Lemon Pasta Sauce

This creamy lemon pasta recipe is easy to make and filled with a combination of bright and refreshing, and savory flavors.

If you're looking for an easy vegan dinner recipe, look no further!

This pasta is perfect for a simple vegan lunch recipe, dinner, or even as a side dish if served with angel hair pasta.

This lemon garlic pasta sauce is also a great recipe for meal prepping because it's delicious when served fresh but reheats really well.

Lemon: The lemon is the star of the show in this recipe, so we want to use fresh lemon juice if at all possible. You'll notice a much brighter and fresher flavor.

When zesting the lemon you'll want to make sure you're only getting the very top of the lemon zest. If you zest the white part of the lemon you'll get a much more bitter flavor rather than a light and bright flavor.

Garlic: Just like the lemon, you'll want to use freshly minced garlic in this recipe for the best flavors possible. The garlic is really important for flavor in this lemon garlic pasta sauce so make sure not to skip it.

Olive Oil: I recommend using extra virgin olive oil because it does a much better job in the higher heat needed to cook this sauce.

Broth: Use an organic vegetable broth in this sauce recipe or make your own using my recipe for Vegetable Scrap Broth.

Oat Milk: I like using oat milk as my plant based milk of choice here. You can use almond milk or cashew milk if that's all you have on hand.

Cornstarch: The cornstarch will thicken the sauce so it's really important not to skip this.

A little trick that I love is to mix the cornstarch in with the vegetable broth before adding it to the pan. This will help it mix in a bit easier.

Spices and Herbs: I just used a simple combination of salt and pepper for my spices and it does the trick with bringing this lemon pepper pasta to life.

I also used fresh basil for serving but you can sub the basil for parsley if you prefer. The herbs are important because they add such great freshness to this lemon herb pasta, yum!

See recipe card below for quantities.

This pasta is really easy to make but it's important that you follow the step by step process to make it just right.

Start by combining the olive oil and minced garlic in a pan and cook it over medium heat for about 2 minutes until the garlic becomes fragrant. You'll want to keep an extra close eye to make sure the garlic doesn't burn.

Then add in the cornstarch, broth, oat milk, salt, and pepper. Whisk it together really well so the cornstarch is mixed in. Continue to cook over medium heat for 5-10 minutes so the sauce reduces and thickens nicely.

Remove from heat and allow it to cool slightly. Add in the lemon juice and zest and mix together well before tossing in the pasta.

This vegan lemon pasta is so yummy but if you add the lemon to the sauce while cooking, you might notice a really strange phenomenon... your garlic turning blue! This is due to a reaction with the acid in the lemon juice. You can read more about that in this article about why acid turns garlic blue.

Substitutions and Additions

This pasta is already vegan and is gluten-free, just make sure you use a gluten-free pasta to serve with if you can't have gluten in your diet.

If you want to make this a lemon butter pasta, simply swap the olive oil out for a vegan butter. The lemon garlic butter will cook in the pan at the beginning of the recipe the same way the olive oil does in the original version of the recipe.

If you want to add more greens to this dish simply add a handful at the end of cooking. You can add spinach and make lemon spinach pasta, or add a handful of kale to make it lemon kale pasta.

It's totally up to you what type of noodle/pasta you want to toss in your creamy lemon garlic pasta sauce. I made it lemon spaghetti but any type of noodle will be delicious.

If you enjoyed this vegan pasta recipe, be sure to try some of these other recipes next: