When you have sweet red peppers that you want to enjoy in a whole new way, this is the pasta to make. We enhance this creamy red pepper pasta with fresh basil for a mellow flavor that accentuates the pasta without overpowering it. This sauce comes together quickly, but it does require a few kitchen tools–a steamer basket, food processor, and a mesh strainer.

How To Make This Recipe

We start by pulling together our ingredients. Red bell peppers ground our sauce with sweetness and lovely red aesthetic. If you don’t have red peppers handy, feel free to substitute canned roasted red peppers and skip the steaming step. We flavor our sauce with garlic, basil, onion powder, agave nectar, lemon juice, and nutritional yeast. For that creamy texture, we bring in an unsweetened, non-dairy milk such as cashew or coconut milk. This creamy sauce pairs especially well with spaghetti, linguini or angel hair pasta.

Prepare Sauce Base

We begin by steaming our red pepper over boiling water in a steamer basket until softened. Then, we allow our red pepper to cool. If you happen to be using canned roasted red pepper, you can skip this step entirely.

Steam that sweet red pepper.

Meanwhile, we fill a large stock pot halfway, season with salt, and place it on the stove over high heat. We’ll use this boiling water to cook our pasta. Once our red pepper cools, we puree those softened pieces using our food processor or high-speed blender.

Puree until smooth.

We prefer a seriously smooth sauce, so we refine it one more time by pushing our processed red pepper puree through a strainer into a large bowl. This step is optional, and it may not be necessary if you have a high-speed blender such as a Vitamix. When we’re using a standard food processor, the smooth texture is worth the extra effort.

Refine by pushing puree through a mesh strainer.

Add Flavor

Into our red pepper puree, we whisk in all remaining ingredients except for the basil and pasta. Then, we stir in our basil.

Season that red pepper puree.

Cook Pasta

By now, our pasta water should be boiling in our stock pot. We boil our pasta until al dente. While the pasta boils, we slowly warm our red pepper sauce over low heat. Using a pair of tongs, we pull our perfectly al dente pasta from the boiling water and pile it into the sauce in the skillet.

We don’t worry about carrying a little pasta water into the sauce, as the starch from the pasta water improves the texture of the sauce. In fact, we’ll add additional pasta water at this step if we need to loosen the sauce for coating.

Ready To Serve

Once the pasta is coated with our sauce, we remove it from the heat and serve. We like to garnish our creamy red pepper pasta with fresh basil, fresh cracked pepper, and a shake of non-dairy parmesan.

Twirl into that creamy red pepper pasta!

Recipe Card for Creamy Red Pepper Pasta

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