Tired of the same old red sauce? Spice up your next pasta night with this arrabbiata sauce recipe! We love this fiery Italian tomato sauce over penne.

Break out the red pepper flakes—we’re making arrabbiata sauce! This spicy Italian tomato sauce is one of my favorite sauces to serve over pasta. It’s insanely flavorful, with a generous pinch of crushed red pepper giving it a delicious kick of heat. It also happens to be easy to make in 30 minutes with 7 basic ingredients. I love having this arrabbiata sauce recipe in our pasta night rotation—I hope you will too!

How to Make Arrabbiata Sauce

My arrabbiata sauce recipe has 7 simple ingredients:

• Canned whole peeled tomatoes – If you can find them, use San Marzano tomatoes for the sweetest flavor.
• Crushed red pepper flakes – For heat. I use 1 1/2 teaspoons to give this sauce a spicy kick, but if you’re nervous about it getting too spicy, you can start with less and add more to taste.
• Onion and garlic – For savory depth of flavor.
• Extra-virgin olive oil – For body and richness.
• Cane sugar – I often add a pinch to balance the acidity of the tomatoes. If you find that your tomatoes are sweet enough to skip it, feel free.
• And sea salt – To make all the flavors pop!

Find the complete recipe with measurements below.

To make the sauce, start by sautéing the onion, garlic, and red pepper flakes. Cook until the onion softens, about 5 minutes. During this time, the red pepper flakes will infuse the oil with heat.

Then, add the tomatoes and their juices. Use a wooden spoon to crush the whole tomatoes against the sides and bottom of the pot. You want the sauce to be mostly smooth but still retain some texture. Stir in the sugar.

Simmer over low heat for 20 minutes to develop the flavors and thicken the sauce. Season to taste, and enjoy!

How to Use Arrabbiata Sauce

• On pasta. I love this sauce over penne, but feel free to use your favorite pasta shape. I often add a little pasta water to loosen the sauce and help it coat the pasta. Top with fresh basil leaves or parsley and Parmesan cheese.
• Over gnocchi. Make potato gnocchi from scratch, or use store-bought for a quick and easy dinner.
• On pizza. A spicier alternative to regular pizza sauce.
• In baked pastas or eggplant Parmesan. Making a recipe that calls for marinara? Feel free to use arrabbiata sauce instead! It would be delicious in a vegetarian lasagna or baked ziti.

How do you like to use this sauce? Let me know in the comments!

More Italian Sauce Recipes

If you love this arrabbiata sauce recipe, try one of these classic Italian pasta sauces next:

Roasted garlic tahini sauce has a rich, creamy texture and is infused with the flavor of sweet, savory roasted garlic cloves. Create delicious pasta suppers in an instant by adding the sauce to your favorite freshly cooked pasta shape. Or, keep a jar of the sauce in your fridge to use as a dip, sandwich spread, or topping for grain bowls.

This roasted garlic tahini sauce is adjacent to tahini dressing, which is a weekly staple in my home.

What distinguishes the sauce from a dressing it’s thicker, richer consistency. It’s suitable as a dip or a sandwich spread. But it’s downright ideal for mixing with freshly cooked pasta and a splash of hot pasta water.

The sauce isn’t my first experiment with tahini and pasta (or noodle) combination. Creamy tahini pesto and a curried tahini pasta salad are both favorites of mine, especially during the summer months.

This sauce, and the pasta that results from it, is reminiscent of alfredo. However, it’s a little lighter than the various cashew or cauliflower-based alfredo sauces that I’ve made over the years.

More importantly, it features the intense and irresistable flavor of roasted garlic.

The magic of roasted garlic + tahini

Roasted garlic and tahini are an ideal match.

Oven-roasting softens the aggressive, spicy kick of raw garlic cloves. The flavor of roasted garlic is very nearly sweet, which is a perfect counterpoint to the slight bitterness of tahini.

I’ve relied on the roasted garlic and tahini combo to make white bean dip and smashed white bean salad.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before I combined the ingredients into a sauce.

One jar, many pasta possibilities

While it’s good to have a go-to list of complete pasta recipes, it’s also so useful to have a trusty jar of sauce at the ready.

From there, you can dress up different pasta shapes and make any additions—protein or vegetable—that suit you.

A jar of marinara sauce is a household staple for me and many others, of course. But it’s good to mix things up, and it’s especially nice for those who don’t like or can’t tolerate tomato-based sauces to have a trusty alternative.

Once you’ve got a jar of roasted garlic tahini sauce in the fridge, you can take your pasta meals in many directions. Try adding roasted vegetables, such as eggplant, peppers, or cauliflower.

For something fresher and with more texture contrast, you can mix the roasted garlic tahini sauce and pasta with crisp, steamed veggies.

It’s so good with all manner of peas: shelled peas, snow peas, or sugar snap peas. (That combination is what you see pictured in this post!)

If the grain + bean + green combo speaks to you, you can create a pasta dish with crispy roasted chickpeas and lightly sautéed spinach or kale. Or you could use chicken-style soy curls for an even more protein-packed meal.

Any one, two, or three of these pasta dishes could appear on your dinner table over the course of a couple weeks. As written, this recipe will create four servings, enough for about 8 ounces of pasta + add-ins.

However, doubling the batch will give you something to freeze and use later. Increasingly, multi-tasking staple sauces like this one have become absolutely essential to my meal prep.

How to make roasted garlic tahini sauce

Step one: roast the garlic

To roast garlic, I begin by slicing the top of a bulb of garlic off crosswise. I drizzle some oil over the exposed cloves, then I wrap the whole bulb in foil.

This recipe calls for two bulbs of garlic, which sounds like a lot. But the beauty of roasting garlic is that even two bulbs won’t be overpowering in flavor. Oven-roasting mellows garlic in the best possible way.

Once you’ve prepared your bulbs for roasting, pop them into the oven for about 35 minutes.

After roasting, the garlic cloves will have shrunken and turned a golden color. Once you allow them to cool a little, you ought to be able to pop them out of the bulb by squeezing it from the bottom.

Step 2: Add the garlic to the tahini sauce base

After roasting the garlic, you’ll add it to the other ingredients needed for the sauce.

These include the usual suspects: tahini, water, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper. The olive oil helps to create an emulsified, silky texture when the sauce is added to pasta. Without it, the sauce is less smooth and luxurious.

I also add nutritional yeast to the sauce. This adds a hint of savory, cheesy flavor, which makes the sauce reminiscent of, but not identical to, alfredo.

Add all of these components to your blender or food processor. Squeeze the freshly roasted garlic cloves in after them.

Step 3: Blend (or process)

Finally, blend or process the ingredients into a silky sauce. Transfer it to a jar and store the jar in your fridge for up to five days, or freeze it for up to six weeks.

Optional step 4: Make pasta

If you’d like to make pasta with the roasted garlic tahini sauce, go ahead and bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boil.

Add eight ounces of any pasta shape to the water and cook it according to package instructions (or to your preferred texture).

When you drain the pasta, be sure to reserve about one cup / 240ml of the hot pasta water. Return the pasta, along with any other components you like (roasted or steamed vegetables, beans, toasted pine nuts, etc.) to the pot over low heat, along with the sauce.

Add a half cup / 120ml of the pasta water to the pot. Give everything a stir and heat it through. Continue adding splashes of pasta water as needed, until the pasta is creamy but has some lightness and looseness. Plate and enjoy!

Alternative serving suggestions

If you like the idea of this sauce but aren’t especially excited about pasta, there are many other things you can use it for.

A few bowls that would be especially good with the sauce spooned on top: quinoa beet bowls, warm winter squash bowls, and vegan harvest bowls.

Keep in mind that the sauce is thick, intended originally to be thinned with pasta water. I recommend diluting it with a few tablespoons of extra water if you use it for drizzling.

I’d use the sauce for all kinds of sandwiches. Roasted garlic is such a more interesting flavor than traditional mayo! It would be an excellent base for my vegan chickpea tuna with artichoke hearts and chickpeas, too.

Finally, you can try serving the sauce as a dip. It’s great with crudité, sure, but it’s also great for dunking sheet pan smashed broccoli florets or roasted cauliflower florets, crispy artichokes, or air-fryer mushrooms.

If you’ve been aiming to make more homemade staples and sauces lately—and especially if you love tahini—then this recipe will serve you well. It’s easy and reliable, and I hope you’ll enjoy it!

xo