Here are ten pasta dishes that come out creamy without a drop of cream in them. We’ve put them in order of what’s making the sauce creamy, because that turns out to be the useful way to think about it.
Sweet potato, pumpkin, cauliflower, silken tofu, tahini, almond butter, cashews and avocado. That’s eight different answers to the same question, and once you’ve cooked with a few of them you’ll start improvising your own.
Three of these are ours. The rest come from cooks we read, and where a recipe still uses oil or a store-bought cream we’ve said so, along with what to do about it.
1. Sweet Potato Mac and Cheese
This is our own recipe, and the sauce is nothing more than boiled sweet potato blended smooth. That’s where the color comes from and where the body comes from, so there are no cashews, no vegan cheese and no oil in it anywhere.
It’s the one readers make for kids who inspect everything before they eat it.
2. Creamy Vegan Pumpkin Pasta
Same idea as the mac and cheese, only with pumpkin, and also one of ours. We roast the pumpkin first because it concentrates the flavor, whereas boiling it tends to water the sauce down.
The sage is what keeps it from tasting like dessert, so please don’t skip it.
3. Vegan Fettuccine Alfredo
A whole cauliflower, boiled soft and blended with garlic, broth and white miso. The miso matters here, because cauliflower on its own is mild and the miso gives the sauce a savory depth it wouldn’t have otherwise.
Thirty minutes and it serves four. The recipe also calls for a cup of store-bought vegan cream and some vegan parmesan, but we’ve found the cauliflower carries the sauce well enough that you can leave both out and nobody notices.
Get the recipe from Happy Kitchen.
4. Green Pea Pasta
Twelve ounces of silken tofu blended with a pound of frozen peas and a cup of basil. Silken tofu is the cheapest creamy base there is, and for some reason it’s the one everybody forgets about.
Twenty-five minutes, serves four. The original has three tablespoons of olive oil in it. Leave them out; with that much tofu in the sauce you won’t miss them.
Get the recipe from Plant-Based on a Budget.
5. Tahini Pasta with Kale
A third of a cup of tahini, loosened with pasta water into a garlicky sauce, with four cups of kale wilted through it. Serves three at 530 calories a portion.
Tahini needs no soaking and no blender, which is why this is the easiest creamy sauce on the list to pull off on a weeknight when you’re tired.
Get the recipe from Earthly Provisions.
6. Creamy Sun-Dried Tomato Pasta
Almond butter and almond milk blended with sun-dried tomatoes and roasted garlic. We’ll admit almond butter sounds like an odd thing to put in a pasta sauce, but it works, and it works well.
Fifteen minutes, serves five at 297 calories. There’s no oil anywhere in it, and a handful of arugula goes in right at the end.
Get the recipe from Vibrantly G-Free.
7. Vegan Lemon Pasta with Spinach
Soaked cashews blended into a lemon and garlic sauce, with a bag of frozen spinach stirred through at the end.
Forty minutes, serves four, and it comes in at only 199 calories a portion, which makes it the lightest dish on this list by a good margin. No oil in it either.
Get the recipe from Vee Eat Cook Bake.
8. Easy Avocado Pasta Salad
The third of our own recipes here, and the only cold one. The avocado gets blended into a dressing that clings to the pasta instead of sliding off it and pooling at the bottom of the bowl.
One warning: avocado is the one creamy base that won’t keep, so make this the day you plan to eat it.
9. Vegan Carbonara
Blended tofu makes the sauce and marinated tofu makes the bacon, so one block does both jobs. Liquid smoke and smoked paprika are what make it taste like the real thing.
Forty minutes, serves four, 489 calories a portion.
Get the recipe from Vegan Huggs.
10. Vegan Pasta Primavera
We’ve ended with the one dish here that has no creamy sauce at all. Zucchini, yellow squash, asparagus, cherry tomatoes and peas, barely cooked so they keep some bite, tossed with penne.
Thirty minutes and it makes six portions at 365 calories each. On the night when a heavy sauce is the last thing you feel like, this is what we’d make.
Get the recipe from The Urben Life.
Which creamy base to reach for
If it’s a weeknight and you want dinner fast, go for tahini or almond butter. Neither needs soaking or a blender, and you can whisk either one into a sauce in the time the pasta takes to cook.
Sweet potato, pumpkin and cauliflower give you a lot of sauce for very few calories, and that’s the main reason we use them more than anything else. Cashews make the richest sauce of all, but they’re also the slowest, since they need soaking first.
Whichever base you pick, keep a cup of the pasta water back before you drain, and add it a splash at a time until the sauce coats the pasta instead of sitting on top of it.
And, always, seek health consciously.
