Our avocado pasta recipe makes an easy creamy avocado pasta sauce that you can serve at room temperature or heat up, combine with any fresh or dried pasta of your choice, and jazz up with grilled chicken or smoked salmon. A popular Italian-Australian pasta of the 1980s and 1990s, we think it’s time this retro-classic made a comeback.
We don’t get out much these days – we’ve just moved house during the pandemic for the third time and we’re pretty much staying at home, as we have been since early 2020 – which means that when we’re not testing recipes for our Cambodian culinary history and cookbook, we’re either testing my Russian family recipes for another cookbook, or we’re digging deep into our past for culinary inspiration.
Our distant past in Australia is where I found this easy avocado pasta recipe for a creamy avocado pasta sauce that you can serve at room temperature with a spiral-shaped fusilli pasta, as I love to do, or you can heat it up, and you can combine it with any fresh pasta or dried pasta of your preference.
You can also serve this avocado pasta with grilled chicken or smoked salmon, both of which were hugely popular additions for this avocado pasta in Australia when we used to order the popular Italian-Australian pasta way back in the late 1980s and 1990s. However you wish to serve it, we think it’s time this retro-classic made a comeback.
Before I tell you about this easy creamy avocado pasta recipe, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-funded. If you’ve used and enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by supporting our original, epic, first-of-its-kind Cambodian cookbook on Patreon. Or, you could buy us a coffee. Although we’ll use our coffee money to buy cooking ingredients for recipe testing instead.
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Avocado Pasta Recipe for a Retro Italian-Australian Pasta Classic
My ‘avocado lady’ here in Siem Reap came through again with another bounty of beautiful Cambodian avocados that she sources direct from local avocado farmers in Cambodia’s mountainous Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri provinces, where, with their fertile volcanic soil, so much of Cambodia’s wonderful produce is grown.
Unlike the last order of avocados that she delivered, which were so long and slender that our friends on social media mistook them for cucumbers, these avocados were perfectly round. We’ve never seen avocados like these here in Cambodia before, but they were full of flavour, if a little less creamy than the previous avocados we bought from her, which made these avocado smoothies.
These latest avocados were still creamy enough when mashed to work as a fantastic avocado pasta sauce and before you exclaim “what?!”, don’t knock it until you try it. This avocado pasta recipe was part of my pasta repertoire when Terence and I first moved in together during my first year at university in Sydney – into a dimly-lit Balmain terrace house basement with a serious rising damp problem. Sigh…
While I don’t miss the smell of mouldy walls on a wet winter’s morning, I do miss so many smells that I associate with those years in Sydney, including fragrant Italian basil growing in pots in our tiny backyard. This recipe, and the fact that I’m cooking retro dishes from the 80s and 90s, gives you an idea of how homesick I am — or perhaps I’m just nostalgic for far simpler times.
Tips to Making this Avocado Pasta Recipe
I only have a few tips for making this avocado pasta recipe as it’s one of the easiest pastas you can make. I recommend using dried fusilli spiral pasta as it’s really made for sauces such as these, as the creamy avocado sauce clings to every bit of the surface of the pasta.
You really only need to mash ripe avocados with a fork to reach a creamy consistency for our avocado pasta recipe. If you’re struggling to get a creaminess then your avocados are not ripe enough. Simple as that.
If you research more contemporary avocado pasta recipes, you will see instructions for ‘processing’ the avocado sauce in a food processor or blender but that’s really not necessary.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw this avocado pasta sauce being made at an Italian restaurant in Melbourne in the late 1980s and the chef mashed the avocado with a fork and seasoned it and it was as simple as that. I’ve only ever done the same. I’ve never made this avocado pasta sauce in a food processor.
If you’re tempted to use a food processor to make this avocado pasta recipe, think about how authentic guacamole is made in Mexico. The best guacamole is the simplest guacamole, mashed with just a few ingredients. That’s all you need to do.
What’s essential when making this avocado pasta recipe is to work quickly and to season the avocado pasta sauce to your taste. Follow our recommended amounts below, but use them as a guide and by all means add more salt, pepper, chilli flakes, cheese, etc, to suit your taste.
Avocado Pasta Recipe
Ingredients
- 250 g dried fusilli spiral pasta
- 1 large avocado
- ½ tsp lemon/lime juice
- ½ tsp sea salt or to taste
- 2 tbsp quality virgin olive oil
- 2 tbsp fresh basil leaves roughly chopped
- ½ tsp ground pepper or to taste
- 4 tbsp Pecorino Romano cheese grated
- 2 tsp dried chilli flakes or to taste
- 2 tbsp homemade dried sourdough breadcrumbs
Instructions
- Boil the dried fusilli spiral pasta for 8-10 minutes or as per the instructions on the packet – or prepare an alternative pasta of your choice.
- While the pasta is boiling, pit the avocado, scoop out the avocado flesh and transfer it to a large mixing bowl, and mash it well with a fork.
- Add the lemon/lime juice and salt and pepper to the mashed avocado and combine well; if it’s not to your taste, add more seasoning.
- Roughly chop the fresh basil leaves and grate the cheese.
- Drain the pasta, keeping a couple of tablespoons of pasta water aside.
- Toss the pasta into the mixing bowl, add the virgin olive oil, two tablespoons of grated Pecorino Romano cheese, roughly chopped fresh basil leaves, a tablespoon of pasta water, and combine well to ensure the pasta is coated well.
- Taste, and add more salt or pepper to taste, and, if necessary, the other tablespoon of pasta water if the sauce needs thinning.
- Distribute between bowls, sprinkle with chilli flakes, homemade dried sourdough breadcrumbs, a tablespoon of grated Pecorino Romano cheese, and garnish with a few basil leaves, and serve immediately.
Nutrition
Do let us know in the comments below if you make this avocado pasta recipe as we’d love to know how it turns out for you.
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