Roasted Garlic Alfredo Sauce is made into vegan Alfredo sauce and classically served with fettuccine pasta. Dinner turns fabulous with a super easy and delicious sauce made from scratch. It can be made ahead of time too so that dinner can be served in about 15 minutes.
Doesn't this look like perfect comfort food to you? It does to me too and it even comes out of a new cookbook titled Vegan Comfort Cooking.
It's a new book and is written by Melanie McDonald. You may already be familiar with Melanie and her recipes as she runs the vegan food blog A Virtual Vegan.
I'm also able to share one of these 75 Plant-Based Recipes with you. They will 'Satisfy Cravings and Warm Your Soul'.
The reason I picked this cashew Alfredo sauce is that, first, it's Alfredo Fettuccine and, second, because the sauce has lots of roasted garlic added.
The sauce is so simple and the garlic blends into the creamy sauce effortlessly.
I took some pictures of the sauce ingredients so you can see they are very accessible ingredients. Everything is included except the garlic. They are roasting at the moment.
You have a choice of using almond flour or ground almonds and leave it to me I did half and half. The ground almonds are underneath the almond meal. You can see it in the food processor in the next photo.
Ah! There are those beautifully roasted garlic cloves. It is two whole heads. You wrap the garlic in a foil packet and then roast until they are soft. The cloves pop right out of the peelings with just a pinch.
This cookbook has really been fun to thumb through. I can't wait to make some of these recipes right away. There are 75 of them all wrapped up in 5 chapters:
- First, We Brunch: You know those pages are going to get dirtied in the kitchen.
- Indulge Yourself: Hearty meals to turn to over and over again.
- The Munchies: A great variety to share with your friends!
- Sweet Talk: Lots of desserts and other sweetness.
- Bits & Bobs: Important extras for everyone's repertoire.
Here's a peek at the cover too. Vegan Comfort Cooking is available on Amazon as a softbound book with color photos and they also have it in a Kindle edition.
Hey! Look at that! The cover photo is of the Roasted Garlic Alfredo Sauce and Fettucine recipe (in the book you'll find it as "I Can't Believe It's Vegan" Roasted Garlic Alfredo. I really like pasta with great sauces.
Other pasta recipes on this blog that are super good are:
- Mediterranean Pasta Salad is so good and it's amazing how delicious pasta is when it's a cold salad.
- You can have fettuccine with a completely different flavor too with this Thai Curry Fettuccine.
- Slow Cooker Spaghetti Sauce is another classic but this time it's a red sauce.
Vegan Garlic Sauce
Roasting garlic is very simple and it is also very rewarding. If you ever get your hands on elephant garlic you're going to have to give those a try for spreading on crostini toasts. You'll be very happy.
So follow these directions in the recipe card below for roasting garlic and you'll also be on your way for an absolutely rewarding comfort food dinner.
📋 Recipe
Vegan Roasted Garlic Alfredo Sauce with Fettuccine
Ingredients
- 1 teaspoon olive oil
- 2 large whole heads of garlic
- ½ cup (70 grams) raw cashews (soaked in boiling water for 15 minutes if you don’t have a high-powered blender, then drained)
- ½ cup (50 g) ground almonds or almond meal, packed
- ½ cup (56 g) nutritional yeast
- 2 cups (480 ml) unsweetened nondairy milk (I like to use soy milk for this recipe)
- 2 tablespoons (30 ml) fresh lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) white wine vinegar
- ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 2 teaspoons (10 g) salt, divided, plus more to taste
- 1 pound (454 g) dried fettuccine or other pasta of choice
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 425°F (218°C) and brush a roughly 10" (25.5cm) square piece of aluminum foil with the olive oil.
- Cut the top quarter off each garlic head with a sharp knife so the cloves inside are exposed. Then place the largest parts, cut side down, in the middle of the foil. Draw the foil up around them. Wrap and squeeze it tightly shut. Separately wrap the little pieces you cut off the top, too, and store in the fridge for another recipe.
- Place the foil-wrapped garlic heads in the oven, directly on the oven shelf, and roast for about 40 minutes. Check whether they feel a little squishy through the foil. Return them to the oven for a few more minutes if not. If they are done, remove and set aside until cool enough to handle.
- The garlic can be roasted in this way up to 4 to 5 days before you make the Alfredo and then stored in the fridge. I like to do it when I have the oven on to cook something else.
- Make the sauce by opening the foil wrapping and squeezing the garlic cloves out of their silvery, papery skins from the root end, straight into your blender. They will pop out really easily.
- Add the cashews, almonds, nutritional yeast, nondairy milk, lemon juice, vinegar, pepper and 1 teaspoon of the salt; then blend until completely smooth. Taste to check the seasoning and add more salt, if necessary
- Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Season with the remaining teaspoon of salt, add the fettuccine and cook for the time directed on the package. It usually takes around 8 minutes.
- When it’s done, scoop out about ½ cup (120 ml) of the boiling water and set aside before draining the fettuccine.
- Return the fettuccine to the pot and immediately add the sauce. Return the pot to the stove and allow it to warm through over low heat for 3 to 4 minutes. It will thicken up a little as it warms up and you can loosen it to your liking with the starchy pasta water that you set aside. You won’t need all of it; just add it a little at a time, if necessary. Serve as soon as the sauce has heated through.
- Leftover sauce can be reheated. It will thicken up when refrigerated, but just loosen it up with a little nondairy milk, warm through and it will be good as new!
Notes
Nutrition
Reprinted with permission from Vegan Comfort Cooking by Melanie McDonald, Page Street Publishing Co. 2019.
Ginny McMeans
That's wonderful Heidy! I'm glad you found this.
Danielle
I haven't made this yet but what does the wine vinegar add. If acidity isn't the lemon juice enough. I don't want to buy something else I'll never use again.
Ginny McMeans
It's for flavor Danielle. White wine vinegar can be used in many things and keeps a long time. It is milder and brightens up the taste.