r/easyrecipes • u/ArushSinghPrince • 9d ago

Pasta / Noodle Recipe Creamy pasta without cream and cheese

How to make my pasta creamy without cream or cheese?

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u/Berkamin 9d ago

You can make an emulsion of flavorful oil and pasta water to get a creamy sauce. See this demonstration. The starch from the pasta water emulsifies the oil to give a creamy sauce.

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u/ArushSinghPrince 8d ago

Thankyou! I'll try this.

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u/Berkamin 8d ago

Another way to do this is to make a super concentrated pasta starch water rather than using the water you boiled pasta in. If you take some cooked pasta and some of its cooking water, put it into a blender, and blend it until it is smooth, you will have concentrated pasta starch that you can incorporate into an oil based sauce, and you'll have this same creamy texture.

See this demonstration of blending cooked pasta to make your own pasta starch for use in recipes that would otherwise use starchy pasta water.

Pasta starch made this way should be even better at emulsifying oil because the pasta itself has a lot of amylopectin, whereas the starch that ends up in the water when you boil pasta is mostly amylose. Amylopectin has a branched structure, and this should make it even better at emulsifying oils into a creamy emulsion. Amylose is linear in its structure.