10 Minute Cherry Tomato and Basil Spaghetti

What could be more deliciously classic than the winning combination of tomato, basil and spaghetti? This recipe is also super quick so you can prepare your meal in only 10 short minutes. Bellissimo!  

Sometimes in life, the simplest dishes are also the most delicious! That’s exactly how I feel about this fantastically quick and easy 10 minute cherry tomato and basil spaghetti recipe.

When it comes to pasta, you can’t get much more Italian than the winning combination of tomatoes, garlic and olive oil, all crowned with the gorgeously green basil which lends its fresh and sharp flavour to this pasta and also provides a beautiful pop of vibrant green colour, all excellent reasons to include it in this super quick recipe. Perfect nosh for a warm summer’s evening (or any evening for that matter!)

I love a good, quick pasta recipe. What could be better than freshly cooked pasta for dinner, whipped up in mere minutes?? Check out some of my other wonderfully speedy pasta recipes for inspiration – such as my 10 Minute Mediterranean Tuna Pasta and my 10 Minute Spaghetti Carbonara. Yum!

This 10 minute cherry tomato and basil spaghetti recipe is a real winner for all sorts of dietary requirements as it is plant-based and vegan (unless you choose to smother it in Parmesan cheese!) and is so quick and easy to make. Lets take a closer look at each of the ingredients in turn, each of which are crucially important to create the perfect plate of yummy spaghetti goodness in only 10 short minutes;

SPAGHETTI – An absolute staple in most people’s pantries, spaghetti is the quintessential Italian pasta that forms the basis of so many traditional and flavoursome recipes including of course many which are tomato based such as this one.

Spaghetti has one of the quickest cooking times of all the pastas and typically becomes al dente (firm to the bite) in only around eight minutes. This means it’s a perfect ingredient for quick cooking and so it’s no surprise that I use it in my 10 minute cherry tomato and basil spaghetti along with a range of other dishes!

Many supermarkets actually stock the quick cook variety of the spaghetti which is even thinner than the traditional type and often cooks in a mere five minutes. Therefore if you want to make this dish even quicker, you can try and source the quick cook variety so that finished dish can be on your plate before you know it!

CHERRY TOMATOES – undoubtably the star flavour in this spaghetti recipe, the gorgeously sweet cherry tomato really makes this spaghetti recipe sing!  I like to think of them as the the perfect little ruby jewels to crown off your dish.

Although tomatoes are absolutely quintessential to so many Italian recipes, they are a relative newcomer to the country’s cuisine. After being introduced to Europe in the 16th century, the tomato wasn’t featured in Italian recipes until the late 17th century. However since then, there has been no turning back as you can find the humble tomato featuring in so many of the recipes from the country, and rightly so!

As with so many ingredients, quality is key. Cheap cherry tomatoes rarely have the full and sweet flavour of the pricer type (the better quality ones usually being sold ‘on the vine’ for added freshness) so it’s absolutely worth splashing out on the posher varieties to really make sure you do this pasta recipe justice. Of course, tomatoes of all shapes and sizes can be happily combined with pasta to make tasty sauces, however I’ve called upon the humble cherry tomato in this particular recipe for several super important reasons;

Firstly, they are naturally usually very sweet, in fact some of the sweetest of all the tomatoes you can buy. This infuses the sauce with an extra lovely flavour in very little cooking time that other tomatoes would struggle to achieve so quickly. Secondly, as they’re so small, you do not have to chop them up before putting them in your sauce to cook down which of course, saves you valuable time. Thirdly, the fact that they are so little means they cook quickly by virtue of their small size anyway which is an added quick cooking bonus.

As a final way of really squeezing all the flavour out of the tomatoes, I advise using a potato masher (yes you heard that correctly!) to squish them down satisfyingly and get the perfect, sooth and creamy sauce in a fraction of the time that most other tomato pasta sauces take to make. The potato masher is a brilliantly versatile kitchen implement so having one on standby for more than just spud pummelling is a great idea for so many recipes.

So fond of cherry tomatoes I am that I grow a few cherry tomato plants every year on my sunny kitchen windowsill as they’re absolutely sublime when freshly picked so I definitely recommend this if you can possibly grow your own. 

OLIVE OIL – olive oil is of course such a fantastically important staple of Italian cooking that it’s no surprise you’ll find it in this 10 minute cherry tomato and basil spaghetti recipe! I have a habit of boring people to tears with my talk of good quality olive oil but that’s because it’s soooo important! You can’t have great tasting pasta without great tasting olive oil.

Extra-virgin is probably the “Queen” of all the olive oils, costing a pretty penny but also infusing huge amounts of rich flavour into all sorts of dishes. Importantly though, I recommend here NOT using the extra virgin variety. This is for two super important reasons; Firstly, the flavour of the extra virgin variety would be too overpowering and mask a lot of the rich tomato flavour. Secondly, when extra-virgin olive oil is heated it can develop a rather ‘acrid’ taste. The last thing we want is our guests complaining about a bitter aftertaste to their pasta so for this cherry tomato and basil spaghetti I’d recommend using a blended olive oil which has a much more delicate taste than the extra virgin variety.

FRESH BASIL LEAVES – Thid beautiful fresh herb fits very happily in so many traditional Italian dishes that it’s a no brainer to use it in this super quick 10 minute cherry tomato and basil spaghetti. Basil, like many other fresh herbs, really doesn’t need to be cooked for long periods of time as this would significantly impair the flavour so it just needs a whisper of heat from the pan at the end of the cooking process to soften it and infuse the dish with flavour but certainly no full on cooking as such, which really helps to keep the cooking time of this pasta recipe to an absolute minimum. 

GARLIC – this is one of my absolute staple ingredients and features heavily in many of my recipes because it is just so blooming delicious! Regular readers to my blog will know that I am an absolutely enormous fan of pre-chopped garlic that you can purchase very easily in jars and squeezy tubes as I just feel that life is too short to go around dicing and squeezing garlic cloves. I therefore fully advocate using the pre-minced variety in this recipe as with so many of my other recipes!

SALT – Finally, perhaps what you would call a “necessary evil”, salt is a super important ingredient to use in this recipe to really draw out all of the flavour possible from the cherry tomatoes. I’m not a huge fan of salt as we all know it’s far from the healthiest ingredient on the planet, so I do avoid using it where at all possible in my cooking. However, there’s no way around it in this 10 minute cherry tomato and basil spaghetti recipe as it’s just nowhere near as tasty without it. So pop it in and try not to feel guilty!

STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO MAKING THE PERFECT 10 MINUTE CHERRY TOMATO AND BASIL SPAGHETTI

now lets have a peek at each of the stages of making your perfect spaghetti dish, with helpful pictures and guidance;

STEP 1;

To get cracking, boil 200g (7 oz) spaghetti in a large pan of salted water according to pack instructions. Spaghetti usually becomes al dente in only 8 minutes but if you can source the ‘quick cook’ variety, it will cook in only about 5 minutes so saving you extra valuable time.

As a side note, if you find that your pasta is boiling a little too vigorously and is at a risk of spewing all over the cooker top, as you turn down the heat a little, you can also add a small splash of cooking oil to the pan which magically creates a thin layer on the surface of the water and prevents the pan from boiling over. A very useful hack I find! 

STEP 2;

While your pasta happily bubbles away, place 4 tbsp. olive oil, 2 tsp minced garlic, 1/4 tsp salt and one 250g (9 oz) pack cherry tomatoes directly into a medium wok or frying pan. (Just throw them all in together, no need to mess about frying off the garlic first.)

It’s important to use a pan that’s a fairly decent size to increase the surface area and ensure the tomatoes cook down quickly. A small pan would do perfectly fine if you had lots of time but it will take longer in such a pan for your tomato sauce to properly cook down and thicken, hence the need for a decent sized pan in a quick recipe!

STEP 3;

Cook the cherry tomatoes on medium-high heat for approximately 1 minute, stirring frequently, just to get them hot and coated in the flavourings. Now comes the fun part… grab yourself a potato masher (yes that’s right, a good old fashioned potato masher!) and give them a really good, satisfying squelch so each little tomato is nice and squashed, releasing all the yummy goodness. This should only take about 10 seconds – no need to spend ages mashing away. 

Keep cooking the cherry tomato sauce on medium-high heat for another 6-7 minutes, stirring frequently as it blends together beautifully and thickens up. 

STEP 4;

Now, turn off the heat to the cherry tomato sauce. Next, you’ll need a small bunch of fresh basil – about 10g (0.3 oz). Take about 2/3rds of the leaves and roughly tear them by hand, popping them into the cherry tomato sauce as you do. Given the sauce a quick stir to combine all together. 

STEP 5;

By about now your pasta should be ready. Drain it, then add it directly into the pan with the cherry tomato sauce. Give it a quick mix to combine together and voila! All done!

Serve out onto two separate serving plates and sprinkle the remaining hand torn basil leaves over the top, popping 1-2 whole leaves on the very top of the pasta if you’d like to for added decoration. Top with some grated parmesan cheese if you wish – entirely optionally – then serve!