3-Ingredient One Pot Vegan Pesto Pasta

Only 3 ingredients are needed for this unbelievably simple one-pot pesto pasta. The recipe as written is for a single serving, but it doubles and triples easily. It’s perfect for a weeknight meal or quick meal prep. Can’t tell you how many times I ate this during school terms when I had no time to cook. The best part is, you can use whatever pesto you want, so it never gets boring!

Perfect for Weeknight Dinners

I first cooked up this dish in mid-June of this year during the height of assignment and midterm stress. I was very grateful to find something tasty could be made for so little time and effort. Here’s the entry from my food diary on this meal:

boil some pasta in a non-stick, throw in some pesto, add a touch more salt, boom you have cuisine

Yep, it’s that simple. Obvs you don’t have to use a non-stick skillet, but it’s what I chose that day and makes cleanup quicker. Plus, boiling pasta in a shallow pan like a skillet distributes the pasta across a wider area and allows you to use less water. I didn’t even have to drain mine. I waited until there was only a little liquid left, then turned off the heat and added the pesto directly to the pan. (The leftover pasta water mixes with the pesto to help the sauce cling to the rotini.) Voila, easy weeknight one-pot meal.

What You’ll Need

This one-pot pasta recipe uses three basic pantry ingredients: dried pasta, water, and pesto. The variety of pasta can be anything: I’ve used everything from angel hair to rigatoni to bowtie pasta. The only varieties I would not recommend are very small pasta shapes, like orzo or tempestina.

I like to add some fresh veggies too—broccoli and spinach are great choices. I prep the veggies while bringing the pasta water to a boil.

Pesto already has a good amount of plant nutrients, usually in the form of herbs or another flavourful ingredient like sun-dried tomatoes, but if you add some veggies with the pesto, like I do with spinach in this recipe, you’re set for a pretty healthy meal!

Pesto Ideas

You are more than welcome to use a storebought pesto for this recipe. However, vegans should note that most storebought brands contain dairy so make sure to check the ingredients before buying. Two vegan varieties that I like are Sunflower Kitchen Basil Pesto and Martelli’s Arugula Pesto.

I love making pesto at home, personally, because there’s endless variation, so the same pesto pasta never gets boring. Here’s a couple of recipes I love that are easy to whip up:

• Dandelion pesto
• Sun-dried tomato pesto
• Mint basil pistachio pesto

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Recipe Notes

1. For one or two servings of pasta, use the ratio in the recipe above. If cooking more servings, reduce the water to be twice the amount of dried pasta by weight. For example, if you want to triple this recipe to make three servings of pasta, use 9oz dried pasta (255g) and 18oz water (510g).
2. I add 1/8 tsp of salt. You may need to add more or less depending on which pesto you are using. Keep in mind we are not draining the water from this pasta so you can’t salt the pasta water as generously as you usually would.

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