Summer Pasta with Brown Butter Tomato Sauce

Summer Pasta with Brown Butter Tomato Sauce is THE pasta of summer! Packed with a ridiculous amount of summer veggies, salty Italian sausage, and a fresh tomato butter sauce sauce, this is what pasta dreams are made of.

For more easy summer pastas, check out this One Pot Summer Tomato Pasta, this Five-Ingredient Tomato & Ricotta Linguine, and this Easy Lobster Scampi.

Summer Pasta with Brown Butter Tomato Sauce

Otherwise known as everything but the kitchen sink pasta. Or heaven on earth pasta. Or the next pasta you may never want to live without.

Obviously I had a difficult time naming this, because Summer Pasta with Brown Butter Tomato Sauce doesn’t do this dish nearly enough justice. What’s really going on at its root, is yes, a summer pasta with brown butter tomato sauce, but it’s also…

• silky-fresh fettuccine noodles tossed in a ridiculous amount of summer zucchini and corn
• bits of semi-spicy salty Italian sausage
• fresh-from-the-garden heirloom tomatoes
• with all of it intertwined in a virtually effortless creamy sauce.

Regardless of what we call it, this is a pasta that needs to come out of your kitchen before the first fall leaves slowly float to the ground.

How to make Summer Pasta with Brown Butter Tomato Sauce

The key to everything being cooked perfectly,  is timing. Because zucchini has a tendency to overcook and corn can easily lose that sweet burst of texture if cooked too long, there’s a strict order I’d like you to follow when making this.

Brown the sausage and deglaze with rosé wine: Like any dish, you want to build on flavor. By browning the sausage first, then deglazing the pan with rosé (or any dry white wine), you have a wonderful salty base in the pan that’s full of flavor.

Sauté the zucchini. While the pan is still hot from the sausage and has little remnants of brown bits, you want to essentially sear the zucchini. Once the zucchini is brown on all sides, the corn goes in for a literal minute- just until it turns from pale yellow to a vibrant yellow.

After the zucchini and corn are cooked, they’re both set aside along with the sausage, and the butter goes in to the pan. If you’ve been around here before, you know the drill with browning butter. But here’s a recap:

How to brown butter

• Start with an extremely hot pan and let the butter melt, bubble and brown without touching it for a little while.
• When the edges become a deep brown, swirl the pan until the brown hue creeps into all of the butter, and an intoxicatingly nutty smell develops.
• When the butter is a deep brown color, it’s done. Remove it from the heat and continue on.

To avoid splattering, I like to turn the heat off, THEN add the tomatoes and garlic. They’ll simmer for a few minutes, and you’ll notice them break down and turn into a super thick sauce on their own. At this point, add the cream and throw the noodles into a big vat of boiling, salted water. Because fresh noodles only need a minute or two to cook, you really want to wait until the last minute to cook them.

The final step is of course tossing everything together, and don’t forget a quick seasoning check of salt and pepper!

The key to perfectly seasoning food.

Which actually leads me to one of the most important rules you need to follow to make this dish, or really any dish for that matter, great. SEASON AS YOU GO! This is the best advice I can give any cook, seasoning as you cook each layer is essential to a well-salted final dish. It makes all the difference in the world.

Here, you’re going to want to season the zucchini and corn as you cook them, followed by the tomatoes, the cream sauce and then last but not least, the final product. It may seem like a lot of seasoning, but it’s honestly what takes a good dish to great, and it’s something I live by.

How many people does this recipe serve? 

This recipe as written serves four average eaters. We don’t eat huge portions in our family, so if you do, or if you have a family of five or six, you may want to double the recipe. And it’s easily done.

Also, you’ll probably want leftovers, because I almost cried when I went back to the kitchen to tuck the leftovers away and there wasn’t even a stray piece of corn or sausage left in the pan.

So just keep that in mind.

Do I have to use fresh pasta? 

No. You can use dried pasta, but I really really like the way fresh pasta tastes here, so if you can get it, please do! You can also sub out spaghetti, tagliatelle, or paparadelle.

Now, go make this pasta, and thank me later.