Recipe Review

I Tried Meghan Markle’s 3-Ingredient Pasta Sauce Recipe

Elizabeth Licata
Elizabeth Licata
Elizabeth Licata is a former contributor to The Kitchn.
updated May 24, 2019
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I am a full-on Meghan Markle fangirl. She’s smart, kind, and her style is *airkiss*. The Duchess of Sussex also has excellent taste in food and wine, so when she said she had a fabulous three-ingredient pasta sauce made out of zucchini, water, and a bouillon cube, I had to try it out.

Meghan said she loves trying great new pastas whenever she’s traveling, but according to Delish, she said her favorite pasta to make at home was a secret sauce a friend had introduced her to, which is made by slow-cooking zucchini for four or five hours with a bouillon cube until it turns into what she calls “a filthy, sexy mush.”

“The sauce gets so creamy, you’d swear there’s tons of butter and oil in it, but it’s just zucchini, water and a little bouillon,” Meghan told Delish.

The recipe only has three ingredients, but I had to try it a few times to make it work out, because Meghan never specified exactly how much of each thing to use. The first time I used a whole cube of bouillon to three large zucchini, and that was way too much bouillon. Also, the particular brand of bouillon cube I had purchased for this experiment turned out to be not to my taste, so I switched to a bouillon paste I had in the refrigerator for the rest of my testing. The second try was far too watery.

On the third pass, I got a pasta sauce a person might actually want to eat. I chopped six zucchini — two large ones and four very small ones — and put them in my Instant Pot with half a cup of water, and half a serving of chicken base paste. (The package said to use three quarters of a teaspoon to a cup of water. Gun-shy from the previous attempts, I used half a cup of water and the corresponding amount of chicken base.) Then I set the Instant Pot to slow cook on medium for five hours.

Occasionally I’d lift the lid to stir the sauce and mash it with the back of my spoon, and in five hours it was definitely a filthy mush, but I don’t know that I’d call it “sexy.” It was a loose mush that looked a bit too watery, so I switched my Instant Pot to Sauté and reduced it by half.

It really does make a pretty decent, healthy pasta sauce. It’s creamy and a little sweet, and the sauce covered the pasta well, and cooking it in a slow cooker meant I could basically ignore it all day. The resulting pasta was good with a sprinkle of Parmesan on top of it, and then I added some red pepper flakes, because red pepper flakes are basically never a mistake. Now, per Meghan’s suggestion, I just need a big glass of red wine to go with it, and I’d make this again.

What do you think of Meghan Markle’s pasta sauce?