Dairy Free Sausage Alfredo Pasta (Gluten Free)

Our delicious mushroom and sausage alfredo pasta is a great dinner for weeknights since it comes together in under 40 minutes, even less if you make the alfredo sauce ahead! Our recipe is dairy free, gluten free, and made without cashews.

If you’re looking for some different recipe ideas for weeknights when you need to make something simple, our mushroom and sausage dairy free alfredo pasta is comes together in under 40 minutes.

This is an allergy friendly main dish recipe we made using our dairy free alfredo sauce. You can put this dish together even faster if you have already prepared the alfredo sauce ahead of time!

One of the best things about this recipe is that our alfredo sauce is made without cashews and doesn’t require a blender.

Like I mentioned in our alfredo sauce post, this obviously isn’t an authentic alfredo sauce because it’s made with dairy alternatives. But it works as a great alternative for people with food allergies! This sauce is really easy to adjust to your personal tastes as well if you have flavor preferences for alfredo.

Our alfredo pasta recipe is:

• Gluten free
• Dairy free
• Egg free
• Peanut free

How to make dairy free sausage pasta alfredo

There are a couple of steps to this recipe, but it comes together fairly quickly. The most involved part of this recipe is the alfredo sauce, and it’s not too hard to make.

Most of these steps can be done at the same time (cooking the pasta, cooking the sauce, and sauteeing the mushrooms and sausage), so this usually together comes together in under 30 to 40 minutes.

You’ll need 3 burners on your stove for this recipe unless you already have your alfredo sauce made ahead (which is a great way to save time on busy nights). Here are the steps to make this recipe (this is just an overview of steps, the full recipe is at the end of the post):

1. Fill a 2 quart saucepan about 3/4 full with water, add a pinch of salt and 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and bring to a boil over medium heat.
2. Once the water is boiling, add the gluten free fusilli pasta and cook according to package directions, reducing the heat if needed and stirring occasionally to keep the pasta from sticking together. You can also use a different pasta shape here if you like instead of fusilli.
3. While the water for the pasta is heating up, begin the alfredo sauce: heat 2 1/2 cups of the coconut milk (set aside the other 1/2 cup), nutritional yeast, seasonings, and lemon juice in a small (1 quart) saucepan over medium low heat.
4. Add the dairy free butter to a skillet and heat the skillet up on medium heat to cook the mushrooms and sausage. One the pan is hot, add your mushrooms, cajun spice, and any additional salt and pepper you like and saute until slightly softened, about 5-7 minutes.
5. Once the mushrooms are softened a bit, slice up and add the cooked italian chicken sausage to the pan with the mushrooms and cook until the sausage is heated through, about another 5-7 minutes.
6. While the mushrooms are cooking, lower the heat on the sauce slightly to medium-low heat and add the dairy free parmesan and mozzarella to the alfredo sauce and melt into the sauce, stirring often, until the sauce is smooth.
7. Whisk in the cornstarch into the remaining 1/2 cup of coconut milk that was set aside to create a cornstarch slurry.
8. Whisk the cornstarch mixture/slurry into the hot sauce and continue to heat and stir until it thickens to your liking (this usually takes 3 to 5 minutes), stirring often to prevent scorching or lumps. Once the sauce is as thick as you’d like, remove it from the heat.
9. Once your pasta is done cooking, drain it and put it back in the pan.
10. There are 2 ways to assemble this dish: you can serve everything separately and let people add the mushrooms and sausage and sauce to the pasta individually, or you can mix everything together into large, deep skillet and serve it like that.
11. Garnish with fresh herbs or chives if you like.

What kind of chicken sausage can I use in this recipe?

For the sausage you choose, make sure to look for the pre-cooked chicken italian style sausages that don’t have cheese added. Some brands of chicken sausage will add italian cheeses to their sausage, so make sure to keep an eye out for that if you have dairy allergies.

I ended up using the Open Nature roasted red pepper and garlic chicken sausages rather than the italian chicken sausages from the same brand, which have cheese.

Technically it’s not an italian chicken sausage, but the flavors complimented this dish well! I couldn’t find cooked dairy free italian chicken sausages in my town at the time, so this version worked really well in our recipe.

Can I use a different kind of mushroom in this alfredo pasta?

For the best flavor in this dish, I recommend using crimini/baby bella mushrooms, which are baby portobello mushrooms. I think they have better flavor than regular white mushrooms, but if you can only find white mushrooms they will work in this recipe, too. Porcini mushrooms will probably also work here as well!

If you’re not a fan of mushrooms, you can leave them out of this dish altogether or swap them for something else, like roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, or sauteed zucchini.

If you add canned roasted red peppers or artichoke hearts, you’ll only need to warm up the sausage and the peppers or artichokes together in a pan and you’ll be able to cut out the additional cooking time of the mushrooms.

Can I replace the coconut milk in this recipe?

Canned coconut milk that has a high fat content works really well for recipes in place of cream and whole milk. However if you have coconut allergies or don’t like the taste of coconut milk, you can use a thick milk alternative like oat milk, almond milk, cashew, etc. It might not have the same creaminess without the coconut fat, but it will still taste good.

The alfredo sauce doesn’t taste like coconut, but if it’s still a taste preference vs a coconut allergy, you can try using the Silk half and half or heavy cream in this recipe and it will work well, too.

Those Silk half and half and cream alternatives do have coconut milk in them, but they have a much milder taste than 100% canned coconut milk. They are great products for cooking with, but I don’t use them very much anymore since they use bean protein and they made my stomach hurt, so I have to stick with canned coconut milk.