sauce without any effort. The whole dish requires almost no technique — just one baking dish, one pot for pasta, and about 40 minutes of oven time.

45 min610 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌶️Spicy

Creamy Tuscan Chicken Pasta with chicken, penne and double cream — Italy recipe

🇮🇹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

Fettuccine Alfredo with fettuccine, butter and Parmigiano Reggiano — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyEasy

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Fettuccine Alfredo

Three ingredients: fettuccine, butter, Parmigiano Reggiano. No cream. The sauce is a pure emulsion of fat and starch — butter melted over hot pasta, Parmesan folded in with small amounts of hot pasta water until the whole thing turns silky and glossy. Fettuccine Alfredo was created in Rome in 1908 by restaurateur Alfredo di Lelio, who made it for his wife after childbirth. The dish is known in Italy as fettuccine al burro. American versions typically add cream, garlic, and flour — convenient but a different dish. The Roman original is lighter, cleaner, and more intensely cheesy. The technique is almost identical to Cacio e Pepe: the challenge is emulsification, not complexity.

20 min570 kcal2 serves

🌿Vegetarian⚡Quick

Lentil Bolognese with red lentils, crushed tomatoes and tomato paste — Italy recipe

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Lentil Bolognese

Red lentils simmered with soffritto, tomato paste, crushed tomatoes, and red wine into a thick, deeply savory pasta sauce. No meat, no substitutes — just lentils doing what they do best when you give them enough time and heat. The sauce works because red lentils dissolve into the tomato base, thickening it while adding body and protein. Walnuts, added near the end, give the sauce a slight richness and something to chew on. The whole thing takes about 40 minutes and tastes better the next day.

45 min480 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan

Cashew Cream Pasta with cashews, nutritional yeast and pasta — USA recipe

🇺🇸USAMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Cashew Cream Pasta

Raw cashews soaked and blended with garlic, lemon, and nutritional yeast into a thick, silky cream that coats pasta like a dairy-free alfredo. This is the recipe that converts people to nutritional yeast. The sauce itself takes about 5 minutes once the cashews are soaked, and it genuinely tastes like something made with cream and Parmesan — without either. Spinach and cherry tomatoes go in at the end for color and texture. The pasta water is the secret to making the sauce flow: add it a splash at a time until the sauce coats the pasta without pooling.

30 min670 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan⚡Quick

Pastitsio with pasta, ground beef and tomato — Greece recipe

🇬🇷GreeceAdvanced

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Pastitsio

Three layers baked in a deep dish: tubular pasta bound with egg whites, a cinnamon-and-clove spiced beef sauce cooked until very dry, and a thick Greek béchamel enriched with egg yolks that sets firm during baking. Pastitsio is sometimes called Greek lasagna but the comparison only goes so far — the warm spices in the meat sauce give it a depth that Italian ragù does not have, and the Greek béchamel is deliberately thicker and richer than anything on a lasagna. The dish requires time but all three components can be made separately and assembled the same day or the next, and the baked dish rests for 30 minutes before it is cut.

120 min630 kcal8 serves

Ingredients

Goes well with

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

spaghetti ground beef tomato parmesan mozzarella ricotta zucchini garlic basil carrot eggs chicken