Vegan Spaghetti Carbonara

Spaghetti à la Carbonara always comes with some kind of discussion. If you even dare to add cream to this dish, you can get the feeling that you’re not even worth eating it! Luckily, this faux pas can’t happen to us, because we don’t use dairy cream anyway.

Stupidly though, all the actual ingredients are also causing big troubles: bacon, egg, cheese. Except for the pasta itself, this Italian classic is really, really un-vegan. Instead of substituting each ingredient, we rather wanted to create a creaming vegan carbonara version that gives you a similar feeling like eating the original. Our sauce is based on cashews (there’s not even vegan cream in it, ha!) that gets an umami flavor from miso paste and nutritional yeast (we know people like to skip on these ingredients since they often don’t have them at home, but we can only look deep into your eyes and tell you always to have them in your kitchen).

There are plenty of choices to substitute bacon, but this one was an emergency solution once when I couldn’t find any smoked tofu in my fridge. But what I could find were jarred sun-dried tomatoes that already have a nice salty taste and a good bite. If you chop and fry them (add a few drops of liquid smoke, if you have it at home!), they become crispy but still juicy, that you can use for many other dishes as well (from pizza to bread).

When I took these vegan spaghetti carbonaras to the office for lunch, a few people tried them. My favorite comment: “It tastes like real spaghetti carbonara … with curdled egg. But good!” Well, … fair enough.