These Creamy Roasted Red Pepper Zucchini Noodles are a big bowl of comfort food, but with loads of veggies!
Pasta is probably my ultimate comfort food, even dessert can’t touch it’s satisfying goodness! So… I never would have thought I’d be so crazy about zucchini noodles – I mean they’re not the real thing right?
Well, they’re definitely not pasta but I love them in their own way. We eat them a couple times a week, and there’s no end to the toppings and sauces that go well with them!
One of the benefits of building your dinner around veggies, is you don’t have to make a side dish to get in that veggie quota. So… on a regular weeknight you can simply whip up this luscious sauce in just a few minutes. Then just add it to the pan with freshly sautéed zucchini noodles. In a matter of minutes you have ultimate comfort food!
Tips for making this Creamy Roasted Red Pepper Zucchini Noodles:
You don’t have to roast your own peppers to make this sauce. Jarred peppers work really well too. But I wanted to give you my tips and tricks for doing it yourself!
If you’re making your own roasted bell peppers, turn the oven on to the broiler setting. Place your bell peppers on a lined baking sheet. I like to do 6 at a time even though you only need 2 for this recipe. I like to freeze the extra roasted peppers for another meal!
Place the baking sheet in the oven with the peppers near the broiler. When black spots appear, turn the peppers and continue to roast until all sides have been blackened.
Remove the peppers from the oven and place them in a sealed glass container. A Pyrex container works well, or place them in a sealed Ziplock to cool down. This step helps to loosen the pepper skins making them so much easier to peel. After the peppers have cooled for 15-20 minutes, peel and deseed them.
My other favorite tip is to roast at least twice what you need, and freeze the extra for future goodness. I thinly sliced all my extra roasted peppers for a polenta pizza recipe I’m working on. Roast once, eat numerous times!
This sauce is about as easy as you can get. You place everything in the blender, and blend until smooth – that’s it!
I like to top my bowl with extra bits of goat cheese for added creaminess and flavor! And… as a final note, this sauce is too good to be reserved to just this recipe. So go forth and use it abundantly!
Dairy Free Tip: I put together this Creamy Cashew Roasted Red Pepper Sauce as an answer to ‘how do I make this dairy free’. It’s made from whole food ingredients and is packed with flavor.
I hope you’ll enjoy this as much as we have! If you do make it, I hope you’ll leave me a comment/rating below. And I always love hearing from you here. Or over on Instagram where you can tag me at #getinspiredeveryday with your photos.
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Creamy Roasted Red Pepper Zucchini Noodles
- Total Time: 30 mins
- Yield: 4 1x
- Diet: Gluten Free
Description
This recipe has been a long time favorite with the sauce being extra versatile!
Ingredients
Creamy Roasted Red Pepper Sauce:
- 2 roasted red peppers, weighing 8 ounces total
- 1 Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
- 2 ounces of soft goat cheese, (usually labeled chevre)
- 1 Teaspoon sea salt, or to taste
For the Zucchini Noodles:
- 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 1/2 cup minced onion
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/2 – 1 Teaspoon sea salt, to taste
- 2 pounds zucchini, ends cut off and spiralized or cut into ‘noodles’
Serve with:
- chopped fresh parsley, freshly grated parmesan, extra goat cheese, and freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
- You can use jarred bell peppers or make your own for this recipe, the instructions for roasting your own peppers are in the post.
- Add the 2 roasted bell peppers to the blender with the rest of the sauce ingredients, and blend until smooth.
- For the zucchini noodles, heat a large 15″ deep sided skillet over medium high heat. When the skillet is hot, add the olive oil, onion, and garlic – sauté for a minute or two until the onion is softened but not browned. Add the sea salt and zucchini noodles to the skillet and sauté using a pair of non-stick tongs to toss the noodles. Just as the zucchini noodles begin to soften, but before they start shedding water, add the sauce to taste, and cook just until the sauce is heated.
- Adjust the salt to your taste, and serve immediately with the freshly chopped parsley, grated parmesan, extra goat cheese, and freshly ground black pepper.
Notes
To spiralize the zucchini for this recipe, I used the smallest blade (1/8″) on a Paderno 3-blade spiralizer.
The nutritional information is calculated without any toppings.
- Prep Time: 20 mins
- Cook Time: 10 mins
- Category: Dinner
- Method: Stove Top
- Cuisine: American
This sauce is fabulous! Followed the recipe exactly, and it was wonderful. Used the leftover on poached eggs and sautéed vegetables for breakfast. Delicious!
I’m so glad to hear you enjoyed it, and I love your idea for the leftover sauce!
I found this to be tremendous. Any idea as to the calorie content of a serving?
Thanks so much, and I’m so glad to hear you enjoyed it! I don’t know what the calorie content is for this recipe, but you can check out the link below for a calorie calculator if you’d like.
https://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp
Only been zoodling 4 cpl mths. My husband is T1 Diabetic, but loves pasta. He Loves that r daughter showed us zoodles. Cant wait 2 make them w the added onions/garlic. Genious!
I’m so glad you discovered zoodles, they are an amazing substitute for pasta when you can’t have it!
Made this tonight, It was delicious!! The sauce was SO GOOD!! I added a pound of ground turkey for some protein too. This was my first time making zucchini noodles, and can not get over how good it was. Will make this again.
What a great idea, sometimes a little added protein is really just the thing, and I’m so glad to hear you enjoyed zucchini noodles because I was really surprised by how much I liked them too the first time!
Tried this recipe last night. I felt like the red pepper sauce lacked flavor and fell flat. I used the jarred red peppers.
I think the primary issue here is the goat cheese used, and perhaps it’s my personal feeling but the taste was so strong it overpowered the flavor of the red pepper. My suggestion, if you like red pepper taste more than goat cheese taste, use light cream or milk to give it a creamy taste instead.
I think the issue might be the particular goat cheese you used because I’ve never had the goat cheese flavor overwhelm the roasted pepper flavor before. If you do like goat cheese, I’d try and find a different brand that doesn’t have such a strong flavor, or you could even try cream cheese. If you use light cream or milk it will make the sauce too thin. Also maybe the roasted peppers you used weren’t very flavorful, but I’d more inclined to suspect the goat cheese for being at fault based on what you described. I’m sorry it wasn’t to your liking, but hopefully this might be of help for the future! 🙂
I tried this tonight, I replaced the goat cheese with a light cheese spread so it was weight watcher’s proof and this sauce is a new favourite from now on. I hope I can keep the left over sauce in the freezer
I’m so glad to hear you enjoyed it! 🙂
I’m in love with zoodles but I tend to keep cooking the same recipes I know. So, time to try this one. It looks delicious. Red peppers are my favorite so this sauce looks great. Can’t wait to try it.
I really hope you enjoy it, this sauce is so versatile you’ll find all sorts of uses for it!
Mmmm! My first Zoodle meal and it’s awesome! I did the salting/rinsing of zoodles to remove some inside moisture prior to putting them in the pot that is referenced in many recipe notes when searching for recipes. I don’t do goat cheese, so instead I softened cream cheese and used that instead. I also cooked a chicken and cubed it to add some meat. My store sells peppers in a 3 pack (red/yellow/orange) so i used that variety (all 3) and just found a pack that had a larger red in it – color looks fine. Thanks so much, this is delicious!
I’m so glad your first zoodle meal was awesome!!! I’ve been hooked on spiralizing since I first tried it out, it’s so fast and healthy, not to mention tasty!
This is a fantastic recipe, thank you!! I’ve been doing a lot of food prepping recently and I made this to take to work for lunch a few times this week. I took another poster’s advice and pre-salted the zoodles in a colander to bring out some of the water and then squeezed more excess water with paper towels. I sauted the zoodles per your recipe, but chose to keep the sauce separate for my lunch portions. I added some crushed red peppers to the sauce before blending. This gave the sauce a nice kick, which I love! I added the sauce to the zoodles and microwaved at work and then topped with parmesan and parsley. It is delicious and I am looking forward to lunch for the next 2 days! I didn’t have enough zucchini for 4 servings, I only have 3 servings. I made the full recipe of sauce and I am not complaining that I have extra sauce on my zoodles!! I will definitely be making this again and again! The sauce will have so many uses..on fish, chicken, etc! Thanks again for this awesome recipe!
That’s such a good idea to make this ahead for lunch, I’ve never tried that before! I think salting the zoodles would be absolutely necessary to keep this more than past dinnertime! 🙂
Hi Kari,
My partner and I are doing Atkins and I’m just wondering if you’ve had any success gathering the nutritional information for this dish. It sounds amazing and I’d love to try it but the net carbs need to be 10 or less.
Thanks and keep those low carb recipes coming please. I’ve already tried two and they were delicious!
I don’t have the nutritional information for this recipe, but you can use an online calculator to check the amount of carbs if you’d like, I’ll leave you a link below. I hope you’ll find some more recipes that you like, I don’t intentionally make anything low carb but it sounds like you’ve already found a few which is awesome!
https://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp