Your Favorite Summery Fruits Belong In Pasta Sauce

The scorching heat of summer has arrived, and with it comes the best of summer fruits. When you're feeling too hot to turn on the oven, summery pasta dishes are a great way to use leftovers without spending hours working over a hot stove. You may think seasonal produce, like corn or heirloom tomatoes, would be the most logical pasta additions, but summer fruits have recently taken center stage. For example, some home cooks are flipping the script on the viral baked feta pasta recipe by substituting tomatoes for strawberries. Even if you are a fruit fiend, you're not alone if you are skeptical about fruit pasta. Hear us out. 

Unlike other simple summer pasta recipes that utilize classic ingredients, such as cherry tomatoes, basil, and burrata cheese, this baked dish highlights strawberries and feta. The strawberries are seasoned with balsamic vinegar, a classic strawberry pairing, then baked in the oven until the strawberries burst and create a creamy sauce. 

Even though strawberries are typically used in sweet applications, combining strawberries and pasta is commonplace in other cultures. For instance, a Polish dish called makaron z truskawkami is pasta topped with a strawberry and sour cream sauce. However, if strawberries aren't your jam (pun intended), you can add plenty of other summer fruits to pasta to create a satisfying summer meal. 

Several creators on TikTok have featured fruit-centric pasta recipes that showcase its versatility as a pasta ingredient, from strawberries to pears. One such recipe draws inspiration from a classic charcuterie board pairing — pears and gorgonzola cheese — and combines the two ingredients into a delicious pasta dish. 

For this recipe, gorgonzola cheese, cream, and butter round out the sauce, and fresh pears are folded in at the end. Pear and gorgonzola work so well, even in a pasta dish, because the sweet, slightly tart flavor of pears works beautifully with the creamy bite of gorgonzola. Any dish with heavy cream and cheese is undoubtedly rich, so sliced fresh pears provide a lighter flavor and balance. 

If you're tasked with bringing a dish for a summertime picnic, look no further than a summer fruit pasta salad. Make this by adding your favorite summer fruits to cooked pasta with optional additions like fresh veggies or nuts. For those fans of salty-sweet dishes, combining prosciutto with figs and cheese should energize your tastebuds. Fig, mozzarella, and prosciutto are well-known pizza toppings that can easily translate to a pasta dish. In the same vein as gorgonzola, prosciutto is salty while figs are sweet — and the two sing in harmony. Figs are a summer fruit, but fig spread or dried figs can easily be substituted to make this pasta dish year-round.