Yotam Ottolenghi’s Mafalda Pasta With Yogurt Sauce Recipe

Mafalda pasta—also known as mafaldine pasta, little queens, mafalde, or reginette—is a flat, wide-ribbon noodle with ruffled edges. It looks like skinny lasagna but you can use it in pasta dishes similarly to fettuccine or linguine. Mafalda is made from durum wheat semolina and water and extruded through bronze molds, giving the pasta its signature shape.

“I’m gonna explain this thing that is called pasta with yogurt ’cause I’m sure people are raising their eyebrows and saying, ‘What’s that all about?’ It’s not always familiar. But in the Eastern Mediterranean and Turkey, in Greece, in the Balkans and bits of the Arab world, this is something that is done quite a lot. There’s wonderful Turkish dumplings called manti, which are minced lamb in tiny little pastry pockets that are cooked and served in a yogurt sauce. And there’s a bunch of other pasta dishes all doing that same thing… When I think of this pasta with yogurt, it just feels so ancient to me.”

“[Yogurt is] such a basic ingredient in so many parts of the world. And I love celebrating it and cooking with it.” — Yotam Ottolenghi

Tangy plain yogurt is a great alternative to the heavy cream and Parmesan cheese found in Alfredo sauce. “What I love about pasta with yogurt is that it’s creamy without using cream. So you get that richness, but without the cloying element. Because of the natural acidity in the yogurt, you’ve got something that cuts through that richness,” Yotam says. “And that makes the pasta super attractive for me.” Unlike cream, yogurt tends to split when heated, so Yotam stabilizes his yogurt pasta sauce with ingredients like egg yolks, cornstarch, and starchy pasta water.

In this recipe, Yotam infuses Middle Eastern flavors into Italian pasta. Learn how to heat Greek yogurt safely to yield a rich, silky pasta sauce:

1. 1. Choose full-fat Greek yogurt. “This is really important because if you use low-fat yogurt, it probably won’t create that creamy texture that you want,” Yotam says. “This is the sauce. This is all you’ve got. So you want it to be top ingredients.”
2. 2. Cook the yogurt sauce gently. “You want to be really, really gentle with your sauce… So it just warms up, but it doesn't bubble vigorously. And it’s just cooked down very, very slowly,” Yotam says. “Treat it very gently and kindly. And make sure it doesn’t split and stays nice and warm, but not bubbling. So always control the temperature. It should be quite low.”
3. 3. Make the sauce just before serving. “The yogurt sauce is not something you want to cook too far in advance because it doesn’t sit very well,” Yotam says. “You just want to cook it more or less when it’s time to serve the dish.”
4. 4. Save your pasta water. “Save the pasta water to homogenize the sauce,” Yotam adds. "It’s something you always want to do when you cook pasta, to keep some of that starchy water to give body and homogenize your sauce.” Yotam recommends saving at least a cup of starchy pasta water before you drain the pasta.
5. 5. Stabilize the yogurt sauce. “Yogurt has a tendency when it’s warmed up to split up. But I add egg yolk and some cornstarch,” Yotam says. “The cornstarch, it’s a stabilizer. It helps the sauce stay together. And these yolks, they really enrich the sauce.”
6. 6. Substitute your favorite vegetables. Yotam’s recipe features butternut squash, but you can use his basic formula to highlight almost any vegetable. “You can easily use other things. I like to add peas, kale, spinach, green things, leeks. Anything that works in a creamy sauce would work really well here,” he says.
7. 7. Top with chili sauce. Yotam finishes his yogurt pasta with his quick shatta recipe, which features fresh tomatoes and chilis. “You’re getting heat and freshness at the same time, so all that cuts into the richness of the sauce even further,” he says. “And it makes it look great as well. Because that red color is a great contrast to both the butternut and the pasta. And if you haven’t made your shatta, you can add sliced red chili or use other chili sauces that you’ve got, as long as they’re not too spicy.”

Once you’ve made Yotam’s pasta with yogurt sauce, experiment with cooking other foods in yogurt sauce. “This yogurt base is really the starting point for so many dishes that I love,” the chef adds. “One of the most popular dishes in the Arab world is zucchinis that are cooked in yogurt. And they’re served with mint. So the zucchinis are actually sitting in the yogurt, absorbing the flavors, and then served with dried or fresh mint.”