One Pot Pasta Recipes – over 20 straightforward recipes!

One pot pasta recipes are the solution to the question, What am we going to make for dinner tonight? Speedy, straightforward, and with minimal clean up, you’ll be making these one pot pasta recipes your go-to dinner plan.

Our family loves pasta: spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, rigatoni, fettuccine, you name it. But let’s face it. Cooking pasta makes a lot of dishes dirty: a big pasta pot, a colander, and a pan for the sauce.

But take heart! These one pot pasta recipes are going to make your life so much easier. The pasta and the sauce are cooked in ONE POT! One pot! Won’t that make cleaning up so much easier? The pasta cooks right in the sauce.

How it comes together

You’ll see more than 20 recipes below but here are the basic principles:

Sauté meat (ground turkey, ground beef, bite sized pieces of chicken, sausage, and so on). Add chopped vegetables like onions, garlic, carrots, or whatever you like. Cook until nearly tender. If you like to add greens (spinach, kale, etc.) to your pasta, wait for these. They’ll be added a little later.

Next, add your sauce ingredients, such as tomatoes, wine, broth, water. It will seem like a lot of liquid at first but don’t worry, the pasta will absorb it as it cooks. Bring it all up to a simmer.

Add the dry pasta of your choice, uncooked. This is the good part: the pasta cooks right in the sauce! You know how a lot of recipes tell you to save a cup or so of the pasta water to put into your sauce? The reason you do this is because the cooking water is full of starches from the pasta. The starch thickens up your sauce and makes it slightly creamy. In one pot pasta recipes, the pasta is cooking in the sauce so that starchy goodness stays right in there.

Cover the pan. Give your pasta a stir pretty frequently to keep it cooking evenly and to prevent it from sticking together or sticking to the bottom of the pan. At the end of the cooking time, turn the heat off, leaving the pan covered, and let the pasta rest for a few minutes.

Best Pan for making One Pot Pasta

Use the right sized pan. You’ll be cooking everything in one pot so it has to be large enough to accommodate all the ingredients, including quite a bit of liquid to cook the pasta. One pot pasta recipes just won’t work in a pan that’s too small. Your pasta will boil over and you’ll be cleaning up a big mess on your stove top.

You’ll need a pan with a lid. This is important. The steam in a covered pot helps the pasta cook evenly even if it’s not all completely submerged in liquid the entire time.

Pan suggestions:

• Dutch oven – The Dutch oven (otherwise known as French oven) is such a workhorse in the kitchen! This is the reliable pot for these types of recipes. A bonus is that they’re often oven-safe, so if you want to broil the top to crisp up pasta or melt cheese, it can go straight from the stove to the oven.
• Deep, straight sided skillet – You can’t go wrong with one of these pans! We use our deep skillet for so many things, but it’s especially great for one pan pasta recipes.
• Instant Pot – You’ll notice that some of the recipes are made in an Instant Pot. The great part about those is that you don’t have to stir while the pasta cooks! The pressure in the Instant Pot cooks everything evenly.

What to serve with one pot pasta

The great thing about these recipes is that they usually provide an entire meal (protein, carb, veggies) in one pot, so sides are optional. If you want to choose a side, pasta is endlessly versatile, so it’s straightforward to find a side that will go great with it. Here are a few ideas if you’re looking for side dishes:

• Classic Garlic Bread
• Chive Bread (dare we say, we like this better than garlic bread?!)
• Classic Green Salad with From-scratch Lighter Ranch Dressing or From-scratch Italian Dressing
• Arugula Salad— a simple, classic salad
• House Salad
• Tomato Bruschetta
• Crusty bread served with Bread Dipping Oil

One Pot Pasta Recipes