Vegan Nut-Free Creamy Green Pasta

Get your greens in with this vegan nut-free, creamy green pasta! Customize the greens to whatever you’ve got wilting in the fridge and add some protein with beans and peas.

Over the last year, I realized that my kid is obsessed with pasta and will eat pasta smothered in almost every sauce. I always have a jar of marinara in the pantry, but sometimes I like to make this vegan, nut-free, creamy green pasta sauce instead.

I’ve made countless versions of this, and there are many different ways you can amp up the flavour or customize it to your liking. The recipe below is the “base” recipe, but you can feel free to substitute based on the following:

Swaps & Substitutions

Greens: I use some sort of leafy green here, usually whatever is wilting in my fridge, which is typically spinach. You could use something peppery like arugula, or something more bitter like chard or kale. Even with a high speed blender, chop the greens before adding to the blender. I like to blanch to make it softer and easier to digest. I find the texture to be silkier when you blanch the greens first.

Fat: This version uses a dairy-free sour cream, but I’ve also used a dairy-free cream cheese instead. You could play around with ratios of using a liquid fat to a solid fat (e.g. less sour cream/cream cheese but more olive oil). I’ve seen versions where people avoid the fat completely. I personally wouldn’t recommend it, the pasta ends up being quite dry. The fat makes this sauce creamier and silkier.

Acid: When I make this creamy green pasta sauce, I usually make it when I’m cleaning out the fridge. Sometimes I have an old lemon that needs to be used up, otherwise I use a combination of apple cider vinegar or red wine vinegar. Bottled lemon juice works too, but fresh lemon juice is better. You could use other vinegars as well, I just find apple cider and red wine to be the sweeter ones that taste good in this sauce. In my opinion, it tastes the best when using fresh lemon juice.

Salt: This is where you can play around with the flavour the most. The recipe below uses the salted pasta water for the majority of the seasoning. However, you can use some miso and unsweetened plant milk instead. I find some of the pasta water helps make this sauce much creamier, but you can sub a different liquid instead. You could use bouillon paste or powder, or even a vegan parm substitute like Violife that is higher in the salt content.

Umami: I didn’t have any vegan cheese to use here, so I used nutritional yeast to provide the bulk of the savoury cheesy flavour. You could use a touch of vegan fish sauce, vegan parm, or vegemite for a bit of depth. But I almost always have nutritional yeast in my house and it packs a lot of flavour and nutrition in.

Protein: I’ve made versions using butter beans from a can, cooked cannellini beans from dry, or silken tofu. Use whatever you like the flavour of! Silken tofu makes this a really silky sauce, whereas butter beans will have some of that beany gritty texture. I balance the beany grit with extra greens and some frozen peas. Feel free to adjust to your liking. My kid has been anti-protein lately (no mock meats, tofu sometimes, and no tempeh) so I find I have to incorporate protein via blended sauces and dips these days.

How to meal prep this:

I personally don’t like to eat leftover pasta, I find the texture tends to be too soft. Plus the pasta can absorb moisture from whatever sauce, so it ends up being dry. I like to make this sauce and save in a jar in the fridge. This way I just cook the pasta fresh for a meal, add sauce and enjoy.

You can freeze the sauce as well, and save it for later. This sauce is best used within 3-4 days. After that, it can separate and I get a little paranoid.

If you have higher protein goals, feel free to serve this alongside something more protein dense. Your favourite vegan chick’n product, vegan steak, or something like these tofu steaks would do!