One pan pasta – quick, very easy and healthy recipes
One pan pasta (or one pot pasta) is a great technology that helps you to cook quick and easy various pasta dishes, all recipes require only one pan and save your time. I’ll try to explain the technology in simple words, so you will get it and you’ll be able to create your own recipes. Here are the examples of one pan pasta dishes. One pan pasta dishes suit any occasion – either a simple meal for poor student, or a dinner for rich guests.
The first important thing – proportions:
- 100 g of any pasta
- 220 ml of water (it can be increased, ~10-20 ml., f.e. if you use tomato paste and you want to have more sauce)
The 2d important thing – time for adding ingredients:
1. Ingredients that have to be precooked/fried (f.e. onions, mushrooms, carrots, meat)
2. Pasta + water + salt (don’t put it too much) + spices + ingredients that can be cooked along with pasta (f.e. tomato paste, precooked meat or frozen vegetables like pea or corn seeds). Your pan should be covered all the time. First, bring to a boil, stir and reduce heat to minimum. For cooking time read the package of pasta and add 2 min.
3. Ingredients that build sauce (f.e. cream); ingredients that don’t need longtime boiling (f.e. cheese, ham); and ready or precooked ingredients (f.e. precooked meat pieces, fried champignons). Put them in pan, stir, cover and wait 2-4 min. If you see that the sauce is too liquid – cook these 2-4 min. uncovered and stirring. Excess liquid will dry out.
4. Tender ingredients that will loose their quality when heated (f.e. cold-smoked salmon, lettuce, fried sesame seeds). They should be added after the cooking was finished. Right before serving. Just add them to the pan and stir. They will only warm up.
If you like al dente pasta, reduce cooking time in step #2, ~2 min.
These are my proportions for the rest of ingredients (I don’t mean that you need to put all this in one time, this is a list to help you to create and avoid my mistakes):
- 100 ml of cream
- 50 g of cheese
- 3-4 tbsp of tomato paste (be careful, real tomato paste contains only tomatoes and salt, Possible ingredients are water and sugar, but nothing more). If you are already cooking and your tomato paste appeared to contain starch – be ready to increase the volume of water.
- 100-150 g. of any meat products (ham, sausage, uncooked meat, minced meat, meatballs).
- 30-40 g. of frozen vegetables (pea, corn seeds, spinach)
List of what you should avoid to put in pan:
- Uncooked (fresh or frozen) mushrooms – they lose their fragrance and taste and turn to untasty pieces full of water.
To make the dish healthier – you may garnish pasta with some sliced vegetables (cucumbers, tomatoes or bell peppers), or if your pasta doesn’t contain meat – add some slices of ham (hot-smoked chicken or any other delicious meat product up to your taste) as a side dish.
All one-pan-pasta recipes with the exact amount of ingredients are here.