3 Delicious & Easy Pastas in Under 15 Minutes

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Some of the best pasta sauces don’t simmer for hours – they happen FAST!
If you’ve been reaching for jarred sauce because homemade pasta sauce feels too time-consuming, then get ready to level up your weeknight cooking.
These three quick and easy pasta sauce recipes build restaurant-quality flavour in the exact time your pasta boils.
Maximum flavour, minimal time!

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RECIPES:
Arrabiata – https://www.andy-cooks.com/blogs/recipes/arrabiata-sauce
Pesto alla Genovese – https://www.andy-cooks.com/blogs/recipes/pesto-alla-genovese
Alfredo – https://www.andy-cooks.com/blogs/recipes/fettucine-alfredo

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
00:31 Arrabbiata
09:08 Pesto
11:54 Fettuccine

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Director, Chef and Host: Andy
Producer: James Threadwell
Videographer: Ben Hasic
Editor: Caleb Dawkins
Kitchen Manager: Sarah Allchurch

#pastasauce #pastarecipes #easypasta #easyrecipes #weeknightmeals

Believe it or not, some of the best pasta sauces happen fast, not slow. Today, I’m going to show you three incredible restaurant quality pasta sauces that do not take that long to pull together. In fact, I guarantee you can make these sauces in a faster time than it takes for the pasta to cook. But one of them only has five ingredients. Let’s get stuck in. Need some pasta. [Music] What if I told you that some of Italy’s most famous and classic sauces are actually faster to make from scratch than they are to open a jar? It’s probably not quite true, but it’s not far off it. So, we are going to make arabia, which is a very classic kind of spicy tomato sauce. There’s a few different versions of this one, so don’t come at me if your version is not the same as mine. First things first, we got to get the pasta cooking. Now, even in my intro, I said we’re going to start from when the pasta starts to boil. And I’m so confident this one takes even less time that the pasta water is already boiling. So, I got 500 g of penet here, which will be enough for four people or two people if you like eating a lot of food or a lot of pasta. You don’t need heaps of water in here. I’ve probably got 2 L of water. And we just need a big pinch of salt. Make sure you season your water. It doesn’t need to taste like the ocean. It also doesn’t need any oil in there. All the oil does is come to the top and it doesn’t do anything at all. Pasta goes in and then we start the timer. Use the time it says on the packet, minus 2 minutes, start tasting it. Says 10 minutes on this packet. In uh 8 minutes, I’m going to start tasting this. As soon as your pasta goes in, give it a stir. And then you’re going to stir it two or three more times throughout the cooking. It’s going to make the pasta cook evenly. And the stirring action is what stops it from sticking together, not the olive oil in there. Just going to move this to this other burner. And because it’s not quite boiling again yet, I’m going to put a lid on it. I’m going to put another saucepan on the heat. Turn the heat down to medium. And we’re going to add a couple of tablespoons of good quality olive oil. Yum. Garlic. Italian food doesn’t actually use that much garlic, so I’m going to use way more than they probably would in Italy. Especially in the north, I believe they use hardly any garlic. We’re just crushing that and putting it in the oil. We don’t need to cut it. We don’t need to chop it up. If you don’t want to, you can. Cooking the garlic is going to teach you all about time and temperature control. What we want to do here is slowly open the garlic up. And if we do that over 3 or 4 minutes, it’s actually going to be edible. This garlic, you’re going to be able to chew on it. And yes, you’re going to have garlic breath, but it’s going to be delicious. What we’re trying to do is infuse that oil with that garlic. Little pinch of salt. And we’ll let that slowly come up to temperature. We don’t want the garlic to get too brown. It will go bitter. We’re trying to get the sweetness out of it. Now, my pasta water is up to boil. I’m going to give it another little stir. Keep that working around. Next up, good quality tin tomatoes. Whole tin tomatoes. They’re the better quality ones than the diced tin tomatoes or the crushed tin tomatoes. Put them in a bowl like this. Make sure you got a clean hand and you’re going to crush them. Just do it slowly, otherwise you might end up with tomato juice all over your nice shirt. That’s never fun. That’s what we’re looking for. A little bit of gar, a little bit of garlic, a little bit of browning. We don’t want that to get too dark. We don’t need this to be like fully pureeed, but you just don’t want any big bits of tomato. Our garlic has pretty much done its job now. Now it’s got a nice light color. And at this point, if you were having a date over and you didn’t want really gnarly garlic breath, you could actually pull that garlic out if you wanted to. You could also crush it a bit more or just leave it in. I love chewing on big pits of garlic. Caitlyn, not so much. So, I’m going to squash this down a little bit more. See how easy that squash is now cuz it’s pretty much fully cooked. I think it’s important mentioning here that this isn’t traditional Italian cooking. And the reality is that in Italy, dishes are cooked differently all over the country. There is a one dish later on as well which is kind of a favorite but has got a bit of a kind of a fauxar attached to it these days and is definitely not a traditional Italian dish. It’s an American Italian dish. Our garlic’s good to go. It’s time to add our dried chili. Add as much or as little as you want. You’ll find again traditionally in Italy they use a little bit of chili. They don’t use heaps of chili. They use it to kind of flavor or perfume the oil, not necessarily to have it like spicy hot like you would in like Thai food. Heat back up and go the tomatoes. Stir that through. Just be really careful. If your oil’s too hot, those tomatoes are going to boil really quickly and splatter. Now, we really want to cook these out for at least four or five minutes, this tomato, you just don’t want that raw tomato flavor. So, you will have to cook it out for that amount of time before we add our pasta. Just going to give it a little season with salt. And then, let’s go cut some herbs before we start checking our pasta. We got a little bit of basil here that we’re going to chop. And then we got quite a lot of parsley for this one. Turn that down. You don’t want that to go too crazy for a couple of reasons. You don’t really want it to burn or catch. It’s also kind of dangerous. Hot tomato sauce on your skin is going to hurt. So, the basil I like to just tear up. I think when you cut basil, it sometimes kind of bruises it. Just tear it up into small pieces. I don’t know if that’s like a placebo effect or something. This torn basil thing, but I don’t know. I like it. It’s quite a delicate leaf basil, isn’t it? Then we got a bunch of parsley here. Now, in a restaurant, you would pick this. You know, if I was running a restaurant, I’d make my chefs pick that before we cut it. At home, I’m not going to bother. Just going to roll it up tight and then run a knife through it. I just want to run a knife through it once, too. I don’t really want to kind of like come back over this and get it really really fine. I find when you do that to herbs, they it’s when they start tasting a little bit grassy cuz you’ve kind of bruised them so much. So, once you get to the end, should be good to go. If you’ve got a few big bits around the outside, pull those to one side and just go through again once more. But done. This is home cooking, not fancy restaurant cooking. So, our sauce is almost ready. Our pasta is almost ready. We’ve got our herbs ready to go. We’ve got some cheese, some delicious pecorino, which is one of my favorite cheeses. And in fact, I actually just love eating this cheese like it is sweet, a little bit nutty, yum. So, let me tell you a little bit more about back to the pasta. Beep. All right, let’s check our pasta. So, take a piece out carefully, put it on a board, cut it open, and have a look. You can see here there’s still like a white ring in the inside. That usually means that the pasta’s not quite cooked yet. The other way to check if it’s cooked or not, just to eat it. It’s pretty close, though. All right, our pasta is cooked. We’re going to drain it over a bowl because we want to keep some of that pasta water. That’s why we don’t use that much pasta water either, cuz it becomes nice and full of all that extra starch that’s come off the pasta. You don’t need all of it. Drain that. Stir the sauce through. We’re going to have a taste of the sauce quickly. See where we’re at with seasoning. Wow. Delicious. Little pinch of salt. And our pasta goes. Stir that through. So, why the pasta water? Well, you want to use a little bit of that starchy pasta water. Helps emulsify the sauce. It’ll thicken it up slightly. If you use too much, obviously, it’ll make it it’ll make it wetter, which is also a good thing to do. If you if you start mixing this and you’re like, “Oh, there’s not enough sauce on add a little bit of that pasta water and make a mess everywhere. This is the beauty of using one of these saucy air pans. You can toss it like this, which will help that pasta water emulsify nicely into the sauce. And even more important when you’re making other sauces that you’re trying to put cheese through. We’re going to put cheese on the top of the sauce, not necessarily through it. Look how glossy that looks though. Delicious. Okay, all the basil goes in. Most of the parsley. Toss that through. Time to serve. How easy is that? Pretty simple to serve this one. Oh, make a mess. I was about to say carefully place it into a bowl so you don’t make a mess you got to clean up. And then I dropped it all into a bowl. Bit more parsley on top. As little or as much pecarina on the top. And if you’re like me, it’s usually a lot protein and all that, you know. And a little drizzle of really good olive oil. So there you go. Arabia. It’s quick to make. It’s cost effective to pull together. And it tastes way better than any jar sauce you’ll ever buy. And if you’re someone that’s already starting to type, what about the protein? and do like the Italians do and have a grilled piece of fish or a grilled piece of chicken on the side afterwards. Let’s have a taste. That looks like it’s going to burn my tongue. I’m going to do it for you. It’s delicious. It’s warm. It’s comforting. And it’s the bowl of pasta that you kind of expect if you went around and had lunch at one of your mates non houses. Make this dish. It’s amazing. [Music] This next sauce is super easy and super elegant and it only has five ingredients. We’re doing a classic pesto to go with pasta and the pasta that we’re using is forcelli. The reason I love this pasta for this dish is all those little curls have all these little spaces for all that pesto to get caught into. So we got water going season it with salt. Then we’re going to add the pasta. So you can do this in a food processor. So how however traditionally basil is basil traditionally pesto basil pesto is made in a mortar and pestle. So we’re going to start by just adding one the single clove of garlic with a little bit of salt and breaking that down. Once you your garlic’s into like a nice paste like that, we’re going to add our toasted pine nuts and we’re going to start to break those down. Once you got something that’s like a dry peanut butter consistency, we’re going to check our pasta. Give that a mix. the mixing. Make sure it doesn’t stick together. Now, we’re going to add our parmesan. Now, you can just kind of cut pieces in there or it’s kind of easy if you just grate it in there. Just means you’re going to have less time to pound it out. The other thing we’re going to do is add a little bit of oil at this stage and then we’ll add the majority of the oil once our basil is in there. We’re going to do our basil in stages. So, now we’ve got this lovely paste. We can start adding our basil. Okay, you can add start adding basil like two kind of pinches at a time. I’m working that in. And until that’s broken down, don’t add any more. So, the reason that using a mortar and pestle is better than a blender is that I think just that action of the stone verse stone brings out a lot more of the oils and stuff in the basil and you get more of a vibrant flavor. But the trick is, can I do it in the time it takes for that for Sally to cook? I’m not sure, but we’ll soon find out. Okay, now most of our basil is broken down. We can start adding oil. We kind of want to do it like you would like you’re making a mayonnaise. Just a little bit at a time. Make sure you scrape down the sides and you’re getting everything. We’re also going to add a pinch of salt. Look, mom. One hand. Done. See, it’s easy. I’m not going to need heaps of pasta water for this one. I’m going to save a little bit. Just like that. Put our pasta back in our empty pot. Get all that pesto on there. Stir that through. Just a little splash of water. Time to plate. More parmesan and a drizzle of olive oil. And that is pesto pasta. Simple, elegant, and five ingredients in that sauce. That’s delicious. If you want to impress someone, make them that. They’ll love you forever. [Music] fetuccini alfredo. It’s uh it’s worth mentioning very early on in this segment that this is not a traditional Alfredo. This is an American Italian style Fredo. We will be using this delicious ingredient, cream. I fully understand that cream is not very common in most Italian pastas. However, it’s not not common, but it does exist. There is some Italian classic Italian pastas that do have cream. This is not one of them. Anyway, we’ll carry on. First things first, big water. Big water. Big water. Sound like an American. Big pot of water. Season well with salt. He goes crazy. The crowd goes wild. Fetuccini. And that goes. Let it spread out. And literally 30 seconds. That’ll be relaxed enough where all of it will be in the pot. We’ll come back to that in a second. So, what else? We’re going to need some streaky bacon. You can use smoked or you can use not smoked. Your preference. Some people don’t like the smoked stuff in here. I don’t mind it, but this is a non-smoked streaky bacon. You want the streakiness cuz you want some fattiness to it. Just going to cut it into pieces around 1 cm thick. That’s good to go. Got some fresh thyme here. We don’t need heaps of it. Thyme can be pretty strong, so you don’t want it to completely overpower everything. Say six nice sprigs. Say that four times quickly. Six nice sprigs. Six nice sprigs. Six nice sprigs. Six nice sprigs. And we’re just going to run our knife through that. We don’t have to go too fine, but lovely fragrance time. We got some garlic we’re going to crush. And then just run your knife through that again. Again, we’re going to cook this like we did in the first one. Slowly once the bacon’s rendered down a bit, so it doesn’t have to be too fine. We can probably start stirring our pasta. It’s time to get the sauce going. Put that to the side. A pan. Just a tablespoon of olive oil. That’s just to get the bacon starting. Going to render some of that fat out. So then the other thing we’re going to need is the cheese. Now the cheese isn’t just for the top of pasta. It’s also the main flavor in this pasta. The cream is the vehicle to carry the cheese flavor. So, we’re going to use quite a lot of that. So, to make sure we’re kind of ready, we’re going to grate that now. And the other thing we’re going to do now so that we’re ready just cut up some parsley. So, we’re starting to get some color on our bacon here, which is great. It’s what we’re looking for. Now, we’re going to add our garlic and our thyme. It’s really important that we keep moving that garlic now. Otherwise, it’s going to catch go all bitter. Now, we don’t want to lose any of that delicious color in the bottom of the pan. And I’m going to delaze a little bit of white wine. Now, if you don’t have any white wine, you can literally use a little bit of pasta water to do this. But you see how when I scrape the bottom of this, all that delicious flavor comes off, which is what we want. Once that wine’s pretty much reduced away, we add our cream. This is all about being really careful with your cream. If you boil this too hard, your cream is going to split, which is not what we want. We want the cream to stay together. We do want to reduce it a little bit, though, so it thickens nicely and sticks to our pasta. This is going to be tight, this one. I don’t know if the cream going to reduce in time. Bit of trepidation. What’s going to happen? How it cooks my pasta? I’m not sure. I do know that it’s really hot though. Few more minutes. We might be all right. Let’s have a taste. Good. Little bit of salt. Not too much. Some fine ground black pepper. Time to add the parmesan. Stir that through. That’ll help thicken our sauce, too, to have another taste. Oh, yum. Traditional or not, that’s delicious. I think doesn’t matter where you’re from. That tastes good. All right, it’s time to drain our pasta. We’re going to keep some of that water just in case we need it. Going to turn our heat down low cuz we don’t want that to reduce anymore. We also don’t want that cream to split. It’s really important. The cheese in there will help stabilize it. But the last thing we want is a split sauce. Pasta in the sauce. Give it a toss. We are going to need a little bit of that pasta water. All right, this is looking good. See here, it’s nice and saucy, but we don’t have any sauce left in the bottom of the pan. That’s what we’re looking for. We want the sauce on the pasta. Get some parsley in there. Stir that through. And if it does get a bit dry, just use a little bit more of that pasta water. Time to plate. Use a carving fork. Spin it around. Bit of the extra sauce. Little bit of extra parsley. More cheese cuz you can never have enough cheese. There you go. A traditional American fetachccini alfredo. I guess we better taste. It’s delicious. It’s rich. It’s indulgent. And it reminds me of growing up in New Zealand in the ’90s, cuz we didn’t know any better back then. As far as we knew, this was Italian food. Boy, was I shocked once I got to Italy. But it’s still delicious. You can’t deny it. So, there you go. Arabia, fetuccini alfredo, and a pesto pasta. All absolutely delicious and proof that flavor doesn’t need to take all day. Legends, thanks so much for watching. Like this video if you take anything from it. Subscribe if you’re not and let me know down in the comments what one you tried first. We’ll see you next week for another recipe. Peace.