Roasted Eggplant Pasta

This eggplant pasta is flavor-packed with roasted eggplant & zesty marinara sauce! An impressive plant based dinner, it works for weeknights or parties.

Meet your new favorite dinner recipe. Yes, this eggplant pasta has got it all! It’s packed with savory and zesty flavor: tender roasted eggplant, zesty marinara sauce, and peppery basil. It’s 100% plant-based, but lacking nothing in the flavor department. Even better, this Mediterranean-style dinner is incredibly versatile: it works for weeknights and for serving to company! (Like your favorite jeans that work for going out or staying in, right?) There’s something about it that’s cozy but elegant at the same time. Curl up with your honey and make it on an evening in…or serve it on a big platter as a family dinner!

First, you’ll make roasted eggplant.

The first time we made this roasted eggplant, I took one bite and shouted “Wow!” (We love recipes like that.) I expected it to be good, but not that good. Roasting eggplant breaks it down into silky, savory tender goodness. Even with no flavoring, it tasted incredible. We dressed it up with a little grated garlic and chopped basil to take it over the top. You can serve this as a side dish, but it was so good we had to make it into this eggplant pasta. Here’s how to make Roasted Eggplant:

Chop: Cut 2 eggplants into 1-inch diced pieces.
Mix with olive oil and salt: Mix with 1/4 cup olive oil and 3/4 teaspoon salt. Eggplant soaks up the oil in an instant, so mix it right as soon as the oil hits its flesh.
Roast at 425 degrees: Roast for about 30 to 35 minutes until the eggplant is browned and tender. Because eggplant has so much water, it will deflate quite a bit. The roasted pieces come out much smaller!

No salting and draining for this eggplant pasta! Phew.

Many eggplant recipes call for letting the eggplant drain with salt on it for 1 hour to extract some of the bitterness from the eggplant. If you’re like us, you’ve probably wondered: is this extra step really necessary?

You’re in luck: it’s not! According to Epicurious, salting eggplant used to be conventional practice with eggplants years ago because they were more bitter. Today’s eggplants are bred to be less bitter, so there’s no need to waste an hour salting the eggplant. Now we know!

While it’s roasting, make the marinara.

This eggplant pasta is all about components. Roast the eggplant, make the marinara, boil pasta, and then stir them all together. Voila: dinner! The nice part about the component approach is it teaches you how to make 3 different things: roasted eggplant, marinara sauce, and eggplant pasta. You can serve the roasted eggplant as a side dish, or use the marinara as a pasta sauce in many other dishes.

This recipe stars our Easy Marinara recipe, which we designed to be quick and ultra flavorful. Here are the key elements to the sauce:

Fire roasted tomatoes: The flavor of fire-roasted tomatoes is sweet and mild, and they require less cooking than other canned varieties. (If you can’t find them, use the best quality canned tomatoes you can find.)
Garlic powder: As a shortcut to fresh garlic, this sauce uses garlic powder so you don’t have to dirty a knife. It melds in perfectly and adds great flavor.
Fresh basil: Fresh basil makes everything taste better! If you’re not growing it in your garden, look for it near the other fresh herbs in the grocery.
Balsamic vinegar: A hint of balsamic vinegar rounds out the flavor: it makes a subtle but important difference!

Cook this eggplant pasta to al dente. Please!

You absolutely must cook the pasta for this eggplant pasta to al dente. A lot of home cooks mess this up, resulting in limp pasta. What’s al dente? In Italian it means “to the bite.” It refers to pasta that is still firm on the inside when cooked. The ideal al dente texture is a tender exterior balanced by a firm bite with a fleck of white at its core. Here are our tips on how to cook pasta to al dente:

Boil the pasta in a large pot of salted boiling water.
While cooking, check pasta continually for doneness.
As soon as the pasta has a tender exterior but a fleck of white at its core, drain it! Even a few seconds can be the difference between al dente and limp noodles.

What type of pasta to use?

Honestly, you can use any type of noodle for this eggplant pasta! It works with any type of long or short noodles. The noodles we used are a fancy noodle called mafaldine that we found at our local grocery. Mafaldine pasta is a ribbon-shaped pasta with wavy edges on both sides, almost like a long and thin lasagna noodle. But really any noodle works! Here are some options:

Long pasta shapes: Spaghetti, fettuccine, linguine, bucatini, pappardelle, mafaldine
Short pasta shapes: Penne, rigatoni, shells, campanelle, fussili, spirali, radiatore, orechiette, farfalle, rotini, gemelli

The final flavor secret: capers!

The last thing you need to know about this eggplant pasta: capers add the final flair! What are capers? Capers are a berry of the caper bush that’s native to the Mediterranean. They’re round and dark green gray, about the size of a peppercorn. You’ll find them in Italian and Mediterranean recipes, most well known in chicken piccata. They’re served pickled, and you’ll find them in jars near the olives.

What’s so great about capers? They taste tangy, briny and salty, and add big flavor to any dish. Since this is a vegan pasta dish, instead of adding Parmesan cheese for salty savory flavor, we’ve added capers. If you’ve never cooked with them, prepare to fall in love.

This eggplant pasta recipe is…

Vegetarian, plant-based, vegan, and dairy-free. For gluten-free, use gluten-free pasta.