PASTAS & SAUCES
Creamy Low Carb Vegan Alfredo-esque Pasta & Pizza Sauce
You can have your pasta, and eat it, too!
To get creamy low carb vegan anything, you usually need to start with silken tofu and a nondairy milk like cashew milk. That’s your cream base, and while it’s not exactly flavorless, you should think of it as a canvas on which to compose something that will please your palette.
Italian cuisine is very approachable in that it usually just consists of a relatively small number of easily identifiable (like, what you see is what you get) high quality ingredients, combined with a simplicity often verging on minimalism. Italian food is peasant and worker food elevated to world class cuisine (or so says Stan Tucci), and that ‘keep it simple and natural’ ethos is what you should keep in mind when doing Italian anything. It’s also why I find Italy (not North American Italian restaurants!) so inspiring for food ideas.
To the silken tofu and nondairy milk base, good choices for additional ingredients would be onion powder, minced garlic or garlic powder of soft boiled garlic cloves, truffle sauce, smoked paprika, salt and pepper. To make it a bit more complex, you can add a tablespoon of herb-flavored extra virgin olive oil, a pinch of saffron and a dash of black salt (kala namak). Garnish with fresh parsley or basil.
That’s all a cream sauce needs for flavor-punch, and using silken tofu will give you a proper amount of complete protein. The pasta in this dish is shirataki, which comes in several forms, one of which is rather linguini-ish. The sauce also works well as a creamy base for flatbreads and pizzas, such as my low carb vegan phyllo dough pizzas.
And so, based on the foregoing discussion, the recipe for this creamy low carb vegan linguini sauce looks like this:
1 package silken tofu, ~400g
1/2 cup nondairy milk, consider cashew milk
1 tsp Tuscan herb flavored extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp truffle sauce
1 tsp onion powder
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
5–8 soft boiled garlic cloves
Fresh ground pepper to taste
Fresh ground black salt (kala namak) to taste
Fresh parsley to garnish.
This sauce makes 4 servings for pasta or covers one phyllo dough pizza.
Put all of the above (except for the fresh herb garnish) into a food processor or blender, and creamify everything. Add more nondairy milk to thin the sauce if you want a less creamy cream sauce. Warm on the stove before serving.
Usually each bag of shirataki noodles makes for one serving of the pasta part.
