The Best Pasta Alfredo Recipe: Gluten-Free, Lactose-Free, and Only 3 Ingredients

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Finding Our Alfredo Recipe

We are big fans of easy, quick recipes. One of our recent favorite dinners when we can’t figure out what to eat (or we feel too lazy to cook) is pasta. There are tons of gluten-free pasta varieties available now, too, so it’s pretty easy to pick a noodle, a jar of sauce, and a protein and call it a day.

However, that can get boring after a while.

Don’t get us wrong – there are some great sauces out there that we still love! It’s just that although Isabelle’s Celiac Disease isn’t the only obstacle: we both have problems with dairy. That means that our only pre-made sauce option is some variation on red sauce. We both like red sauce on pasta, but it’s frustrating when that feels like it’s the only option.

As we’ve discussed, there are certain kinds of dairy that both of us can eat – namely goats’ and sheep’s’ milk varieties. Once we learned that we could find goats’ milk at our local grocery store, that really changed the game for us. We started making mac ‘n’ cheese and very creamy alfredo sauces.

While we liked these new options, we did find them to be more “special occasion” dishes than day-to-day pasta sauce options. Not only was the amount of cheese and milk needed getting to be expensive because we can’t use more accessible cow’s milk options, but these dishes felt too heavy. We also dabbled in vegan cheeses, but we ran into the same cost issue without the same cheesy taste that we wanted.

That’s when we decided to try something else out: a more old-school, traditional Italian pasta alfredo recipe.

What’s So Special About this Alfredo Recipe?

Sometimes it’s true that simpler is better. In the case of this alfredo recipe, that is definitely true. Basically, it relies on using cheese and butter (which we will talk about shortly) along with reserved pasta water (which we’ll also talk about).

Now, we were hesitant when we first tried this because we were using sheep’s milk pecorino romano. While the flavor is great for this kind of dish, sheep’s milk cheeses (like goat’s milk cheeses) tend to be lower in fat and have trouble melting. We’ve struggled with this in the past making mac ‘n’ cheese.

However, something about that starchy, hot pasta water makes the cheese melt pretty fast. It ends up far smoother and creamier than it seems like it should – in the best possible way.

Making Some Gluten-Free and Lactose-Free Modifications

Like we said, we use sheep’s milk cheese for this recipe because that’s something that both of us can eat safely. While we have suggested vegan alternatives in the past, this particular alfredo recipe really requires some kind of dairy in order for the cheese to melt. However, if you’re not vegan but are lactose intolerant or have an allergy to cow’s milk, then this should work fine.

We do use vegan butter for this recipe, but you could use a goat or sheep milk butter instead if you wanted to. While we have talked about some of the struggles that come with combining something dairy (pecorino) with something non-dairy (vegan butter), this is the one case we’ve had where that doesn’t seem to be an issue.

As for the gluten-free component of this recipe, you need to think about what gluten-free pasta you’re using (we have a whole post on different pasta options, but we’ll give you the run-down here):

1. Grain-based pastas are ideal for this because they produce water that is moderately starchy, much like traditional wheat pasta. These include: rice, brown rice, corn, or blended pastas (e.g. rice AND quinoa).
2. Legume-based pastas are very starchy – but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use them. For example, pure chickpea pasta will leave you with some very opaque pasta water, so less is definitely more when it comes to adding that water to your sauce.
3. Veggie pastas will not work for this recipe. While zucchini noodles (a.k.a. “zoodles”) or spaghetti squash can be great healthy alternatives, there won’t be any starchy water to work with (which is needed for this alfredo recipe to work).

Add-Ins

The nice thing about this alfredo recipe is that one you’ve made the sauce, you can throw in almost anything you’d like. We often add some simple salt, pepper, and Italian herb/garlic chicken, but sometimes we add veggies (spinach, tomato, and sweet peppers are some of our favorites for this). The important part here is to wait until the noodles are coated in sauce and that the sauce is the right consistency before you add these things in.

Alfredo Recipe