I Tried TikTok Viral High Protein VEGAN Pastas

Hey, what's up everybody? It's your girl Merle, and today we're gonna be making some viral TikTok vegan high-protein pastas. If you're like me, maybe you find yourself on TikTok when you're trying to numb your brain. As you're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, a pasta, all it takes is one. One delicious recipe that just, it just derails your entire brain. And you're like, I need to eat that. I need to know what that tastes like. I don't usually end up making them, but today we're going to. And I'm seeing a lot of really delicious-looking pastas, and I know y'all are trying to get your protein in like I am. I figured, let's put them together. Pasta is something most people have laying around in their pantry. Why not add a protein element to it? Why not? And even though there's all these haters out there being like, oh, vegans eat our carbs, let us eat whatever we want. Leave us alone. It is so hot right now, so if I'm sweating throughout this entire video, I'll be sweating throughout this entire video. So today we're gonna end the waiting game, and I'm gonna go through my saved TikToks, and we're gonna make the most delicious, high-protein pastas. We're gonna try them, and I'm definitely gonna put my own spin on these. I'm gonna make some alterations, if I feel like they need them. Some of them are just gonna be perfect the way they are, but I like to kind of start with a base recipe and then pepper my magic into it wherever I can, wherever I feel like it. I love pasta, and I don't eat it all the time, but when I do, I tend to stick to the tried-and-true pasta dishes that I know and love, like the spaghetti all'assassino, which I actually learned from making a video of it on this here channel, which you can watch if you want, and I just don't change it up very often, so I'm really excited to today. For the high-protein spinach pasta, this one looked so incredible and creamy to me, like cannot even tell you how excited I am to make. Basically, the first thing we're going to do is go ahead and cook our pasta in some nice salted boiling water, whatever pasta you want. I tried to go to one similar to the one that I saw, so a nice rigatoni. Once the pasta's ready, we're going to just drain that and reserve about half a cup of our pasta water. Then we're going to add our spinach into a pan, and we're going to cook that for about two to three minutes or until it's wilted. Hello there. I just want to point out that I decided to add in some butter with the olive oil with the spinach. You can just do olive oil. You can just do butter. You can do whatever you want. That's what I'm doing. Then we're going to transfer our spinach to our blender with some silken tofu, nutritional yeast, cashews, hemp seeds, garlic, two tablespoons of olive oil, and a generous pinch of salt and pepper. Blend that up until the sauce is nice and smooth. And for me, I did a couple of additions for myself. I added six tablespoons of nutritional yeast instead of four tablespoons. I added parsley and I added basil for a little bit of lightness, and I just thought the basil would make a nice flavor for this, and I thought that the parsley might brighten it up. I also added one tablespoon of white miso and some lemon juice. I thought the lemon juice would add a nice acidity and complexity to the sauce as well. And the miso, just for more of an umami filled out flavor. And we're going to add about a tablespoon or so of the reserved pasta water, just however much you want to get the consistency to where you want it to be. All right, so here we have our sauce. Smells so good. And then we're going to go ahead and top off our pasta with this beautiful sauce. Look at how vibrant it is. The color is gorgeous. The protein breakdown for this delicious high protein spinach pasta, 42 grams of protein for 320 grams of rigatoni. I used burrilla. 20 grams of protein for one block of silken tofu. 15 grams of protein for six tablespoons of nutritional yeast. Three grams of protein for 8.8 ounces of spinach. Seven grams of protein for 40 grams of cashews. And two grams of protein for one tablespoon of white miso. 20 grams of protein per serving in the original recipe. And with my additions, it's around 30 grams per serving. Pasta is done. It looks gorgeous. It's very green. Check it out. Get into that. It smells so good. And it looks so beautiful. I just topped it with a little bit of nutritional yeast. Let's try this. It looks beautiful. The sauce texture, consistency came out perfect, in my opinion. This is so good. I have no idea what the original tastes like because we added more garlic, more nutritional yeast, parsley, basil. I added red pepper flakes too. So I changed it up, but oh my God. I can taste the spinach in there, but it's not overwhelming. This is a brilliant way to sneak in your greens as well. Like if you don't want to have a salad, you toss a bunch of parsley and spinach. Oh my God, this is so good. I'm actually kind of bummed that I made this first because I can't finish it all right now. I want to eat this whole entire thing, but I have so much more pasta to try. Ooh, it looks so good. And I got more of this sauce left over. So when it comes to pasta sauces, I like to freeze them in like ice cube trays so that I can just drop them in to a pasta when you're finishing the pasta. I just know myself, like this is a lot. I'm not going to use probably the rest of this this week because there's a lot here already. Oh man, guys, this is really good. It's so fresh and like refreshing, the spinach, the parsley. We'll give this a 9.5 as far as deliciousness goes. It's delivering in the protein. And with my alterations, I also did that so I could boost up the protein count. Thank you again, So Vegan, for the inspiration and the base of this. Mm, oh my God, it's so good, I have to stop though. That's such a good problem to have, but I want to finish this, but I can't right now. So let's move on to the next one. We're going to be making a vegan bolognese using a special ingredient called TVP. Oh gosh, I don't want to stop eating you. Let's take one more moment of appreciation for that gorgeous green sauce. Reminds me of all the money I'm saving with Rocket Money. Today's sponsor, Rocket Money is the personal finance app that helps you cancel subscriptions, lower bills, and manage your money better. After linking my credit cards, checking, and savings accounts, I found out that I had an extra subscription with Adobe. Yes, this has happened twice now. No, it sounds like a me problem. But Rocket Money does much more than just save you money on ghost subscriptions that are still haunting you. Rocket Money has truly helped me learn to budget because it tracks my spendings and it even breaks it down into different categories. And it even gives you the option to mark certain expenses as tax write-offs. As someone who's self-employed, that comes in extremely handy for me. So that end of the year taxes are not an absolute nightmare. So what are you waiting for? Save some money, grow your savings, and invest in your financial independence with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com slash Merle, or click the link in my description to get started for free. That's rocketmoney.com slash Merle to get started for free. Thanks again, Rocket Money. All right, back to the video. Okay, so our first pasta was a success. Now we're going to be making a vegan bolognese. The creator for this recipe is That Vegan Babe. We've tried her recipes before and they've been pretty darn good across the board so far. But today we're making a bolognese and the key ingredient for the protein on this one is going to be TVP. TVP is like a vegan protein miracle source. 12 grams of protein in every quarter cup. And it's only 80 calories on top of all of that. If you're trying to cram in a ton of protein, this could be a really good way to do it. It's also like legitimately just one ingredient. It's soy. There was just a great video made by Mark over at Sauce Dash and he did a whole video about TVP. You guys should definitely go check it out. I hadn't cooked with it very much and his video was so informative. I was like blown away. It can kind of act as a meat substitute because of the texture. It doesn't really have any flavor just on its own but we can imbue it with flavor. And we're not gonna change too much about this recipe. I'd say this one's the one we're probably gonna keep the closest to just the way it is. She uses zucchini and carrots and onions and mushrooms. I think the only thing I'm gonna add that this recipe doesn't have is tomato paste because I like tomato paste in my bolognese. I might add some nutritional yeast too but we'll see. We're gonna be using one and a half cups of TVP. Quarter of a cup is 12 grams, good boy. Okay, so 12 times four is 48 and then we need another half of that is 24. 48 plus 24 is 72. 72 grams of protein from a cup and a half of TVP. That's kind of crazy. Anyway, why don't we go ahead and start? So first thing we're gonna do is chop up our onions and mushroom into small pieces. She uses like a grater for the carrots and for the zucchini. I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna slice them up really small. So we're gonna saute our onions until they're nice and translucent over just like a medium heat. We're gonna add in our garlic and toss in all the rest of the vegetables and we're gonna let those cook down, release their water, crisp up a little bit. What I like about this recipe is it's pretty simple all things considered, it's pretty straightforward. And we're just gonna toss in the rest of our ingredients basically. And in her recipe she does not really let it simmer. I'm gonna let it simmer for like 35 to 45 minutes. We just made a bolognese for my video where I ate like Pam Anderson for a day. And that bolognese was really good and I think a key part of it, part of the flavor was letting it simmer. I'm gonna let it sit for a little while but you don't have to because she didn't. Then we're just simply gonna add everything else in. So we're gonna add in our tomato sauce, our vegetable broth, balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, thyme, oregano, basil, rosemary, and mix that up. And then we're gonna let that start to simmer and then we're gonna add in our TVP. And once we add in our TVP, I'm gonna let this simmer for like 30 minutes or so and let it really rehydrate and absorb that flavor. Then we're gonna pour it over our pasta and it's time to try it. The protein breakdown for this high protein TVP bolognese is 78 grams for 1.5 cups of dried TVP, 56 grams of protein for 16 ounces of Barilla spaghetti. Barilla is just the brand that I use. And that comes out to 134 grams of protein and that yields around four servings. So that's 33.5 grams of protein per serve. All right, so I let this simmer for like 40 minutes or so. I've got it all plated up here with some parsley. The TVP, you know, it doesn't look like meat but maybe it looks more like meat than like just mushroom wood, I guess. I'm excited to try it. I hope the TVP doesn't impart any kind of weird flavor into it. I'm wary about this one. Oh wow, actually that is delicious. All right, well, I was wrong about that. It's not imparting any flavor. The bolognese is really good too. And I like that it has the zucchini in it. I wasn't sure about that, but it adds like a nice freshness. Oh my God, this is so good. It's like incredibly umami packed. I'm gonna give it a nine out of 10. Really, really good. TVP is not my favorite meat substitute. I might almost rather just go just vegetables on my own but for the protein, it is more than worth it. And like I said, it doesn't get in the way of anything. Wow, another success, another win. This would be really, really filling too. I can only imagine. I feel like the TVP will fill you up. Next, we have a vegan mac and cheese recipe. And this is the one that we're gonna be using lentil pasta with. Let's move on to the next one. All right, well, I went on a little hike in between the second recipe and this third recipe. And now I'm back. Oh, I almost forgot to turn these lights on. So this final one, we're gonna be doing a high protein vegan mac and cheese. I'm gonna put my own little twist on it. The base recipe of this looks pretty darn good. This one features lentil pasta. I'm using this Trader Joe's lentil pasta. It has 15 grams of protein per three quarter cup. Obviously you can just use plain old pasta if you don't have lentil pasta at your disposal. I think it sounds really good like the way it is. But for me, I like to have an element of tanginess. So I would either use maybe a quarter cup of vegan yogurt or maybe a half a teaspoon or a teaspoon of citric acid or some lemon juice, whichever you have on hand. I'm also gonna be adding some vegan buffalo chicken at the end because mac and cheese and buffalo chicken sounds really good to me. It's also extra protein. I thought it would be a nice addition if you don't wanna use red lentil pasta. You can just add vegan chicken on top. I'm using Daring. I love their vegan chicken. Pretty much the best of the best for me, this buffalo chicken. But that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna see if the vegan yogurt that I have in the fridge has not expired. And if it has, then like I say, I'll use lemon juice or I'll use citric acid. But let's get cooking. The cheese cheese sauce for this one is pretty straightforward. We're gonna be boiling some carrots, onion, and garlic in some boiling water, obviously. Then we're gonna remove all of those veggies and we're gonna put them in this blender. Then we're gonna go ahead and cook our pasta in that same water to reuse, reduce, recycle. Once we've got all of our boiled vegetables in the blender, we're going to add in some nutritional yeast, some miso paste, and some apple cider vinegar. Okay, so our cheese sauce is done. It looks pretty good. I realized I was talking all this about acid, adding acid or whatever. And obviously there's apple cider vinegar in it, so that's the acid. But I still added lemon juice because I tasted it and it didn't have quite the amount of tanginess I wanted. I want a little bit more. Okay, so now I'm going to cook up our buffalo chicken so that I can eat this with the mac and cheese and then we're gonna be done and I can try it. The protein breakdown for this vegan mac and cheese with my additions is 78 grams of protein for 250 grams of Trader Joe's lentil pasta, 10 grams of protein in four tablespoons or 20 grams of nutritional yeast, 2.5 grams of protein in 20 grams of miso paste. And per my additions, three grams of protein for 150 grams of Forager's unsweetened cashew yogurt. And finally, 27 grams for one bag of Daring Buffalo plant-based chicken wings. That's a total of 117 grams of protein. He said this was two servings. I more realistically would make this into three servings. So that is 39 grams of protein per serve if you do three servings. Our final pasta is done here. Since we don't have any like binders or any like gelling agents or anything that's gonna make this stretch or congeal, it's kind of a looser sauce, which I'm fine with because for all intents and purpose, I don't need it to act like cheese other than for it to hopefully taste a little something like cheese. So for some people, you might not like that. You might want a binding agent or you might want to add like tapioca starch to get a nice stretch out of it or something. For me, this is perfect. It's simple. It's actually almost like a soup. I think part of it though is because there was quite a bit of water left over of the lentil pasta when I put it in the bowl. Part of that is my bad. If you wanna thicken it up, you don't want it to be so loose, you can add some more nutritional yeast. That also will give you some more protein, more cheesy flavor. I added a couple squirts of olive oil into the high-speed blender to kind of help emulsify and really get it nice and smooth and creamy. Now, we're gonna add my addition, this vegan buffalo chicken. I almost never add like processed vegan meat in my recipes, but for this, it just seems like a fun idea. I'll try it without the chicken first. Damn, that is good. Personally, for me, anytime I use carrot for a vegan cheese, I almost can always taste it. I feel like that flavor never truly goes away for me. I'm not a huge fan of carrots. I don't hate them, but I don't love them, but this is still good. I think I'd give this closer to like a 7.7. It's good, super healthy. I'll definitely eat the whole thing. Closeness to cheese isn't quite there for me. I've tried a bunch of different vegan mac and cheeses. I still think it's really good. I think it's super, you'll feel good after eating it. So yeah, I would give this a 7.7. Tasty, not super, super close to mac and cheese, but packed with protein, and I'm not a big fan of red lentil pasta, and this will definitely get me to finish the pasta. I would say if I had to rank the three of them, I think the green pasta has to be number one, then the bolognese, and then this mac and cheese. All great options, all very different, and have something new to offer. Anyway, I hope you're feeling as excited as I am because now, I mean, first of all, I have pasta for weeks, maybe even, and I hope that you got some inspiration. I hope you're excited to try some of these. Please let me know which one you're the most excited to try. Let me know if you have any additions or notes or tips you'd like to add to any of these recipes. I always go through and look at them, and they're helpful for everyone. Anyway, check out the creators. They'll all be linked below with their original videos that I derived inspiration from or replicated in this video. Great day, and it's rare. It is so rare that I finish one of these multiple recipe videos in one day, and I actually did it, and I hiked. I hope you have a beautiful day. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe, and let me know what you'd like me to make next. I love seeing your requests. Tag me or send me any videos you want me to try, any recipes you want me to try. All my socials are in the description. At Merle Shays my handle. Thanks, guys. I hope you have a beautiful day. Ciao for now. I will catch you on the next one. Okay, bye.