Pasta with Mushrooms - Easy Champignon Pasta Recipe

Pasta with Mushrooms

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Pasta, or, as we habitually say, “makaroni”, is a world-famous food made from dough, a calling card of Italian cuisine.

In the old days few people knew that there are incomparably more kinds of pasta than were sold in a Soviet store, where the choice was limited to macaroni, shells and elbows.

Usually by pasta we mean packaged, dried pieces of wheat flour dough. But pasta is not limited to wheat flour; it can be made from rice flour, starch, the flour of various legumes and so on. Besides, pasta is not only dried: in home cooking the dough is often not dried at all, and freshly made dough shapes are used.

But pasta is just a dough of flour and water. Plain unleavened dough. The taste of pasta is determined first of all by the sauce or additions it is served with, for example pasta with ham. The whole point of pasta is in making the sauce.

The sauce is what turns dough into a delicious dish. Usually, how to cook pasta causes nobody any difficulty. You simply boil it. In a large amount of well-salted water. The cooking time is given on the package, unless it is a mix of low-quality flour and water.

Pasta sauces can be anything. Various ingredients, ways of cooking, a wide range of thickness – take your pick. Usually the thickness of the sauce is partly determined by the type of pasta it is made for. For a thin sauce, take shaped pasta with a ridged surface or even a complex structure.

Such pasta holds a thin sauce much better. Thicker sauces, or even mixtures of ingredients, often made by a complex technique and without added liquid, go wonderfully with almost any pasta. For example, a mushroom sauce can be made of almost any thickness.

It so happened that at home we mostly use no more than five types of pasta. For soups, the tiny filini. For a sauce like Bolognese or amatriciana – fusilli or capellini. And of course, spaghetti. But our favorite pasta, which suits most sauces best, is penne. Short tubes of pasta cut at an angle, like a writing quill. In fact, penne comes from penna, which means “feather” or “quill”. Penne with a ridged surface – Rigate (ridged) – is one of our most beloved kinds of pasta.
We really like pasta with mushrooms, spaghetti with mushrooms in particular. Usually, in season, we cook ordinary fried mushrooms, or fried mushrooms with onion, and use them as a sauce for pasta. Pasta with mushrooms is always delicious, as, by the way, are potatoes with mushrooms or mushroom pizza. Pasta with mushrooms – with fried champignons and onion.

More with mushrooms and pasta

Ingredients

2 servings

  • For the mushroom sauce
  • Mushrooms (champignons) 6-7
  • Onion 1 large
  • Garlic 1-2 cloves
  • Olive oil 3-4 tbsp
  • Salt, ground black pepper to taste
  • For the pasta
  • Pasta (penne, fusilli) 250 g
  • Water for boiling the pasta 2 l
  • Salt for boiling the pasta 14 g (7 g per 1 l of water)
  • For serving
  • Parmesan, fresh basil optional

Step-by-step recipe

Preparation

  1. The pasta with mushrooms whose recipe I give here is a simple dish and needs no special skills. You need fresh champignons, considering that the mushroom season is over or has not yet begun. And champignons are always on sale. Of wild mushrooms, porcini suit pasta best, and slippery jacks also work well, but I would not take chanterelles: their taste and aroma are too intense. You need good pasta, preferably a short one – penne, fusilli. Still, I think the usual spaghetti will do as well.

    Penne pasta.

    Fried champignons can already be a dish on their own, and combined with fried onion and good pasta, it is simply a delightful dish.

    You need fresh champignons.

  2. Slice the mushrooms and onion. Wash the fresh champignons and pat them dry with a paper towel. Cut each mushroom in half lengthwise, then into strips or wedges. It is very convenient to cut radially, the way orange segments are divided. Peel the large onion and cut it into thick strips. By the way, if you cut along the onion rather than across, the onion pieces are less likely to fall apart when frying mushrooms with onion and keep their shape better, and the pasta will not turn into mush.

    Slice all the mushrooms. Peel the large onion and cut it into thick strips.

Mushroom sauce

  1. Let us make a mushroom sauce from champignons with fried onion. Though it is hardly a sauce, considering it is made without cream, water or other liquid ingredients. But experience shows that this does not make the pasta with champignons “dry”. The whole process of frying the mushrooms with onion is done over medium heat, without covering the pan with a lid; the dish should end up with as little moisture as possible.

  2. Flavor the oil with garlic. In a frying pan, heat 3-4 tbsp of the best olive oil. Fry 1-2 peeled garlic cloves in it, first flattened with the flat of a knife. Fry the garlic until it begins to darken and immediately remove the cloves from the oil. The garlic’s task is to lightly flavor the olive oil.

    Fry 1-2 peeled garlic cloves in olive oil.

  3. Fry the sliced onion in the prepared oil. Stir the onion constantly so it browns evenly.

    Fry the sliced onion in the prepared oil.

  4. When the onion begins to turn golden, add the sliced champignons. Add salt and pepper to taste. Fry, stirring constantly, for about 10 mins: as little moisture as possible should remain, but do not dry the mushrooms out.

    When the onion begins to turn golden, add the sliced champignons.

    Champignons do not need any special or specific heat treatment, so there is no reason to be afraid. Champignons are quite safe mushrooms. Incidentally, ready fried mushrooms with onion are quite a dish in their own right, not only a sauce for another dish.

    Ready fried mushrooms with onion are, by the way, quite a dish in their own right.

Pasta

  1. Boil the pasta in parallel with the sauce. Bring 2 l of water to a boil and add 14 g of salt (7 g per 1 l of water). Cook the pasta until al dente, as the Italians do – when the pasta is fully done, you feel barely noticeable firmness inside. Still, if you cook for the time on the package, you will not go wrong.

  2. Drain the cooked pasta in a colander, let the water run off, and mix the pasta with the mushroom sauce. That is really all – the pasta with mushrooms is ready.

    Drain the cooked pasta in a colander, let the water run off, and mix the pasta with the mushroom sauce.

Serving

  1. Mix the pasta with the mushrooms and divide among plates. The dish can be sprinkled with grated Parmesan or Parmesan chopped with fresh basil. Optional.

    The dish can be sprinkled with grated Parmesan or with Parmesan chopped with fresh basil.

    Pasta with mushrooms is a dish to serve right away, without waiting for it to cool.

    Pasta with mushrooms

Calories and macros

710 kcal

Serving ≈ 370 g

  • Protein19 g11% of kcal
  • Fat26 g34% of kcal
  • Carbs95 g55% of kcal

100 g192 kcalProtein 5.1 gFat 7.1 gCarbs 25.6 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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