The Absolute Best Way To Use Nutritional Yeast For Creamier Vegan Pasta

Nutritional yeast is a staple ingredient in a vegan pantry, and while it has tons of utility for flavoring all kinds of dishes, pasta may be the clear best use. Eating vegan isn't always as hard as it's made out to be, but there are some dishes where matching what you love about the original really is hard without things like dairy. Creamy pasta almost always relies on one of three things to get that rich taste and texture: cream, eggs, or cheese, all of which are verboten for people trying to cut out animal products.

Nutritional yeast solves one of those — no cheese — by providing a fermented flavor that is not only highly reminiscent of cheese but also has nutty, umami notes like a good aged parm. However, it doesn't tackle the creamy texture part, so Tasting Table reached out to Nisha Vora, the New York Times best selling author of the cookbook Big Vegan Flavor, to ask her about the best way to marry nutritional yeast and creamy vegan pasta.

Vora tells us the best way to use nutritional yeast is like parmesan in combination with other creamy vegan pasta recipes. Vora says, "You can simply stir it into the creamy sauce until well-combined." She also suggests a mixture that can be used as a great vegan base for pasta recipes, explaining, "You can even combine nutritional yeast with finely chopped walnuts (or pistachios) and use pasta water to create a creamy emulsion."

Vora gave us a starting point for the combo of chopped nuts and nutritional yeast, suggesting her lemon asparagus pasta as a great example of how the two can contribute to a satisfying creamy pasta. If you don't have the walnuts and pistachios she suggests trying, you can make a similar vegan sauce by soaking cashews as well. The nutritional yeast will provide much of the flavor, but Vora's recipe mixes in a lemon sauce, which shows that these nut sauces are just the beginning of building your pasta dish.

Once you've made the mixture, one of the best showcases for your creamy vegan pasta sauce base is Alfredo. With just some garlic and onions, lemon juice, and unsweetened nut milk, you can have a silky, satisfying Alfredo sauce that gets more than enough cheesy flavor from the nutritional yeast. Or try adding sauteed mushrooms for a meatier pasta sauce with a stronger umami flavor that goes great with sauteed greens.

And if you really want to surprise people, sub the vegan nut sauce in for cream in a pasta alla vodka recipe. The sauce will be just as smooth and sumptuous, while the vegan sauce will add even more depth of flavor than dairy. It's the kind of vegan variation so good that even your non-vegan friends and family will want to try the recipe.