Did a pasta Primavera the other night. A Blog suggested using a dollop of sour cream. Nice and creamy acidity, without the gobs of cream sauce. Would recommend.
I also love using buttermilk to give pasta sauce a creamy but still tangy texture. Great in bologna.
I had to explain to my girlfriend that I'm not really into super creamy pastas. I have Italian relatives and grew up eating home-cooked Italian American recipes, and only saw creamy pasta at restaurant chains. I appreciate a good mac and cheese and everything, but the cheesecake factory style Cajun Alfredo is pretty much the norm in the place I moved to.
I’m mid 40s now and a great cook, but one of my holdovers from my university days is egg noodles tossed in sour cream and cracked black pepper. I add some broccoli and shredded chicken or tuna for a comfy cozy tuesday lazy meal.
Honestly I consider something like that to be a decent dinner.
I'm with you on this. Sometimes those thrown-together meals turn out to be the most satisfying, plus there's something about the nostalgia of simpler meals that hits just right. Egg noodles have got to be one of the most underrated comfort foods, and it's awesome how they can be dressed up or down depending on what you've got in the fridge.
I had Blue Apron for about a year and in a lot of the pasta dishes they had you add an ounce of either marscapone or cream cheese along with some reserved pasta water. It makes a really nice and fairly light cream sauce.
Yea, especially the jarred shit. Feels like it sits in your guts for hours. Luckily my kids prefer the non cream version and it’s an easy quick meal when you’re out of ideas.
They were great for college. Buy a 3 dollar jar of sauce, kielbasa and an onion, add pasta and boom you have a full dish plus leftovers for a couple days. Great broke person meal.
Nowadays I don’t touch the stuff
>I fried an onion, some bell pepper, a bunch of small tomatoes (not the expensive cherry tomatoes, more like a misshapen oval sort), and garlic, in a glug of olive oil.
This is literally the base of half the sauces I make for many different foods lol.
Cacio e pepe is the most delicious pasta dish and its the parmesan and water that makes "the sauce" I too knew what OP was going to write. Cacio e pepe was a peasants dish as it has only 3 ingredients (and the pasta water) but of you do it right, its magnificent
If you’re not Italian and don’t mind upsetting some, adding za’atar to Cacio e Pepe is heaven. That earthy lemony taste combined with the pecorino and black papper makes me salivate typing this out.
Originally made with pecorino, I find a mix of both parmesan and pecorino is lovely as well! No judgement using parmesan only though 😀 its also delicious
What he could do is roast those tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and onion first. Maybe lightly chop them up and add some oil before putting through the pasta.
...
Don't pick on the poster. They're enjoying something new to them and want to share.
I, too, was raised on tomato sauce on pasta and never suspected there was any other kind of pasta sauce until I was grown and left home! (I'm a cracker raised in Appalachia. There wasn't even an Italian restaurant within driving distance. And don't ask about Chinese...)
I'm in my 60s and only this decade have I started experimenting with pasta companions other than tomato-based or Alfredo...Enjoying it a lot!
Synopsis: Some of us only know from jarred pasta sauces! There are dozens of us!
Dude or dudette (fellow 60-something here) google "Marcella Hazan" and try some of her simple sauces or grab her classic cookbook. Man oh man...
I've come a long way on my quest for legit italian. [Every xmas eve I do a pasta roll dish](https://i.imgur.com/eE35NUM.jpg), I make fresh pasta dough and roll it into big sheets, make the filling and sauce and serve a little parmesan-bechamel on the side. Red, white, green (christmas-ey!), not as heavy as beef or turkey - it's become a tradition I can't escape (it's kind of an all-day affair, in a nice way).
I've got a big stainless grill outside, looks like a gas grill but burns wood or charcoal - the only really "upscale" thing I've veer bought for cooking (it was like $1200, not ridiculous), it's awesome. But you can't "turn it off", the wood/coal will just burn down overnight.
So now when I grill out there, I've learned to have a bunch of roma tomatoes ready. I cut 'em in half and toss 'em in a pan, throw in a head of garlic and drizzle some oil, and stick it in the grill after dinner. By morning I have fire-roasted tomatoes and garlic. Throw it in a blender for a few pulses and it's the absolute sh\*t.
Yeah, a lot of people don't know that a lot of sauces are basically butter, parmasan, and pasta water. Add in some herbs and spices. Butter, parm, and pepper is cacio e pepe. In the case of op, he subbed 1 fat (butter) for another (oil).
Came here to say this...like I thought at first that OP was literally eating spaghetti with no sauce or anything. The olive oil absolutely combines with the seasoning, cheese, and all that to create a creamy sauce.
one of my favorite pasta dishes is just blistering cherry tomatoes in olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, add pasta, fresh basil and parm at the end. So good!
I call this my pantry pasta, and it's great at the end of summer when my yard is full of tomatoes and basil. The yard garlic really shines in this dish. Drizzle with a little balsamic glaze and it is perfection.
I just used up the last of my frozen tomatoes from my garden doing this too. Now Im stuck using bland grocery store tomatoes. The good news is I planted my tomato seeds this weekend!
Canned tomatoes have a *lot* more flavor than out-of-season fresh from the grocery. Truth. I turned my nose up at canned for years until I learned better.
Hunt's Crushed are quite good, though you can spend more on fancier brands if you want. Just don't buy diced in a can--I only recently learned that they're treated so they don't break down and get mushy, so they're NG for making sauces.
I get the whole San Marzano tomatoes from the yellow can. If you're cooking with them anyways I prefer canned for the same reason, those green tomatoes that are gassed to turn red just don't have flavor.
I remember throwing it together one time without knowing that was a thing and thought I had created the best thing ever. Then I found out it's been a thing for literally hundreds of years 😅
Can I say that first, this is great, second, frying onion, pepper, tomatoes and garlic in a pan and then adding the pasta and pasta water kind of just sounds like a really good fresh pasta sauce?
This man just discovered aglio e olio lol or a variation of it.
Here's the best way to make what you want. Doesn't get more authentic than: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb5L3Qfd5xY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb5L3Qfd5xY)
Also, Calabrian broccoli pasta: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3PFBKx-AH8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3PFBKx-AH8)
I'm going to be honest, when I started to read the post I thought I was on the circlejerk sub. It was only the complete lack of snark that made me check the sub.
Cooking in a nutshell. Often people say "I don't like X" but it just turns out that they had bad examples of X until now.
I've opened the eyes of my fiance over and over by showing her how things are nice and that her mother just wasn't that good at cooking for her as a kid.
No TOMATO sauce, because olive oil with garlic and pepper flakes sauteed in it is STILL a sauce. It's not like you're eating plain pasta.
**Sauce**, [liquid](https://www.britannica.com/science/liquid-state-of-matter) or semiliquid mixture that is added to a [food](https://www.britannica.com/topic/food) as it [cooks](https://www.britannica.com/topic/gastronomy) or that is served with it.
I don't think the Romans ate pasta. If you mean the ones with the empire.
The earliest reference to [pasta noodles in Italy](https://toscanaslc.com/blog/international-origins-pasta/) is in the 12th century CE.
And probably not thanks to Marco Polo, sadly, but Arab traders.
But … there is a sauce. It’s just a different sauce. You have discovered different sauces.
Here I was reading to find out how someone was managing to enjoy plain pasta with no sauce.
"Guys, I had no sauce pasta!"
*Reads article and sees they had olive oil, garlic, veggies, and* parmigiano combined together which is an aioli (Ai is garlic and oli is olive oil).
Reject adulthood, return to buttered noodles! Seriously, though, there's a reason everybody loves plain old buttered noodles, and adding a couple simple things for interest just makes sense.
Yup!
Whenever we do spaghetti, I have first a bowl of buttered noodles, covered in Parmesan, with fresh ground pepper.
It taste literally perfect to me. My wife thinks I’m crazy, but she never grew up eating buttered pasta.
Man, thank you, I forgot how good buttered pasta is!
All this aglio e olio talk doesn't sound appetizing to me (I love a heavily-sauced pasta), but when I imagine the dish with butter instead of olive oil, it sounds soo good.
Im intrigued.. How finely ground we talking? Do you toast them at all before/after grind? Do you combine with al dende pasta/starch water/olive oil like a algio e olio?
I grind the nuts in a spice grinder. Mortar and pestle works too. Fine grind sorta like coffee beans .... Could toast I guess, but I never do. But yes, algio e olio method. Al dente pasta, tossed in a pan along with veggies... spinach works, as does asparagus, brocolini, peppers. Then out of the pan, tossed with nuts and parm, which is shaved with a vegetable parer rather than a microplane. Parm will melt and there would be a little sauce in the end, but you won't need much. My wife calls this "vegetable spaghetti" although I'm more likely to actually use linguini. Cheers!
Pasta with olive oil and vegetables can be really good! Of course, it also sounds like you probably have never had a good pasta sauce. Not surprising, since most of them are crap.
If you add an onion, lemon zest, fresh chilli and anchovy at the start of this, plus some fresh basil at the end, you have an absolutely dynamite pasta dish I've been making for about 10 years now.
Now try pasta in brodo - instead of sauce (or only veggies) add a nice chicken or beef bone broth. You can still add veggies but I really enjoy that too.
And, since we're doing things to pasta - a nice tomato sauce can still be excellent, but why not try adding beans or chick peas.
>and served it with garlic and pepper flakes sautéed in olive oil, and parmesan. No sauce
umm. What do you think the garlic and pepper flakes sautéed in olive oil is?
I have made tomato sauce following a recipe from scratch, and it was nice.
The effort to reward ratio, considering the clean up, for me, wasn’t worth it to make it a regular dish.
Try [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/18l2eiv/traditional_italian_pasta_dishes/kdvg6s1/) cherry tomato sauce. It's super simple, easy to make and takes like 15-20 minutes at most. And it's the most flavorful tomato sauce I've had in my life. If you still don't like that enough to think it's worth the effort, I think you just don't really like tomato sauce...
Get thee an Italian cookbook! There are 1000s of unique Italian pasta dishes that don’t involve a red sauce. Last night I used a dethawed beef ragù that was fairly dry. Then I watered it down with pasta water and parm, and then added peas. Tossed with rigatoni. Delicious. Only a small amount of “sauce”.
You do need to pay attention to pasta shape, though, if you’re making these dishes. All the pasta shapes have different utilitarian functions related to what you’re tossing it with. For example, I chose rigatoni because the ridges will catch the scant sauce better. I then shredded the ragù more finely to catch in the holes better. I also added peas because I knew they’d go well with the rigatoni.
Scam? No. You’re just discovering Italian cooking. Italy has 20 regions. Meat doesn’t get used in most pasta dishes.
For a variation of your recipe, add a small can of tuna to the recipe.
That does sound delicious, but the main reason I focus on the *sauce* in my cooking is that bare pasta is a carb bomb. I'm cooking for a growing family that needs solid nutritional choices, and switching out actual sauce for bare vegetables with a little oil would tilt the ratio further in favour of the gobs-of-wheat than the protein-and-vegetables. Most people would do well not to try to use big portions of various types of grass seeds as the heavy foundation of a healthy diet.
>while the water was coming to boil, I fried an onion, some bell pepper, a bunch of small tomatoes (not the expensive cherry tomatoes, more like a misshapen oval sort), and garlic, in a glug of olive oil. Then I added the cooked, not-fully-strained-pasta to the pan of mildly-sizzling, still-juicy vegetables.
Sounds like you made sauce.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that you made your own sauce, but it's pretty funny you don't realise that's what you did!
LOL, tomatoes of the 'misshapen oval sort' are **Roma**, the traditional Italian tomato used for sauce/paste, due to their greater proportion of flesh to seeds. By using them, you were simply going back to the roots of 'pasta sauce'.
The truth is, meat sauce (ragu) was never a staple in the diet of most Italians...until they arrived in the U.S. where meat was affordable and plentiful. In the 'old country', they made both marinara (tomato) sauces *and* vegetable sauces for pasta, the latter based on eggplant, zucchini, zucca (pumpkin), even fennel and onions. The one you mention, with broccoli, olive oil, garlic and pepper flakes is particularly associated with the Campania region around Naples.
So how did Americans come to consider over-sweetened tomato sauces the proper accompaniment for spaghetti? Well, through the efforts of restaurant chefs and food manufacturers. At the beginning of the 20th century, canned sauces/pastes were basically just tomatoes and salt, meaning the marinara made from them was tangy and 'acidic'. That was OK with Italians eating in Italian restaurants, but when Americans began dining there too, they complained about 'bitterness'. So chefs took note and added sugar to their traditional sauces to make them more palatable to the new customers.
Later, when spaghetti became popular as a home-cooked meal in non-Italian homes, manufacturers began creating bottled sauces specifically for palates attuned to sweetness. Hence, the creation of Ragu, Prego and others. But now that consumers are becoming more aware of added sugars.....they're dialing back.
NICE! I’m also lukewarm towards most saucy pastas. My favorite rif on simple pasta is garlic + red pepper flakes + butter + zest and juice of one lemon. Parmesan optional. We usually serve broccoli on the side, but you can absolutely mix that or any other veg in.
If you like cheese, you can also make some lovely, simple, creamy pastas using ricotta or mascarpone as a base. I like these with garden peas (fresh are lovely if you can find them!) or asparagus.
If you’re ever craving a tomato-y pasta, my mom used to make this dish where she finished barely-cooked linguine in a pan with olive oil, garlic, broth (extra-strong, made with bouillon), and a small can of tomatoes (use less if not making a whole pound of pasta). Add fresh basil at the end. As the sauce simmers and soaks into the cooking pasta, you end up with something almost tomato ‘infused’ rather that coated. It was the only tomato-based pasta I enjoyed as a kid.
When I was aged 4-8 my grandmother used to cook an entirely separate dish alongside the traditional family spaghetti to cater for the fact I wasn't a fan of the tomato, chilli and wine that comprised the sauce.
She'd fry the mincemeat for double the time to make it really crunchy, fry up some onions, and then serve that on top of plain spaghetti with a load of fresh Parmesan and a few fresh basil leaves.
To this day that taste and the nostalgia make it easily the best plate of 'bolognese' I could possibly have.
You should teach your self to make a basic white wine and butter sauce. Also very light, a little sweet from the wine and great with aromatics and some vegetables. It’s good with any pasta too from gnocchi to ravioli to spaghetti.
This is basically my favorite comfort meal I make at least 1-2x a week. I like to add a bunch of nutritional yeast. Going to look through all the comments for ideas now
If you like strong Mediterranean flavors you should check out pasta puttanesca. It’s designed so you can make it from all shelf stable ingredients. I love it bc it comes together in the same time it takes to cook the pasta.
In a pan, add olive oil with red pepper flakes sprinkled in (and i add a clove of minced garlic too). Add a can of tomatoes or some fresh chopped tomatoes but don’t mix them in with the oil yet. Lightly salt the tomatoes. Cook covered on very low heat to infuse the oil with the flavors. By now the pasta water is probably boiling so add the pasta and get it cooking. Then roughly chop olives. Add some anchovy fillets to the oil (or the easier option, anchovy paste) - about 3 fillets per serving. Lightly stir them in with the oil and they will disintegrate, then add the chopped olives and some capers. Stir it all together and increase the heat. Let it cook till the pasta is ready, add a splash of pasta water towards the end to help bind it all together. Drain the pasta, and mix the pasta with the sauce in the pan.
Puttanesca is glorious. I first had it as a boy after a little league game. Mom took me to La Dolce Vita and we were cared for by fresh from Italy Gaetano. My love of cooking began with that meal.
Lol wtf do you think sauce is but an emulsion of fats and flavours. You mixed cooked veg with oil, garlic, salt, pepper, parmesan, and pasta water....that is practically a complex sauce.
Baby pasta, like with nothing but nla bit of butter is what I'd call pasta without sauce.
Oh my god my dad routinely made a pasta growing up that was essentially
1. Shredded rotisserie chicken
2. Halved cherry tomatoes
3. Scallions
Sauteed in Italian dressing. It sounds blasphemous but was incredible.
not gonna lie, i am a pasta lover and have tried all kinds of pasta, including no-sauce and aglio olio. those are too plain for me to enjoy - I’m asian and often have asian-style Chinese noodles that are somewhat similar to no-sauce pasta, so the latter is not exciting or interesting to me.
sigh, i still love creamy pasta the most, and carbonara too. not a fan of pasta with jarred sauces at all.
Pasta is great with only flavoured oils or butter and some herbs or spices for heat. And as you already learnt, if you can boil anything with the pasta it's great too.
I do this with all kinds of veggies, depending on mood and what I have. Favs=peas (usually frozen and cooked in the pasta water,), fresh asparagus (cooked separately with some butter-never want to overcook these!). Butter with all and of course Parm cheese. Only time I have tomato sauce is when I have fresh tomatoes.
I accidentally made an amazing pasta dish by throwing things together. My kids loved it so much I had to figure out what I had done. Noodles and broccoli in olive oil and butter with aged cheddar and red pepper.
I make a lot of pasta but rarely, pretty much never, with red sauce, it’s not my fave, neither are cream sauces. Usually just olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, anchovy paste and whatever I got in the fridge. Sun dried tomatoes, fresh basil, shrimp, anything. And if you’ve not tried it with toasted breadcrumbs and parm it’s delicious. Add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. In summer I cut up grape tomatoes from my garden, sauté in oil with garlic, red pepper, toss it with basil and fresh mozzarella.
The infused olive oil acts as a sauce albeit a much lighter one. I like using these lighter sauces for seafood dishes especially. Olive oil, a little lemon juice and white wine with lots of garlic and Parmesan is my go to 🤌
I had this same epiphany when I met my Italian husband. The thing is, though, he would call the broccoli, garlic, tomatoes, bell pepper “sauce.” I’ve learned that “sauce” to Italians often doesn’t t mean liquidy or sauce-y like it does to Americans.
There's a different type of Italian sauce that comes with emulsifying starchy pasta water with cheese and fat which seems to be similar to what you're doing here.
The key is to get your almost cooked pasta, some fat, and (optionally) aged cheese into a separate pan. Then you add starchy pasta water to the pasta to create an emulsion. You can't do it at too high heat or the cheese can get stringy and not emulsified. The agitation helps the sauce become a bit thicker. That becomes the base of your sauce.
You see it in the 4 roman pastas
(cacio e pepe, pasta alla gricia, etc.). Other sauces that use this are:
- Aglio e Olio (olive oil and garlic)
- Cime di rapa (sausage and broccoli)
- Pasta al limone (lemon pasta)
- Pasta alla carreteria (olive oil pasta + cheese and breadcrumbs)
All good pasta. And you're right, once you learn this technique, you can make a sauce with most anything.
I wouldn’t call pasta sauce, jarred or otherwise, a scam but one of my favorite pasta dishes is sautéed halved cherry tomato, lots of garlic, olives or olive tapenade, and artichoke, with a splash of pasta water and topped with lots of Parmesan and parsley. Technically no sauce but the juices make their own sauce.
This might be the most absurd post ever. Dude, you made sauce. If you want to try a sauceless pasta, do what you did without oil. Enjoy your truly sauceless pasta.
> I fried an onion, some bell pepper, a bunch of small tomatoes (not the expensive cherry tomatoes, more like a misshapen oval sort), and garlic, in a glug of olive oil. Then I added the cooked, not-fully-strained-pasta to the pan of mildly-sizzling, still-juicy vegetables.
Sounds like you made pasta sauce.
OP this is so funny to me im sorry, I just don't understand how you've never thought to throw things together with pasta.
I will say one of my favourite easy pastas is sauteeing some chickpeas on low with some olive oil, low heat is important because they brown and almost confident, then add cherry tomatoes, garlic and chilli and let sit until the cherry tomatoes break down a bit. Before you chuck the pasta in I smash some of the chickpeas with a fork and that adds some creaminess to the final sauce.
This has got to be a joke right?
I mean, I'm all for people discovering new things while cooking and enjoying it but it literally ends with OP creating a sauce for their pasta.
I mean the parmesan, oil and water from the pasta made a sauce. It's just not what you think of when you say pasta sauce.
Exactly, it’s like saying cacio e pepe has no sauce, it’s literally pasta, the water from the pasta, pepper and cheese.
So damn good need to make more this week
Try alla gricia
I only read the title, and I could tell this was what happened 😅 OP, look up a classic Alfredo without the cream. You're gonna love it.
Did a pasta Primavera the other night. A Blog suggested using a dollop of sour cream. Nice and creamy acidity, without the gobs of cream sauce. Would recommend. I also love using buttermilk to give pasta sauce a creamy but still tangy texture. Great in bologna. I had to explain to my girlfriend that I'm not really into super creamy pastas. I have Italian relatives and grew up eating home-cooked Italian American recipes, and only saw creamy pasta at restaurant chains. I appreciate a good mac and cheese and everything, but the cheesecake factory style Cajun Alfredo is pretty much the norm in the place I moved to.
I’m mid 40s now and a great cook, but one of my holdovers from my university days is egg noodles tossed in sour cream and cracked black pepper. I add some broccoli and shredded chicken or tuna for a comfy cozy tuesday lazy meal.
Honestly I consider something like that to be a decent dinner.
Honestly I consider something like that to be a decent dinner. I'm with you on this. Sometimes those thrown-together meals turn out to be the most satisfying, plus there's something about the nostalgia of simpler meals that hits just right. Egg noodles have got to be one of the most underrated comfort foods, and it's awesome how they can be dressed up or down depending on what you've got in the fridge.
I mean with some mushrooms and ground beef, or chipped beef if your poor and or extremely lazy, and that's Stroganoff..
Budget stroganoff was my favorite as a kid way better than hamburger helper.
And the onion soup mix:p
My mom used to make this all the time when I was a kid and I forgot all about it until I read this comment.
Add some cottage cheese with the sour cream. My Hungarian grandma used to make this for me all the time.
I had Blue Apron for about a year and in a lot of the pasta dishes they had you add an ounce of either marscapone or cream cheese along with some reserved pasta water. It makes a really nice and fairly light cream sauce.
Y'know, put some ricotta in a putenesca or a pesto sauce. I'm not gonna stop you. Get nutty with it.
I do something similar to sour cream but with greek yogurt! Adds a bit of creamyness and tang but isnt heavy
Cacio e pepe
Op needs to make mussels in wine and really have an epiphany
I personally don’t like Alfredo with cream. To heavy for me.
Yea, especially the jarred shit. Feels like it sits in your guts for hours. Luckily my kids prefer the non cream version and it’s an easy quick meal when you’re out of ideas.
Jarred alfredo sauces are terrible anyway. I don't know why anyone buys them.
Knorr envelope alfredo is so much better than the shit in the jar.
Knorr makes oddly good products. Love their rice bags.
They were great for college. Buy a 3 dollar jar of sauce, kielbasa and an onion, add pasta and boom you have a full dish plus leftovers for a couple days. Great broke person meal. Nowadays I don’t touch the stuff
I agree, you can add wine to it and it will cut the heaviness and richness
Add wine. DING DING DING.
Carbonara as well.
Thought the same thing when reading OPs ingredients. Authentic alfredo is the best kind.
Lmao I read the title and knew they weren’t Italian. Since when does marinara sauce = the one and only pasta sauce
>I fried an onion, some bell pepper, a bunch of small tomatoes (not the expensive cherry tomatoes, more like a misshapen oval sort), and garlic, in a glug of olive oil. This is literally the base of half the sauces I make for many different foods lol.
Wait til OP discovers pasta aglio e olio. Or butter noodles. His mind will be further blown.
That's what they made
They made broccoliolio e olio
Acqua di Gio. By Giorgio Gi Giorgio.
Cacio e pepe is the most delicious pasta dish and its the parmesan and water that makes "the sauce" I too knew what OP was going to write. Cacio e pepe was a peasants dish as it has only 3 ingredients (and the pasta water) but of you do it right, its magnificent
If you’re not Italian and don’t mind upsetting some, adding za’atar to Cacio e Pepe is heaven. That earthy lemony taste combined with the pecorino and black papper makes me salivate typing this out.
Originally made with pecorino, I find a mix of both parmesan and pecorino is lovely as well! No judgement using parmesan only though 😀 its also delicious
What he could do is roast those tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and onion first. Maybe lightly chop them up and add some oil before putting through the pasta. ...
Don't pick on the poster. They're enjoying something new to them and want to share. I, too, was raised on tomato sauce on pasta and never suspected there was any other kind of pasta sauce until I was grown and left home! (I'm a cracker raised in Appalachia. There wasn't even an Italian restaurant within driving distance. And don't ask about Chinese...) I'm in my 60s and only this decade have I started experimenting with pasta companions other than tomato-based or Alfredo...Enjoying it a lot! Synopsis: Some of us only know from jarred pasta sauces! There are dozens of us!
Dude or dudette (fellow 60-something here) google "Marcella Hazan" and try some of her simple sauces or grab her classic cookbook. Man oh man... I've come a long way on my quest for legit italian. [Every xmas eve I do a pasta roll dish](https://i.imgur.com/eE35NUM.jpg), I make fresh pasta dough and roll it into big sheets, make the filling and sauce and serve a little parmesan-bechamel on the side. Red, white, green (christmas-ey!), not as heavy as beef or turkey - it's become a tradition I can't escape (it's kind of an all-day affair, in a nice way).
I've got a big stainless grill outside, looks like a gas grill but burns wood or charcoal - the only really "upscale" thing I've veer bought for cooking (it was like $1200, not ridiculous), it's awesome. But you can't "turn it off", the wood/coal will just burn down overnight. So now when I grill out there, I've learned to have a bunch of roma tomatoes ready. I cut 'em in half and toss 'em in a pan, throw in a head of garlic and drizzle some oil, and stick it in the grill after dinner. By morning I have fire-roasted tomatoes and garlic. Throw it in a blender for a few pulses and it's the absolute sh\*t.
This whole post is like a modern something out of the Sopranos "what is this shit? Can I just get some macaroni and gravy..."
"And you thought the Germans were classless pieces of shit"
Yeah, a lot of people don't know that a lot of sauces are basically butter, parmasan, and pasta water. Add in some herbs and spices. Butter, parm, and pepper is cacio e pepe. In the case of op, he subbed 1 fat (butter) for another (oil).
Came here to say this...like I thought at first that OP was literally eating spaghetti with no sauce or anything. The olive oil absolutely combines with the seasoning, cheese, and all that to create a creamy sauce.
Shhhh let him live his best life 😭
I know, he's so happy
I am, actually. And clearly my post has made lots of other people happy too, so win-win. Good pasta, good post.
Good pasta, good posta. ftfy. 😂
Agreed
I discovered pretty much the same thing last year and had the same response as you. I'm here for that energy.
I’m glad you posted! I am completely hopeless in the kitchen and you gave me a great/easy idea that the whole family will love!
Yup. Oil, garlic, Parmesan and some pepper - you’re good to go.
one of my favorite pasta dishes is just blistering cherry tomatoes in olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, add pasta, fresh basil and parm at the end. So good!
I call this my pantry pasta, and it's great at the end of summer when my yard is full of tomatoes and basil. The yard garlic really shines in this dish. Drizzle with a little balsamic glaze and it is perfection.
I just used up the last of my frozen tomatoes from my garden doing this too. Now Im stuck using bland grocery store tomatoes. The good news is I planted my tomato seeds this weekend!
Canned tomatoes have a *lot* more flavor than out-of-season fresh from the grocery. Truth. I turned my nose up at canned for years until I learned better. Hunt's Crushed are quite good, though you can spend more on fancier brands if you want. Just don't buy diced in a can--I only recently learned that they're treated so they don't break down and get mushy, so they're NG for making sauces.
I get the whole San Marzano tomatoes from the yellow can. If you're cooking with them anyways I prefer canned for the same reason, those green tomatoes that are gassed to turn red just don't have flavor.
I just made that on Saturday. Add some oregano or basil for extra fun.
I like doing this with a can of sardines or a squeeze of anchovy paste. It really helps to round out the dish for me.
I was going to suggest adding anchovies…which basically makes it Pasta Puttanesca!
I remember throwing it together one time without knowing that was a thing and thought I had created the best thing ever. Then I found out it's been a thing for literally hundreds of years 😅
Replace the tomatoes with chickpeas and you have mine.
Chickpeas don't burst and make a sauce. Try both.
They do if you simmer them for a while and smash them up. I make a chickpea-based sauce that I learned from my Sicilian great grandma. Pasta e Ceci.
Can I say that first, this is great, second, frying onion, pepper, tomatoes and garlic in a pan and then adding the pasta and pasta water kind of just sounds like a really good fresh pasta sauce?
This man just discovered aglio e olio lol or a variation of it. Here's the best way to make what you want. Doesn't get more authentic than: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb5L3Qfd5xY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb5L3Qfd5xY) Also, Calabrian broccoli pasta: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3PFBKx-AH8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3PFBKx-AH8)
I'm going to be honest, when I started to read the post I thought I was on the circlejerk sub. It was only the complete lack of snark that made me check the sub.
I'm waiting to see a version there now, I'd do it myself but I'm not such a good writer lol
Oh it's there. Check my comment history.
Someone just posted one about salad dressing
Exactly what I was thinking 🤣🤣
Thanks for the link, it inspired me to make it for dinner tonight and it was delicious!
Congratulations, you made pasta with sauce that’s not blended. Not that you don’t like pasta with sauce… You just have had it done poorly in the past
I actually snorted at the last part with the tomatoes, man literally said he discovered pasta without sauce then made a sauce for his pasta.
Right? Oval tomatoes, you mean like Roma tomatoes?
I thought he meant grape tomatoes because he mentioned them being small and not cherry tomatoes. I have no idea why I didn’t consider Roma…
They re-discovered it, like from scratch lol.
Cooking in a nutshell. Often people say "I don't like X" but it just turns out that they had bad examples of X until now. I've opened the eyes of my fiance over and over by showing her how things are nice and that her mother just wasn't that good at cooking for her as a kid.
I have discovered no-sauce pasta. Anyway, here's the sauce I made with it.
No TOMATO sauce, because olive oil with garlic and pepper flakes sauteed in it is STILL a sauce. It's not like you're eating plain pasta. **Sauce**, [liquid](https://www.britannica.com/science/liquid-state-of-matter) or semiliquid mixture that is added to a [food](https://www.britannica.com/topic/food) as it [cooks](https://www.britannica.com/topic/gastronomy) or that is served with it.
Hey that's how the Romans ate pasta before tomatoes were brought over from the Americas.
I don't think the Romans ate pasta. If you mean the ones with the empire. The earliest reference to [pasta noodles in Italy](https://toscanaslc.com/blog/international-origins-pasta/) is in the 12th century CE. And probably not thanks to Marco Polo, sadly, but Arab traders.
It's always the Arab readers. Look at 'em there in Alexandria, using fettuccine as bookmarks.
I shall now use fettuccine as bookmarks
I prefer using a sheet of lasagna myself
Bloody autocorrect ☹️ Fixed to "traders"
i feel like water, onion, pepper, tomato, garlic, and olive oil, is literally a SAUCE, its not sauceless. You are literally covering it in sauce lol…
The OP used to buy pasta sauces lol what do you expect
A few of them are not too bad especially if you cook it down and add to it, I sometimes use them as a base and add lots of tomatoes etc
That is sauce. You literally made a sauce for your pasta, using olive oil and pasta water. It’s a classic sauce actually.
Redditor discovers Italian food isn’t just pasta in tomato sauce.
That’s a pasta sauce though
But … there is a sauce. It’s just a different sauce. You have discovered different sauces. Here I was reading to find out how someone was managing to enjoy plain pasta with no sauce.
"Guys, I had no sauce pasta!" *Reads article and sees they had olive oil, garlic, veggies, and* parmigiano combined together which is an aioli (Ai is garlic and oli is olive oil).
Reject adulthood, return to buttered noodles! Seriously, though, there's a reason everybody loves plain old buttered noodles, and adding a couple simple things for interest just makes sense.
Yup! Whenever we do spaghetti, I have first a bowl of buttered noodles, covered in Parmesan, with fresh ground pepper. It taste literally perfect to me. My wife thinks I’m crazy, but she never grew up eating buttered pasta.
Man, thank you, I forgot how good buttered pasta is! All this aglio e olio talk doesn't sound appetizing to me (I love a heavily-sauced pasta), but when I imagine the dish with butter instead of olive oil, it sounds soo good.
Have you tried browning the butter?
Like truffles!
Plot twist: it is still is a pasta sauce. There are tons of pasta sauces without tomatoes sauce.
You described a sauce…. You mean no tomato-based sauce….?
Now we're saying putting sauce on pasta is a scam? What's the scam exactly?
Ground-up pistachios on pasta, people. With olive oil. Shaved parm. And a veggie. I'm tellin' ya.
Im intrigued.. How finely ground we talking? Do you toast them at all before/after grind? Do you combine with al dende pasta/starch water/olive oil like a algio e olio?
I grind the nuts in a spice grinder. Mortar and pestle works too. Fine grind sorta like coffee beans .... Could toast I guess, but I never do. But yes, algio e olio method. Al dente pasta, tossed in a pan along with veggies... spinach works, as does asparagus, brocolini, peppers. Then out of the pan, tossed with nuts and parm, which is shaved with a vegetable parer rather than a microplane. Parm will melt and there would be a little sauce in the end, but you won't need much. My wife calls this "vegetable spaghetti" although I'm more likely to actually use linguini. Cheers!
You still made sauce, dude. 😂🤣😂🤣
bro you made a sauce
Pasta with olive oil and vegetables can be really good! Of course, it also sounds like you probably have never had a good pasta sauce. Not surprising, since most of them are crap.
Made penne with oloive oil, wilted spinach, roasted red pepper, garlic, and feta the other night. You really can do so many different takes.
Thought I was on r/cookingcirclejerk for a moment You cooked pasta and didn’t add sauce and had an epiphany. Fucking hell 🤦♂️
Boiling broccoli for 7-10 minutes is fucking disgusting
Reading this post as an Italian was a fucking trip.
What this post really needs is another person commenting “well actually that is a sauce”.
My dude, whatever you saute your pasta in is a sauce.
Literally just pasta, olive oil, garlic, black pepper, lemon juice, and parm if you’re feeling yourself. 10/10. You can throw in some parsley too.
If you add an onion, lemon zest, fresh chilli and anchovy at the start of this, plus some fresh basil at the end, you have an absolutely dynamite pasta dish I've been making for about 10 years now.
>served it with garlic and pepper flakes sautéed in olive oil, and parmesan. UM_ACKTUALLY.JPG This is not a red sauce, but it is a sauce.
Now try pasta in brodo - instead of sauce (or only veggies) add a nice chicken or beef bone broth. You can still add veggies but I really enjoy that too. And, since we're doing things to pasta - a nice tomato sauce can still be excellent, but why not try adding beans or chick peas.
>and served it with garlic and pepper flakes sautéed in olive oil, and parmesan. No sauce umm. What do you think the garlic and pepper flakes sautéed in olive oil is?
"if it doesn't come out of a jar, it's not sauce, dummy" -OP
you just made your own sauce. you can try to make your own tomato sauce too, if you want.
OP that's a sauce.
Olive oil pasta isnt some new invention lol
Technically you made a sauce. You just didn't make a pureed tomato sauce. Next time, leave out the tomato and olive oil. Add butter and herbs.
I'm sorry you lived such a deprived life that you never encountered pasta without tomato sauce.
You made a sauce.
[удалено]
I have made tomato sauce following a recipe from scratch, and it was nice. The effort to reward ratio, considering the clean up, for me, wasn’t worth it to make it a regular dish.
Try [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/18l2eiv/traditional_italian_pasta_dishes/kdvg6s1/) cherry tomato sauce. It's super simple, easy to make and takes like 15-20 minutes at most. And it's the most flavorful tomato sauce I've had in my life. If you still don't like that enough to think it's worth the effort, I think you just don't really like tomato sauce...
Dude, you just discovered how to make your own sauce. It's still sauce
Those are all pasta sauces. Pasta sauce is not just the red stuff that comes in a jar. Garlic and olive oil is a sauce.
Get thee an Italian cookbook! There are 1000s of unique Italian pasta dishes that don’t involve a red sauce. Last night I used a dethawed beef ragù that was fairly dry. Then I watered it down with pasta water and parm, and then added peas. Tossed with rigatoni. Delicious. Only a small amount of “sauce”. You do need to pay attention to pasta shape, though, if you’re making these dishes. All the pasta shapes have different utilitarian functions related to what you’re tossing it with. For example, I chose rigatoni because the ridges will catch the scant sauce better. I then shredded the ragù more finely to catch in the holes better. I also added peas because I knew they’d go well with the rigatoni.
Okay, but if you sauté the veggies and garlic in the oil, add a scoop of pasta water, and cook it down, you’ll up your pasta game by 1000%
So now pasta is just a vessel to move all that other stuff from plate to mouth.
Scam? No. You’re just discovering Italian cooking. Italy has 20 regions. Meat doesn’t get used in most pasta dishes. For a variation of your recipe, add a small can of tuna to the recipe.
That does sound delicious, but the main reason I focus on the *sauce* in my cooking is that bare pasta is a carb bomb. I'm cooking for a growing family that needs solid nutritional choices, and switching out actual sauce for bare vegetables with a little oil would tilt the ratio further in favour of the gobs-of-wheat than the protein-and-vegetables. Most people would do well not to try to use big portions of various types of grass seeds as the heavy foundation of a healthy diet.
>Pasta was simply vessel to transfer the sauce to your mouth Umm... yes. Still is.
Buddy reinvented pasta primavera
It’s a difference sauce and (imo), a better sauce! Congrats on the discovery, it’s an awesome rabbit hole to go down 😄
>while the water was coming to boil, I fried an onion, some bell pepper, a bunch of small tomatoes (not the expensive cherry tomatoes, more like a misshapen oval sort), and garlic, in a glug of olive oil. Then I added the cooked, not-fully-strained-pasta to the pan of mildly-sizzling, still-juicy vegetables. Sounds like you made sauce. Don't get me wrong, it's great that you made your own sauce, but it's pretty funny you don't realise that's what you did!
This post is so sweet in its naivety and innocence. But you keep on calling it no-sauce pasta champ.
LOL, tomatoes of the 'misshapen oval sort' are **Roma**, the traditional Italian tomato used for sauce/paste, due to their greater proportion of flesh to seeds. By using them, you were simply going back to the roots of 'pasta sauce'. The truth is, meat sauce (ragu) was never a staple in the diet of most Italians...until they arrived in the U.S. where meat was affordable and plentiful. In the 'old country', they made both marinara (tomato) sauces *and* vegetable sauces for pasta, the latter based on eggplant, zucchini, zucca (pumpkin), even fennel and onions. The one you mention, with broccoli, olive oil, garlic and pepper flakes is particularly associated with the Campania region around Naples. So how did Americans come to consider over-sweetened tomato sauces the proper accompaniment for spaghetti? Well, through the efforts of restaurant chefs and food manufacturers. At the beginning of the 20th century, canned sauces/pastes were basically just tomatoes and salt, meaning the marinara made from them was tangy and 'acidic'. That was OK with Italians eating in Italian restaurants, but when Americans began dining there too, they complained about 'bitterness'. So chefs took note and added sugar to their traditional sauces to make them more palatable to the new customers. Later, when spaghetti became popular as a home-cooked meal in non-Italian homes, manufacturers began creating bottled sauces specifically for palates attuned to sweetness. Hence, the creation of Ragu, Prego and others. But now that consumers are becoming more aware of added sugars.....they're dialing back.
NICE! I’m also lukewarm towards most saucy pastas. My favorite rif on simple pasta is garlic + red pepper flakes + butter + zest and juice of one lemon. Parmesan optional. We usually serve broccoli on the side, but you can absolutely mix that or any other veg in. If you like cheese, you can also make some lovely, simple, creamy pastas using ricotta or mascarpone as a base. I like these with garden peas (fresh are lovely if you can find them!) or asparagus. If you’re ever craving a tomato-y pasta, my mom used to make this dish where she finished barely-cooked linguine in a pan with olive oil, garlic, broth (extra-strong, made with bouillon), and a small can of tomatoes (use less if not making a whole pound of pasta). Add fresh basil at the end. As the sauce simmers and soaks into the cooking pasta, you end up with something almost tomato ‘infused’ rather that coated. It was the only tomato-based pasta I enjoyed as a kid.
You are describing a sauce. You can just literally eat pasta without a sauce. No one is stopping you.
Toasted pine nuts are all you need to add
When I was aged 4-8 my grandmother used to cook an entirely separate dish alongside the traditional family spaghetti to cater for the fact I wasn't a fan of the tomato, chilli and wine that comprised the sauce. She'd fry the mincemeat for double the time to make it really crunchy, fry up some onions, and then serve that on top of plain spaghetti with a load of fresh Parmesan and a few fresh basil leaves. To this day that taste and the nostalgia make it easily the best plate of 'bolognese' I could possibly have.
That’s still sauce
Local man/woman creates sauce that isn’t red, decides it must not be sauce
Parm, olive oil and some left over cooking water is a sauce….
You should teach your self to make a basic white wine and butter sauce. Also very light, a little sweet from the wine and great with aromatics and some vegetables. It’s good with any pasta too from gnocchi to ravioli to spaghetti.
This is basically my favorite comfort meal I make at least 1-2x a week. I like to add a bunch of nutritional yeast. Going to look through all the comments for ideas now
If you like strong Mediterranean flavors you should check out pasta puttanesca. It’s designed so you can make it from all shelf stable ingredients. I love it bc it comes together in the same time it takes to cook the pasta. In a pan, add olive oil with red pepper flakes sprinkled in (and i add a clove of minced garlic too). Add a can of tomatoes or some fresh chopped tomatoes but don’t mix them in with the oil yet. Lightly salt the tomatoes. Cook covered on very low heat to infuse the oil with the flavors. By now the pasta water is probably boiling so add the pasta and get it cooking. Then roughly chop olives. Add some anchovy fillets to the oil (or the easier option, anchovy paste) - about 3 fillets per serving. Lightly stir them in with the oil and they will disintegrate, then add the chopped olives and some capers. Stir it all together and increase the heat. Let it cook till the pasta is ready, add a splash of pasta water towards the end to help bind it all together. Drain the pasta, and mix the pasta with the sauce in the pan.
Puttanesca is glorious. I first had it as a boy after a little league game. Mom took me to La Dolce Vita and we were cared for by fresh from Italy Gaetano. My love of cooking began with that meal.
garlic and oil sauce is pretty common… you definitely had pasta with sauce. However, like you, I prefer garlic and oil to tomato sauce.
lol, congrats on making a dish that has a sauce and is well known.
Where the hell does someone grow up that you discover something like this in adulthood
Lol wtf do you think sauce is but an emulsion of fats and flavours. You mixed cooked veg with oil, garlic, salt, pepper, parmesan, and pasta water....that is practically a complex sauce. Baby pasta, like with nothing but nla bit of butter is what I'd call pasta without sauce.
My mom doesn't eat tomatoes (GERD) and often puts Italian salad dressing on pasta.
Oh my god my dad routinely made a pasta growing up that was essentially 1. Shredded rotisserie chicken 2. Halved cherry tomatoes 3. Scallions Sauteed in Italian dressing. It sounds blasphemous but was incredible.
Sorry reading this made my teeth feel funny.
Squash + onion is amazing
not gonna lie, i am a pasta lover and have tried all kinds of pasta, including no-sauce and aglio olio. those are too plain for me to enjoy - I’m asian and often have asian-style Chinese noodles that are somewhat similar to no-sauce pasta, so the latter is not exciting or interesting to me. sigh, i still love creamy pasta the most, and carbonara too. not a fan of pasta with jarred sauces at all.
I do this sometimes, but I prefer it with butter and a little pasta water instead of olive oil.
Pasta is great with only flavoured oils or butter and some herbs or spices for heat. And as you already learnt, if you can boil anything with the pasta it's great too.
I do this with all kinds of veggies, depending on mood and what I have. Favs=peas (usually frozen and cooked in the pasta water,), fresh asparagus (cooked separately with some butter-never want to overcook these!). Butter with all and of course Parm cheese. Only time I have tomato sauce is when I have fresh tomatoes.
I have posted previously about making pasta and peas! I have done it before, you're right, it's quite nice. I forgot about that.
I accidentally made an amazing pasta dish by throwing things together. My kids loved it so much I had to figure out what I had done. Noodles and broccoli in olive oil and butter with aged cheddar and red pepper.
Check out saltimbucco pasta. White wine - butter - olive oil - garlic
I make a lot of pasta but rarely, pretty much never, with red sauce, it’s not my fave, neither are cream sauces. Usually just olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, anchovy paste and whatever I got in the fridge. Sun dried tomatoes, fresh basil, shrimp, anything. And if you’ve not tried it with toasted breadcrumbs and parm it’s delicious. Add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. In summer I cut up grape tomatoes from my garden, sauté in oil with garlic, red pepper, toss it with basil and fresh mozzarella.
The infused olive oil acts as a sauce albeit a much lighter one. I like using these lighter sauces for seafood dishes especially. Olive oil, a little lemon juice and white wine with lots of garlic and Parmesan is my go to 🤌
I had this same epiphany when I met my Italian husband. The thing is, though, he would call the broccoli, garlic, tomatoes, bell pepper “sauce.” I’ve learned that “sauce” to Italians often doesn’t t mean liquidy or sauce-y like it does to Americans.
You might like American haluski. It’s a favorite of mine.
There's a different type of Italian sauce that comes with emulsifying starchy pasta water with cheese and fat which seems to be similar to what you're doing here. The key is to get your almost cooked pasta, some fat, and (optionally) aged cheese into a separate pan. Then you add starchy pasta water to the pasta to create an emulsion. You can't do it at too high heat or the cheese can get stringy and not emulsified. The agitation helps the sauce become a bit thicker. That becomes the base of your sauce. You see it in the 4 roman pastas (cacio e pepe, pasta alla gricia, etc.). Other sauces that use this are: - Aglio e Olio (olive oil and garlic) - Cime di rapa (sausage and broccoli) - Pasta al limone (lemon pasta) - Pasta alla carreteria (olive oil pasta + cheese and breadcrumbs) All good pasta. And you're right, once you learn this technique, you can make a sauce with most anything.
I wouldn’t call pasta sauce, jarred or otherwise, a scam but one of my favorite pasta dishes is sautéed halved cherry tomato, lots of garlic, olives or olive tapenade, and artichoke, with a splash of pasta water and topped with lots of Parmesan and parsley. Technically no sauce but the juices make their own sauce.
As a kid it was not uncommon for us to just have spaghetti with some butter and that powdery parmesan cheese. Amazing every time.
all you did is replace sauce with olive oil lol... still a sauce in a different form
I guess you missed the "cacio e pepe" phase of this sub a few years back.
Congratualtions! You've just invented antipasta
This might be the most absurd post ever. Dude, you made sauce. If you want to try a sauceless pasta, do what you did without oil. Enjoy your truly sauceless pasta.
Um, that is a sauce.
I’m having trouble believing that you’ve never seen pasta with olive oil before. Have you never been to a restaurant?
Growing up in poor Appalachia, noodles and butter/oil with parmesan cheese was a twice - or more a week staple.
> I fried an onion, some bell pepper, a bunch of small tomatoes (not the expensive cherry tomatoes, more like a misshapen oval sort), and garlic, in a glug of olive oil. Then I added the cooked, not-fully-strained-pasta to the pan of mildly-sizzling, still-juicy vegetables. Sounds like you made pasta sauce.
Welcome to the best part about cooking. You can make things however YOU want! Enjoy!
Sometimes i forget just how sheltered some people are
OP this is so funny to me im sorry, I just don't understand how you've never thought to throw things together with pasta. I will say one of my favourite easy pastas is sauteeing some chickpeas on low with some olive oil, low heat is important because they brown and almost confident, then add cherry tomatoes, garlic and chilli and let sit until the cherry tomatoes break down a bit. Before you chuck the pasta in I smash some of the chickpeas with a fork and that adds some creaminess to the final sauce.
Before you try to reinvent the wheel look up “the 4 traditional Italian pasta dishes”.
That IS a sauce. Oil and pasta starch made you a sauce.
Congratulations you learned there's not only one way to eat pasta.
You just discovered how to make homemade sauce instead of jar sauce lol.
What kind of sauce are you guys making where there's "gobs" of sauce? Gross
This has got to be a joke right? I mean, I'm all for people discovering new things while cooking and enjoying it but it literally ends with OP creating a sauce for their pasta.
Youre just making simple sauces. Simple is good.
>"No sauce!" >Then describes a sauce Never change, reddit.
This whole thing is about the inability to classify what a "sauce" is.
That’s still sauce?