Use it up
Zucchini Recipes: Silky Garlic Courgette Pasta
The best zucchini recipe for a summer glut. Cook courgettes down slowly with garlic and lemon into a silky pasta sauce that uses four at once.
- TIME
- 35 min
- SERVES
- 4
Most zucchini recipes treat the vegetable as a side. When you have four of them on the counter and more coming, you need one that eats a pile of them at once. This is that recipe: courgettes cooked down slowly with garlic until they stop being distinct pieces and become a silky, savoury sauce that coats pasta.
It takes four medium zucchini and about 25 minutes of mostly unattended cooking. The technique matters more than the ingredient list, and it is the same technique whether you call them zucchini or courgettes.
The two rules that make this work
Salt and squeeze first. Zucchini is mostly water. Grate it, toss with salt, wait ten minutes, then wring it out. Skipping this gives you a pale, watery pan instead of a sauce.
Cook it far longer than feels right. The instinct is to pull zucchini off the heat while it still has bite. Here you want the opposite — 15 to 18 minutes until it collapses. That slow collapse is where the sweetness comes from.
Using up a serious glut
If you have far more than four, this scales. Cook a double batch of the zucchini base and freeze half; it thaws into pasta sauce, a soup base, or a filling for an anything-in-the-fridge frittata.
Enormous late-season courgettes are still usable. Halve them, scrape out the spongy seeded centre with a spoon, and grate the firm flesh as normal.
When to stop rescuing a zucchini
A little softness or a bendy end is fine — that zucchini belongs in this pan today. Cut away a single soft spot and use the rest. Discard any that is slimy to the touch, has mould, has visible dark rot, or smells sour or fermented. Cutting mould off a soft vegetable does not make the rest safe.
What else eats a lot of vegetables
Soft tomatoes want the same slow-collapse treatment and make a natural partner to this pasta. If the crisper drawer has odds and ends of several vegetables rather than a pile of one, clean-out-the-fridge soup handles the mix better than pasta does. Any leftover basil or mint can be turned into a flexible green herb sauce before it wilts.
From fridge to table
How to make it
- 01
Coarsely grate the zucchini, or slice into thin half-moons. Toss with ½ tsp salt in a colander and leave for 10 minutes, then squeeze out the liquid with your hands. This is what stops the sauce turning watery.
- 02
Bring a large pan of well-salted water to the boil for the pasta.
- 03
Warm the olive oil in a wide frying pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and chilli flakes and cook gently for 1–2 minutes, until fragrant but not browned.
- 04
Add the squeezed zucchini. Cook for 15–18 minutes, stirring now and then, until it collapses into a soft, jammy tangle. Do not rush this — the texture is the whole point.
- 05
Cook the pasta until just short of al dente. Reserve a mug of pasta water before draining.
- 06
Add the pasta to the zucchini with a good splash of pasta water and the cheese. Toss hard for a minute until the sauce turns glossy and clings, adding more water as needed.
- 07
Finish with lemon zest, a squeeze of juice, black pepper, and torn herbs. Taste and adjust the salt.
