An easy one pot pasta with fresh baby, cherry or grape tomatoes! Angel hair pasta is quick to cook, making it the perfect choice for a one pot pasta. It cooks in the tomato juices for amazing flavor. You’ll love the simplicity of this recipe and the fact that it’s endlessly customizable.
We are bowing out of tomato season with one more tomato pasta recipe!
While I’ve done a couple of recipes for fresh tomato sauce this summer (Butter Heirloom Tomato Sauce and Yellow Tomato Sauce, in case you missed them), this is a quicker and easier way to turn your fresh tomatoes into a bowl of pasta. All in one pot.
You will love the simplicity of this recipe, how easily it comes together and the fact you only have one dish to wash! A bowl of this pasta is a super satisfying dinner, or the base for a bigger meal. Add faux meatballs, extra veggies, extra cheese, whatever your heart desires!
The success of this recipe will be somewhat determined by the quality of your tomatoes, so peak summer tomatoes will be incredible but off season just get the best you can manage. A little extra salt and butter can be a good idea when you’re concerned your tomatoes are lacking.
How one pot pasta works:
For the uninitiated, one pot pasta recipes involve cooking the dried pasta in the sauce, rather than cooking your pasta in one pan and your sauce in another. This gives your pasta dish a distinct creamy, velvety texture, from the starch that the pasta leaches out while it’s cooking. If you’ve ever tried cacio de pepe, where the sauce is formed mainly from pasta cooking water, you’ll know what I mean.
Angel hair pasta is perfect for one pot pasta recipes! It’s the quickest pasta to cook so it makes the dish come together super fast. And because of how fine it is, you don’t need as much vegetable stock to cook it, so I feel like the tomato flavor gets to stay front and centre a little more.
Ingredient Notes and Swaps:
- I use cherry or grape tomatoes, but peeled and chopped larger tomatoes would work too. You’d just need to watch the liquid ratios because different tomatoes would give off different amounts of liquid. Start with a smaller amount of vegetable stock, and add more if you need to.
- While I consider basil the perfect herb for this dish, fresh parsley is a great addition too. Use either, or both, depending on what you have to hand.
- For the cheese, you want parmesan or something similar. I use a generic Italian hard cheese that is free from animal rennet, which is an ingredient in legit parmesans.
- Being honest, I can’t really recommend a good way to lighten up or veganize this recipe, I do feel like cheese and little bit of butter are important for this particular recipe. I would instead look at making a roasted cherry tomato sauce (this is a good bet) if you want a simple vegan tomato pasta.
Scaling up and storing
This recipe makes two big adult portions, or four smaller ones, so it’s not a big batch. Two reasons for this:
- Before we add the pasta, we saute the tomatoes in some garlic, balsamic vinegar and butter and we let that cook down to get a little sticky. For this to work, it’s ideal to have a single layer of tomatoes at the bottom of the pan. If we doubled the recipe, they would just boil instead of saute. It’s not the end of the world, but it won’t be quite as good.
- The downside of one pot pastas is that they don’t keep all that well. The starch which makes it dreamy at the start will harden and congeal in the fridge, and can turn a little too gloopy. So I would not plan to make extras of this recipe. If you do have leftovers, keep them for sure, but you’ll want to add a fair bit of water when reheating to salvage the texture.
More Cherry Tomato Pasta Recipes
One Pot Angel Hair Pomodoro
Ingredients
- 7 oz (200 g) angel hair pasta
- 1 lb (500 g) cherry tomatoes, halved
- 6 cloves garlic, minced
- 2 tsp balsamic vinegar
- salt and pepper, to taste
- 2-3 cups (475-700 ml) vegetable stock
- 1 Tbsp (15 g) butter
- 1 cup (100 g) parmesan or Italian hard cheese
- 1 bunch basil, and/or flat leaf parsley
Instructions
- Heat a little olive oil in a wide, deep pot. Over a low to medium heat, saute your tomatoes and garlic until the garlic becomes fragrant and soft.1 lb cherry tomatoes, 6 cloves garlic
- Add the balsamic vinegar, butter, and a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper. Continue to cook the tomatoes, stirring frequently, for about 5 minutes. The tomato juices, butter and balsamic will come together to make a slightly sticky coating for the tomatoes.2 tsp balsamic vinegar, 1 Tbsp butter, salt and pepper
- Add the pasta to the pan, and then pour in 2 cups of the vegetable stock. Mix things around as best you can to stop the pasta sticking together. At first, the pasta is still very hard and will sit on top of the tomatoes a bit. But after a minute or two it will become more pliable and will be immersed in the vegetable stock.7 oz angel hair pasta, 2-3 cups vegetable stock
- Now you can leave it to simmer on a very low heat, covered, for about 5 minutes. Check in on it regularly – it needs to be stirred often to stop it sticking to the bottom. Add additional vegetable stock if the pan starts to dry out before the pasta is cooked and just a light coating of sauce remains. If it's too dry and sticky, add some extra vegetable stock to loosen it up. If there's a lot of liquid left and it feels soupy, just continue to simmer it uncovered for another minute or two until it cooks down.
- Once the pasta is cooked al dente, add the cheese to the pan and mix through until it is melted. It will combine with the starchy liquid in the pan to make a sauce.1 cup parmesan or Italian hard cheese
- Turn off the heat, mix the basil through the sauce, and it's ready! Serve immediately.1 bunch basil
Made this last night and it was fabulous! Used standard spaghetti noodles instead of angel hair pasta. Will definitely make on a regular basis, delicious!
So happy to hear this, thank you so much for the feedback! 🙂
This came out amazing! I missed the part of not cooking the pasta 1st (oops) but it still very yummy!!