Vegan One-Pot Pesto Pasta Bake with Crispy Cheesy Crust

The end of summer is approaching and is one of the most interesting times of the year for us in culinary terms, because somehow we feel a bit like we're caught between two stools. A warm summer lies behind us, in which we all needed cooler dishes to refresh us (keyword Gazpacho Pasta) and didn't eat anything too hearty. You may not have looked in your oven for weeks either. And all of this is summer cooking as we love it, but after this long period of time, we're starting to crave a little variety ... and maybe something warm from the oven again?

With this dish, we hope to find a compromise for precisely this transitional period. We're firing up the oven and it will be a little more hearty, but it's ultra convenient and easy. We're making a casserole without pre-cooking and without frying. All you'll have to do is stand in the kitchen, chop a few ingredients, throw everything into the casserole dish and you can go straight back out onto the balcony, deal? Nevertheless, you'll end up with a super tasty pasta bake with the simplest sauce in the world and a vegan cheese layer that's even crispy.

The casserole itself tends to contain Mediterranean ingredients such as onions, garlic, tomatoes and Italian herbs, but also a few of our pantry favorites such as grilled peppers from the jar and olives. As you can see, you can vary here depending on what you have in the kitchen at the time. More fresh vegetables, such as eggplants or zucchinis, for example, are perfect.

The easiest casserole sauce in the world comes from byodo. It's their vegan pesto rosso and it landed our office at the top of our pesto charts with the very first spoonful. The pesto is not at all greasy, which would make your casserole end up swimming in oil, but fabulously creamy. It contains sun-ripened vegetables and herbs in 100% organic quality. The pesto rosso really tastes so good that we don't need anything else for our sauce. You just add water so that your uncooked pasta can cook in the oven. In addition to the pesto, we also have our pasta from Byodo - you can find both at your local health food store.

So, how do you make the vegan cheese layer crispy? The secret ingredient is panko, the coarser version of breadcrumbs (which would also work). We mix this with the vegan crumbled cheese, put it on top of the casserole at the end, and after 30 minutes of baking time, you can take the pasta casserole of your late summer dreams out of the oven.