Made with simple and wholesome ingredients, this Vegan Roasted Red Pepper Pasta is comforting, delicious, and makes the perfect weeknight dinner. It’s dairy free, vegan, and can be made gluten free!
Pasta, I love you. Pesto pasta, mac and cheese, and this roasted red pepper pasta, you name it, I love it. It’s my go to comfort food and was always my favorite food to bring on long road trips as a kid.
Anyway, this roasted red pepper pasta is one of my favorite pasta recipes. It’s rich and creamy without a touch of dairy and is perfect for an easy weeknight dinner. Sprinkle on top some cashew parmesan, fresh basil and red pepper flakes for some spice!
It takes around 30 minutes to make and is loved by both kids and adults.
How to make a creamy dairy free pasta sauce
If you’ve recently cut dairy out of your diet, I understand the struggle of not knowing what to use in cooking to make things creamy. Fortunately, there lots of amazing replacements these days to satisfy your creamy pasta cravings. There are a few key ingredients we will be using that will yield a super creamy red pepper sauce.
- Cashews: Raw and soaked cashews are my go to ingredient to make any pasta sauce cream. I do have a slight intolerance to cashews, but I deal with pain after eating this pasta because it’s just so good.
- Olive oil: A good quality olive oil is going to give this sauce depth of flavor and will help round out the creamy texture. You can omit this if you are oil-free, but it won’t be quite the same.
- Almond milk: You can use any non-dairy milk in place of almond milk if needed. Just make sure it is both unflavored and unsweetened, we don’t want any hits of vanilla in this pasta!
How to make a roasted red pepper sauce
First, add the cashews to a bowl of boiling hot water and soak them while you prep everything else. Next, you’ll want to chop the onion, peppers and peel the garlic. Add them to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and bake at 350 for 30 minutes. You can cook the pasta as you wait, read a book, or dance around in your kitchen. The choice is yours 🙂
When the veggies are done, add them to a blender with the drained cashews and all remaining ingredients aside from the arrowroot and nutritional yeast.
Process until smooth. Transfer to a pan, stir in the final two ingredients and let simmer for about 5 minutes. Add in the cooked pasta, top with fresh basil and enjoy!!
Final thoughts on this roasted red pepper pasta
- Once prepared, this pasta will store in the fridge for about 3-5 days. To reheat, add the pasta to a pan with a splash of almond milk, oil or water to bring out the creaminess and reheat over low heat until warm.
- You don’t want to skimp on the onion or the garlic in this recipe. I recommend using 4 large, like really large, cloves of garlic or 6 smaller ones.
- To keep this dish gluten free I used brown rice pasta, but any pasta will do! For extra protein you can use chickpea pasta or a legume based pasta.
- I have not tried this recipe with something in place of the cashews. I would not recommend subbing for another nut or seed, as it won’t yield the same creamy consistency.
Looking for more dairy free pasta recipes? Try these:
- Mushroom Broccoli Rigatoni With Lemon Garlic Cream Sauce
- Life Changing Tomato Basil Cream Sauce
- White Wine Cream Sauce with Rigatoni
- Creamy Vegan Vodka Sauce with Penne
Follow along on on instagram and subscribe to my email list for more recipes and updates. Leave a comment and rating below if you try this recipe and let us know how it turns out!
Print
Prep Time:
Yield:
Category:
Cuisine:
Print
PinDescription
Made with simple and wholesome ingredients, this Vegan Roasted Red Pepper Pasta is comforting, delicious, and makes the perfect weeknight dinner. It’s dairy free, vegan, and can be made gluten free!
Ingredients
- 16 ounces pasta of choice
- 2 red bell peppers
- 1 large red onion
- 4 large cloves garlic
- 1–2 tbsp olive oil
- 1/2 cup raw cashews
- 1 cup plain unsweetened almond milk
- 1 tbsp arrowroot powder (or cornstarch)
- 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
- 1/2–1 tsp sea salt (or to taste)
- Black pepper to taste
Instructions
- Add the cashews to a bowl and cover with boiling water. Set aside while you prep the remaining ingredients.
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Peel the garlic, and chop the onion and bell peppers into large chunks.
- Place on a silicone baking mat or parchment paper and roast for 30 minutes.
- While the veggies are roasting, cook your pasta of choice.
- When the veggies are done, add to a blender or food processor with the drained cashews and all remaining ingredients and process until completely smooth.
- Stir the sauce into the cooked pasta, and top with fresh basil if desired!
Notes
My favorite gluten free pastas are brown rice pasta and chickpea pasta.
I recommend using pretty large cloves of garlic and a large onion because this is where much of the flavor comes from. If your garlic cloves are small, you can use 5-6 instead of 4.
Once prepared, this recipe will store in the fridge for about 3-5 days. To reheat, add to a pan with a splash of non-dairy milk so it gets creamy.
To deepen the flavor of the dish, you can add extra tomato paste. This will also give the sauce a deeper red color.
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 4 servings
- Calories: 406
- Sugar: 6.5g
- Fat: 18.9g
- Carbohydrates: 55g
- Fiber: 5.7g
- Protein: 11.9g
Keywords: roasted red pepper pasta, vegan pasta recipe, vegan roasted red pepper pasta
This recipe was easy to make and was delicious. It was very creamy! The only trouble I had was that I only have a Nutribullet, so it didn’t blend as smoothly as I would have liked, but it was still good!
★★★★★
Thanks Alyssa! Next time you can try subbing the cashews for cashew butter, it should make it much creamier when you blend it 🙂
This looks great! Do you think the taste would be seriously compromised if I cheated and used roasted red peppers from a jar?
It’s not going to have quite the same flavor, but it might work! You definitely don’t want to leave out the roasted onion or garlic though, so may as well just throw the fresh peppers in there too!
I love this. So good to have for dinner. This is so easy to heat up and this is so flavorful!
★★★★★
Yes! It heats up so well, glad you liked it 🙂
What kind of blender did you use to get the sauce so smooth? I have a Ninja and it came out super lumpy, no matter how long I blended it.
I have a vitamix! Did you soak the cashews? That should make it easier to blend! A food processor could also work
I did. Boiled water, then poured it into the bowl so it covered the cashews and let it sit while I chopped and roasted the veggies. I even tried using an immersion blender after the regular blender. The cashews were raw.
An immersion blender is unfortunately not powerful enough for cashews, but you can try subbing the whole cashews for 2-4 tbsp cashew butter next time! You should get about the same result 🙂 Sorry for the trouble, a high speed blender is necessary for this recipe.
Delicious and easy! I completely forgot to do the last step and poured the sauce straight from the blender over my pasta and it was still very tasty. I added some salt, pepper and hot pepper flakes before blending — I like heat in almost all of my food. Sautéed up some asparagus and mushrooms to mix in, and used plant-based higher protein penne.
This was so perfectly easy – will it freeze well? I’d love to double a batch next time I make it.
★★★★★
YUM! I love asparagus mixed in with this! I do think it would freeze well, however, certain gluten free pastas/legume based pastas don’t hold up very well so I’m not sure how well that would work. The sauce on it’s own would definitely be ok to freeze though! Let me know how it turns out if you try it 🙂
Loooooove this recipe. It’s one of my go to’s that I just keep making. I add spinach, asparagus and cannellini beans to it usually. So easy to make! Thanks so much!! 😁
Thanks Joan! So happy it’s such a favorite! If you don’t mind leaving a star rating along with your review next time, it really helps us out:)
Very tasty!
★★★★★
Thanks Garimaa! So glad you liked it 🙂
I only have original almond milk which has a bit of a vanilla aftertaste can you use that for this recipe?
I highly recommend using plain, unsweetened milk for this recipe. I’d check the ingredients on yours to make sure there is no added sugar. Otherwise, it may not turn out very well!
Just made this tonight. It was quick and super tasty. I added some spinach for some greens. This is the second recipe I’ve tried from your blog / instagram and they have both been so flavorful. So much that my teenage daughter not only eats it but says she will eat again. Thank you for posting them 🙂
That sounds delish! I’m so glad you’ve been liking the recipes!
I made this tonight, served with choice of Seitan “sausage” or regular Italian sausage for the carnivores in the house. Made a great one-dish meal.
Hi Melissa! I’m so glad it was enjoyed by all types of eaters! Thanks so much for trying it 🙂
This looks delicious. Roasted red peppers are amazingly versatile. I will be making this recipe soon.
Thanks so much Hanne! Let me know how you like it 🙂
I’m new to cooking Vegan, and my very first recipe called for adding nutritional yeast at the end. I thought it totally ruined the flavor of the meal. Does the yest do anything except fool people into thinking it’s ‘creamier’? Do you think this recipe would be okay with out? I’m so sorry, but I really didn’t like it! Thanks for any advice!
You can totally just leave it out if you don’t like it! It does give a slightly “cheesy” flavor, but I’ve made this recipe without the nutritional yeast many times, and it’s still delicious! Let me know what you think if you try it 🙂
Such a delicious recipe- thanks for sharing!
★★★★★
So happy you liked it!
Love this!
★★★★★
Thanks, Grace!