Dinner · 35 min · Amounts not specified
Pasta e fagioli
Bean broth is the sauce. A little pasta, not a bowl of noodles.
The sheet · 4 bowls · 35 min
easyWhy tonight. Bean broth is the sauce. A little pasta, not a bowl of noodles.
What it needs
Nothing confirmed on your shelf yet — this list is the whole ask.
- pasta
- white beans
- tomato
- onion
- garlic
Good if you have them, fine if you do not: parmesan, olive oil.
Method
- Onion and garlic soft in olive oil, tomato in, cooked down properly.
- Beans in with their liquid, and blitz or mash about a third of them against the side of the pot. That is what makes the broth creamy without any cream.
- Small pasta straight into the pot with enough water to cook it. The starch stays in the soup where you want it.
- It should be thick enough that a spoon stands up briefly. Olive oil and parmesan at the table, and it will need loosening tomorrow.
Technique coach
What the method is trying to make happen
Sequence, correction, heat and texture, equipment workarounds, scaling, and component reuse are available with this cook sheet.
An educational plan from a curated corpus. Not a nutrition, allergen, or doneness guarantee.
Cook or pour it, then edit the shelf if you emptied a bottle or used the last of something.
The technique underneath this
- Pasta and its waterUsing starchy cooking water to bind fat and cheese into a sauce that coats, instead of a sauce that pools.watery · clumped cheese · scrambled egg · dry and claggy
- VinaigretteDispersing fat into acid so it stays dispersed for as long as dinner takes, which is all it has to do.separates immediately · greasy · too sharp · dull
Going wrong while you cook it? Say what it is doing and the triage will tell you what is happening, the smallest move, and the instinct to resist.
Watch the technique behind this one
Third-party video. Opens in a new tab — nothing is embedded and nothing is fetched from a video platform until you click.
Reviewed video matched to this method, not to the cuisine. Opens in a new tab.
- EmulsionsHow to Make Classic Pasta Carbonara | Kenji's Cooking ShowJ. Kenji López-AltStarchy pasta water binding egg and cheese into sauce instead of into scrambled egg.Link checked 2026-09-08
- Produce prepHow To Mince GarlicAmerica's Test KitchenSmashing and mincing a clove down to something that cooks evenly instead of burning in pieces.Link checked 2026-09-08
- Knife skillsHow To Dice OnionsAmerica's Test KitchenWalks through the claw grip and the two cuts that turn a whole onion into an even dice.Link checked 2026-09-08
Why each of these is on the list
What the ingredients are actually doing
- pasta
- The sauce finishes on the pasta, not the other way around.
- white beans
- Creamy enough to thicken what they are in — mash a ladleful against the side of the pot and the whole dish gains body.
- tomato
- Sweet, sour and savory at once, which is why it holds up so many dishes with no meat in them.
- onion
- The base under most of this library.
- garlic
- Burns in seconds and turns the whole dish bitter, so it almost never goes in first.
Missing one of them? The substitutions are written against those jobs rather than against a chart, so they say what each replacement costs this dish in particular.
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Next
Cook it, then tell the shelf what you used.
The ranking is only as honest as the shelf behind it. Empty the cream, and everything that leaned on cream should stop being offered.