With this spinach pici pasta recipe you can have fresh, homemade vegan pasta without a pasta maker! Pici is easy to make, egg-free, hand-rolled pasta from Tuscany that will take you back to your Play-Doh days. Here I’ve added spinach to my pici for some colour, flavour and extra iron and served it with sweet roasted Mediterranean vegetables and pesto.

I do love making pasta from scratch. I find the entire process of kneading, rolling and cutting with the pasta machine to be extremely relaxing and calming after a long day. Obviously making your own pasta allows you to get creative with the shapes and flavours. Check out this pink pasta I made a while back.

Hand rolling and cutting pasta, conversely, would seem to be an arduous task. It seems like I can never roll the pasta thin enough as it has a habit of springing back on itself. Luckily I’ve discovered spinach pici pasta – thicker than spaghetti, it doesn’t need to be rolled out so thinly, and is really easy to make by hand.

I discovered pici pasta watching the new season of Jamie Oliver’s Superfoods. He did a spinach pici pasta recipe on the first episode and since I have a short attention span I had to try it right away. I’m not sure if you can argue with Jamie Oliver but I did change several things which I would consider improvements to his recipe .

Firstly, I added semolina flour. I’ve tried making eggless pasta with just regular flour before and it didn’t cook al dente. Also, a commenter on Jamie’s recipe called it claggy (which I think is like pasty or gooey), which is how I would describe the pasta I made without egg or semolina. So a ratio of two to one with white four and semolina worked great.

Secondly, rather than pan fry the veggies, I roasted them. It makes much more sense to just pop them in the oven and leave them to roast while you’re rolling out the pasta. A time saver there. Finally, rather than parmesan as a sauce I used a vegan pesto , which went great with the spinach pici and roasted vegetables.

Vegan pesto is really easy to make – simply replace the parmesan for miso to give it that same umami you expect from pesto. I usually make up a big batch and store it in small ziplock bags in the freezer for whenever I need it.