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Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
5 min
15/01/2026
Dressed to impress, and your date loves Italian, but you don’t have the budget for a fancy restaurant? Then these pasta sauces cando the trick. Cooked with herbs, cheeses, tomatoes, garlic, and plenty of olive oil to carry the flavours of the sauce, these pasta sauces are easy on the prep, pocket, and palate. Pick your favourite pasta pack, be it spaghetti, fusilli, or shells, and get cooking.
What can make or break a good pasta? Well, from the shape of the pasta to the herbs and seasonings, everything impacts a good dish — but few have a stronger influence than the pasta sauce. From the quick-fix ketchup versions common on the Indian streets (that might have Italians breaking into cold sweats) to the traditional Arrabiata or Pomodoro, sauces define the pasta. While the authentic Italian sauces might sound intimidating, with a few swaps and a quick run to e-commerce sites, you will have everything you need to make them. Knowing how to make these easy-peasy sauces will make your pasta nights so much easier.
Béchamel (white sauce) is essentially made from butter, flour, and milk, forming a smooth, creamy base. The butter and flour cook together to make a ‘roux’, which acts as a thickener, and milk is whisked in gradually to yield a velvety texture. It’s gently seasoned (salt, pepper, sometimes nutmeg) and used as a foundation for many creamy dishes because it carries flavours without overpowering them.
This is a ‘compound butter’ style sauce combining butter and garlic as the core flavouring agents. In simplest terms, you let butter melt (or soften) and infuse it with crushed or finely minced garlic, letting the flavour seep in without burning the garlic (low heat helps). The result is a rich, aromatic, buttery garlic-flavoured sauce which is both delicate and unpretentious. You can customise this further with extra herbs, lemon, salt, or pepper to lift the sauce, but the main idea is flavoured butter that you can drizzle, toss, or coat your pasta with.
Mac and cheese sauce is fundamentally a cheesy cream sauce built on milk with a thickener base. There’s a desi mac and cheese with masala, but the Western version is a bit different. It often starts with a béchamel or similar milk-thickened foundation, into which grated cheese (like cheddar) is melted until smooth and stringy. The sauce is seasoned (salt, pepper, mustard powder, paprika) to enhance the cheesy flavour. Its job is to coat pasta in creamy, cheesy richness – thick enough to cling, but also fluid enough to slide off the pasta.
A recent find, this is more of a fusion Italian sauce made from blending peanut (or peanut butter) with coconut milk. It also includes a bit of salt, a bit of sugar, and sometimes garlic, ginger, or chilli. You can experiment with local flavours and add soy or something sour like lime or tamarind. The idea for this sauce is to get the balance of creamy-to-nutty-sweet-salty right, so that the sauce is rich and wholesome and perfect for serving over spaghetti or penne pasta.
Made with fresh Italian Basil leaves (you can grow a bunch of these sun-loving plants in a pot), pesto combines them with pine nuts, garlic, Parmesan cheese, and olive oil. Everything is ground or blended into a vivid green paste, and you can smell and taste every ingredient in the paste. Pesto sauce requires zero cooking, and it’s the olive oil that does the binding and carries the flavours. If pine nuts are unavailable or too costly, go for walnuts or almonds. This sauce is added to the dish towards the end. After the seasonings, vegetables, and meat (if any) are fried, the sauce is mixed with the pasta, cooked al dente..
This is the white sauce that the Italians love with their fettuccine. Alfredo is a creamy pasta sauce made from butter, fresh cream (or heavy cream), and cheese – usually Parmesan. Garlic is optional. You just melt everything at one go and stir until smooth. That’s all. It’s rich, cheesy, and thick. No flour or maida is needed here. If Parmesan is hard to find, processed cheese can be used, but the flavour will change.
Remove the masalas and go for authentic Italian ingredients, and you get ‘red sauce’ or marinara, which is made with tomatoes (fresh or canned), garlic, onions, salt, oil (usually olive), and dry herbs like oregano or basil. You cook it until it thickens and do a taste test, it should be slightly sweet and tangy. No cream or cheese is needed for this one. It’s the red sauce used in pasta, pizza, lasagna, or as a dip. You can use regular cooking oil and skip the herbs if not available, and it’s perfect with spaghetti.
You don’t need a culinary degree or a passport to Italy to master these pasta sauces. With a handful of ingredients and a few smart swaps, your pasta night can be as authentic (and delicious) as it gets. Whether you're going for the creaminess of Alfredo or the punch of the herby pesto, these sauces are proof that simplicity is the secret to great Italian food.
