Tea is not just a drink. It’s an ingredient that belongs in your kitchen cabinets right next to salt and pepper. You can use tea to infuse many dinner dishes with extra flavor, from soup to ribs, and chicken to pasta. Here, we’ve rounded up some of the most delectable tea-infused pasta recipes around, so that next time you boil pasta, it will get an exciting tea-based makeover.
1) Green Tea Pesto Pasta
Pesto gets an extra dose of green in this recipe from Jackie Newgent, a professional chef, recipe developer, and nutritionist. Here, she adds unsweetened, freshly brewed green tea to pesto for a healthy infusion. The green tea joins classic pesto ingredients basil leaves, pine nuts, oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and hot pepper flakes, combining them with peas and garbanzo beans to make a creamy version of pesto. Low calorie, this green tea pesto will keep your taste buds and your gut happy.
2) Shrimp & Spaghetti with Matcha Cream Sauce
This recipe from J-Simple Recipes pairs spaghetti, shrimp, and spinach with a matcha-based cream sauce. Fresh cream, mozzarella cheese, matcha powder, salt, and pepper mix together to make the creamy green sauce. The author claims, “The colors of the matcha powder, shrimps and spinach are vivid,” and also promises, “This dish has a lot of cheese, but it isn’t heavy at all.” That means more room for seconds!
3) Linguini & Tomatoes with Matcha Cheezy Cashew Cream Sauce
This vegan recipe from Sugimoto America pairs classic Italian linguine and tomatoes with a Japanese-inspired sauce that throws matcha and cashews into the creamy mix. Start by blending cashews to create a puree. Add matcha, nutritional yeast, and lemon juice to build the sauce. Add to sautéed tomatoes and cooked linguine, then top with fresh basil for a picturesque dish!
4) Slow Cooker Ramen
This recipe from Bigelow Tea uses a green tea bag from Bigelow to create a savory ramen broth. The broth gets more lots of additional flavor from pork butt or shoulder, ginger, white miso paste, and seaweed. This recipe adds roasted pork belly to the fun, but you can skip if you’re not into it (though we can’t get enough of this on-trend meat). Making this dish does require a slow cooker and 8+ hours of patience, but it’s worth the wait!
5) One-Pot Spaghetti with Greek Tea, Feta, and Kalamata Olive
This Greek-inspired recipe from Eats Well With Others calls for Greek Mountain Tea (or green tea, if you’d prefer). Greek Mountain Tea is an herbal tea made from the dried parts of the Sideritis plant, which grows in Greece’s mountains. Greeks have enjoyed this tea for centuries, and even Hippocrates, the philosopher credited as the father of modern medicine, praised Greek Mountain Tea for its health benefits. Those benefits have been confirmed as of late. The tea’s benefits are often compared to the those of green tea, which you can substitute for mountain tea in this recipe. Bursting with Mediterranean flavor, this pasta dish uses not only the Greek Mountain tea, but also Greek culinary staples feta cheese and kalamata olives. Try today for a culinary road trip to Athens!
