Creamy Spinach and Tomato One Pot Vegan Orzo Recipe

This is not our first orzo recipe. We liked the last one so much, we thought we would have another go. Same concept, new flavours. This time we’ve taken some inspiration from the Italian arrabbiata sauce, which uses tomatoes, garlic and chilli. We’ve just thrown in a couple of extra flavours into the mix, using some red onion and parsley. Pour in some vegetable broth, plant-based cream and a cup of orzo and you have our creamy spinach and tomato one-pot vegan orzo recipe.

If you haven’t yet made our original orzo dish (creamy one-pot vegan mushroom orzo recipe with spinach) then you should take a look. You won’t find any tomatoes but you will find some tender baby bella mushrooms, complemented by parsley, thyme and fresh lemon juice. Think, meaty flavors and a creamy texture, minimal ingredients, great creamy orzo recipe. 

Just in case this is your first time cooking with orzo and you’re looking at the photos on this post trying to work out if it is, in fact, pasta or rice, we’ll save you the Google. It’s pasta, although it is roughly the same size and shape as a large grain of rice. We could probably rename this recipe orzo risotto. These little pasta do not take as long to cook as risotto rice though. We like this dish so much because it’s quick to make, it’s one of those easy recipes and includes those magic words: one-pot recipe because nobody likes dishes.

In traditional Italian cuisine, orzo is often used to add texture to a soup, a great way to bulk out some veggie broth. They’re most commonly made from semolina, but whole wheat orzo also exist. In this recipe, we have used the common, readily available semolina pasta. If you did feel like being a little more adventurous though you can find tri-colour orzo which uses a spinach orzo, and another variety using sun-dried tomatoes. Or if wheat is not your friend then you’ll be happy to know there are gluten-free orzo alternatives.

Creamy Spinach and Tomato Vegan Orzo Ingredients

1 Tbsp vegan butter

1/2 red onion (finely chopped)

1 tsp minced garlic

1/2 small red chilli (deseeded and finely chopped)

300g canned chopped tomatoes

Ground salt and black pepper (to taste)

1 3/4 cups vegetable stock

1 cup orzo

1 handful of parsley (roughly chopped)

1/2 cup plant-based double cream (or heavy cream)

2 cups baby spinach

1/2 cup nutritional yeast (or vegan parmesan cheese)

Vegan parmesan to serve (optional)

So let’s talk about some of our delicious but simple ingredients. We use yellow onions in our mushroom orzo recipe, but this time we’ve gone for a red onion, it’s mild and sweet flavour goes great with the tomatoes. 

Don’t be shamed into thinking you can’t keep it simple and use minced garlic from a jar, we do, it still tastes great and saves a load of time. You are more than welcome to use garlic cloves and mince them yourself. Similarly, we’ve used canned chopped tomatoes, they taste great and a perfect for making sauces. They’re normally vine-ripened, packed with extra flavor (often some added salt though) and break down quickly, which we need.

We’re adding a bit of a kick to our dish with some finely chopped red chilli pepper. Deseeded, halved and then finely diced to be fried with the aromatics before adding the stock. We used a small British red chilli, it has about the same heat as a jalapeno so it’s fairly mild, we just want to add some warmth, much like in an arrabbiata sauce. 

The double cream is important, we created this recipe to have a good amount of sauce, but we also wanted to make sure we were creating a super creamy orzo pasta recipe. That’s why we’ve used a plant-based double cream. Letting it sit at room temperature for a while and adding it to the broth slowly also helps to make sure it doesn’t break down while you’re simmering your sauce.

To be certain that we made the richest creamiest sauce, we’ve used 1/2 cup of nutritional yeast, added towards the end along with the fresh spinach. Nutritional yeast has a great cheesy, nutty flavor and it’s great at thickening up a sauce, so you can have all the flavor of vegan cheese and the perfect creamy orzo. This might be the only pantry ingredient that you don’t have at hand, there are a handful of pantry staples you should have in your plant-based arsenal nutritional yeast is used in plenty of vegan recipes.

A final note on ingredients, we have used a vegan parmesan-style cheese to top our orzo dish with. This is optional, but we like it. In the UK there is a brand called Violife, we used their block of prosociano, which is sold in certain grocery stores over here, but you can search locally and see what’s available to you as well. 

How to Make Creamy Spinach and Tomato Vegan Orzo

Peel and then chop an onion in half. Finely dice one half and keep the other for another recipe.

Melt a 1/2 tablespoon of vegan butter in a large saucepan over a medium-high heat and then fry the onions until they have softened and become translucent but not golden. 

Add the minced garlic and chopped red chilli, then fry them for a minute in the pan until they’ve softened.

Next, turn the pan back down to medium heat and stir in the canned tomatoes, then season with some ground salt and pepper to your taste. Cook them in the pan for 5 minutes until they start breaking down.

Now it’s time to pour in the vegetable stock.

Add the orzo to the pan, along with 3/4 of the diced parsley,

Turning the pan up to high heat bring everything to a boil then back down to medium heat so that the stock is just simmering, and then slowly, little by little, and while stirring add the room temperature cream to the pan.

Let the orzo simmer in the sauce until the sauce has thickened and the orzo is cooked, stirring occasionally so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. This should take at least 10 minutes (it took just over 12 for us), but you can always refer to the packaging for instructions.

With a couple of minutes before the orzo is done add the baby spinach, another 1/2 tablespoon of butter and the nutritional yeast to the pan, and stir them in well until the spinach has wilted and the nutritional yeast has blended into the sauce.

Serve and top with some grated vegan parmesan and the remaining fresh chopped parsley.

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