5-Ingredient Chicken Sausage Pasta for Two

This chicken sausage pasta is super easy to make and makes for a great date night dinner for two. Or if you have a crowd to feed or love pasta for meal prep, you can easily double or triple the recipe. Every serving has a whopping 31 grams of protein and can be customized to be extra cheesy or scaled back for lower calorie needs. 

The ingredient list is short and sweet, but I’ll walk you through the recipe and cover a few ideas for substitutions along the way. If you’re ready to get cookin’ right away, feel free to hit the jump to recipe button above. 

Chicken Sausage Pasta Ingredients

Here’s everything you’ll need: 

1. Chicken Sausages
2. Cherry Tomatoes 
3. Shallots 
4. Olive Oil
5. Banza Bowties (chickpea pasta) or your choice of farfalle  

And an optional sixth ingredient, you guessed it, parmesan cheese. 

Chicken Sausage

I used Trader Joe’s Garlic Herb chicken sausages. They have 17g of protein and 7g of fat per sausage, in case you’re comparing another chicken sausage. In case you need extra encouragement to make a Trader Joe’s run, you can use this sausage to make my Cauliflower Gnocchi with Chicken Sausage and Italian Sausage and Veggie Pasta Bake recipes.

Shallots

If you don’t have shallots on hand, you could get by with a sweet onion. Though I’d strongly recommend going with shallots as their structure allows them to break down faster than onions, creating more caramelization. And that’s an important factor in this sauceless pasta. 

Side note: Masterclass has a great post on the difference between shallots and onions.

Tomatoes

Since we’re talking differences between ingredients, cherry tomatoes are typically a bit juicier than their grape tomato counterpart. And as you can probably guess, that’s important for a sauceless chicken sausage pasta like this one! 

To make the pasta, begin by bringing a pot of salted water to a boil for the pasta and browning sliced rounds of chicken sausage for 4-5 minutes. 

The only tip I have for this step would be for choosing chicken sausages. Do your best to avoid any variations with cheese fillings. Not that I know from experience or anything, but the cheese melts and leaves holes in the sausage during any attempt at browning sliced rounds. 

Once the sausages have browned, add a tablespoon of olive oil to the skillet, followed by the shallots and tomatoes. 

Give everything a toss and let it chill. 

Cook over medium heat for 8-10 minutes until the tomatoes begin to wrinkle and shallots begin to caramelize. Drop the pasta 2-3 minutes in to cook for 7-8 minutes. 

If you’re using a non-chickpea pasta like a classic farfalle, you may need to drop the pasta a bit earlier so it can fully cook (about 9-11 minutes). You don’t want to overcook any pasta, but you especially want to avoid overcooking chickpea pasta. That is, unless you want to make hummus instead of pasta. 

For a cheesy option, you might check out the Goodles I used to make my cheesy Italian ground chicken pasta.

Turn off the heat and add the cooked pasta and 2-4 tablespoons of pasta water, tossing everything together.

Add the pasta water gradually, being careful not to make chicken sausage noodle soup. If you’re reading this after making said soup, you can use the option parmesan cheese in the next step to cure your woes. Cheese solves everything, right? 

Optional: Add an ounce of grated parmesan and toss everything together.

The parmesan helps bind everything together and adds a bit of saltiness. If you decide to add the parmesan on top instead of incorporating into the pasta, you’ll probably want to add a little salt to your finished pasta. 

Speaking of, it’s always a good idea to taste as you go. I personally love the caramel flavor and juicy tomatoes as-is, but you may want to add some fresh parsley and/or oregano to your pasta before serving. Make this recipe your own! 

And that’ll do it. Your chicken sausage pasta is ready to rock. If you have a recipe question I forgot to cover, leave a comment at the bottom of this post. Also, recipe reviews are always appreciated!