Ina Garten is famous for recipes that are just as easy as they are delicious, including her Greek salad and her blueberry-ricotta breakfast cake.
One of Garten’s most popular summer recipes is her summer garden pasta. It’s also almost a no-cook recipe, since you only need to use your stove to boil the pasta.
However, while Garten’s summer garden pasta has only a few simple steps, you can’t whip it up right before dinner.
To create the sauce, Garten marinates the tomatoes, basil, and olive oil for four hours before serving with the cooked pasta, so it requires some planning ahead.
Despite the extra time, the end result was a delicious, easy dinner that was impressive enough to serve at a summer dinner party.
We had two Business Insider reporters put this recipe to the test — here’s how it turned out.
Ina Garten’s summer garden pasta requires just five main ingredients.
To whip up her dish, you’ll need:
- Angel hair or another kind of dried pasta noodles
- Parmesan cheese
- Cherry tomatoes
- Minced garlic
- Basil leaves
For seasoning, you’ll also need “good” olive oil — Garten wouldn’t have it any other way — plus salt, freshly ground black pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes.
We tried making the recipe with angel hair pasta, as Garten recommends, and with spaghetti. Both types worked well with the dish, suggesting you can make it with any kind of pasta you have in your pantry.
We started by halving the cherry tomatoes, the stars of this pasta dish.
Anneta opted for cherry tomatoes on the vine, while Erin purchased 2 pints of cherry tomatoes from her local Trader Joe’s.
Both worked for this dish, though the pint of tomatoes was slightly easier to slice in half and prepare, since they were already separated from the vine.
Garten’s recipe calls for 4 pints of cherry tomatoes to serve six. Since we were making a much smaller portion, we cut the recipe in half.
We then prepared the other ingredients for the marinated tomatoes.
Per Garten’s recipe, Anneta minced three cloves of garlic and julienned nine basil leaves.
By placing the basil leaves on top of each other and slicing through them a few times, she was done julienning in a matter of seconds.
This quick bit of chopping is about all the prep the recipe requires. If you want to save even more time, reach for jarred minced garlic — as Ina Garten likes to say, “store-bought is fine.”
We threw the ingredients into a glass mixing bowl.
We seasoned everything with half a teaspoon of salt, a few dashes of red pepper flakes, and freshly ground black pepper.
To top everything off, we soaked the tomato mixture in olive oil.
We used about half the olive oil Garten recommends. It was enough to cover the tomatoes and create a base of “sauce” at the bottom of the bowl.
We gave everything a good mix and then covered the bowl with plastic wrap.
Garten recommends letting the mixture sit at room temperature for about four hours, so find a good spot in your kitchen and don’t put it in the fridge.
We loved the ease of this meal — it reminded Erin of slow-cooker meals she’s made in the past, since it’s somewhat a set-it-and-forget-it dish, aside from making the pasta noodles.
Just before the four hours were up, we made the pasta noodles.
We added olive oil and salt to the pasta water before boiling it, per Garten’s instructions.
Anneta made the recipe with angel hair pasta, while Erin opted for spaghetti noodles she already had in her pantry.
Cooking times will vary slightly depending on the pasta you use, but Garten recommends cooking your noodles al dente.
Since angel hair pasta is so thin, it cooks much faster than other types of pasta, making this recipe even quicker and easier.
As the pasta cooked, we gave the tomato mixture another quick stir.
We were instantly hit with a delicious scent, reminiscent of a plate of bruschetta.
The combination of fragrant basil and sweet cherry tomatoes filled the kitchen with such a fresh aroma that it was easy to see why Garten included “garden” in the dish’s name — they’re the kinds of ingredients many home gardeners grow themselves.
Once the pasta was done cooking, we threw the noodles into a bowl with the tomato mixture and added the grated cheese.
We followed Garten’s advice and added freshly grated Parmesan cheese and fresh basil leaves, then tossed everything together in the same pot we used to make the pasta.
The Parmesan cheese really brought the sauce together, helping it coat the noodles.
The easy pasta dish looked beautiful, and it tasted just as good.
Marinating the cherry tomatoes in Garten’s mixture for 4 hours gave them a rich, intense flavor, and the olive oil, seasonings, and Parmesan cheese combined to create a rich sauce that coated every noodle.
We couldn’t stop snacking on the tomatoes as we tossed the pasta together, and Anneta said she’d definitely make them again for a cheese plate or a Greek salad.
Anneta thought the angel hair pasta was the perfect foundation for this dish. After her first bite, she completely understood why Garten recommends it. The airy and fluffy noodles balance out the richness of the tomatoes perfectly, ensuring that the pasta is still light, exactly what you want on a hot summer night.
Erin thought the spaghetti noodles also sopped up the delicious sauce, making it a more filling dish — it really depends on your personal preference.
We’ll definitely be making Garten’s summer garden pasta again, even when the season ends.
While we’re both huge fans of pasta dishes drenched in heavy meat sauces, we loved Garten’s pasta: It was unbelievably simple yet rich, and just as easy to prepare.
Between preparing the tomato mixture and cooking the pasta, we used only a handful of dishes and spent less than 10 minutes actively cooking.
The recipe was simple enough for a beginner to master yet impressive enough to serve at a summer gathering. Since it relies on ingredients many people already have on hand, it’s a dish we’ll definitely make again.
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