Baked Pasta with Goat Cheese, Radicchio, and Caramelized Red Onion

This baked pasta with goat cheese has a creamy sauce and gets even cheesier with the addition of fontina. The sweetness of the onions and the slight bitterness of radicchio take this cheesy pasta bake to the next level!

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This baked pasta with goat cheese is a little unexpected. It's not so typical. It's got radicchio for cryin' out loud. We don't use it enough in our cooking. So let's change that right now.

I love the bitterness of radiccio and how it pairs with sweet and salty flavors. It's a sturdy member of the chicory family and holds up well to long cooking. All of which makes it perfect for this dish.

Radicchio, red onion and balsamic vinegar are already such good friends, it only makes sense that they work so well together to cut through the creaminess of this goat cheese pasta with their sweet, tart, and bitter flavors.

Oftentimes when you're making a cheesy pasta bake, you need to make a roux, but that is not the case here. The goat cheese and heavy cream become the base of the sauce, then we'll add fontina cheese to make it nice and gooey.

Fontina cheese is another ingredient in this pasta that doesn't get enough love. It's nutty and melts really well, I like it better than mozzarella in many cases because it gets a little creamier.

And let's make dinner a little more whimsical and use cavatappi as our noodle.

What is cavatappi? It's a corkscrew shaped pasta with a hole in the middle. Like a corkscrew macaroni.

You don't have to use cavatappi. You can use other varieties of pasta with a hole in the middle like penne, or elbows. The cavatappi is really fun though...

This is a pretty effortless recipe with a lot of reward in creamy, cheesy, bitter and sweet flavors. The only thing that takes any time at all is caramelizing the onions. And it takes 25 minutes, folks. No short cuts. You can do it.

Listen, some things are worth waiting for, and some of those things are caramelized onions. Do not believe those people who tell you it happens in 5 - 8 minutes. It just doesn't.

Baked Pasta with Goat Cheese, Radicchio and Caramelized Red Onion

Adapted from Food & Wine

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Set the goat cheese out on the counter to allow it to start softening as you cook the other ingredients.

Slice the radicchio into thin ribbons and soak in a bowl of water. This removes some of the bitterness. I learned this trick from Elizabeth Minchilli.

If you want really full-on bitter, you can skip this step. I really love bitter flavors, but when I was testing this recipe I felt that the bitterness was overwhelming if I skipped the soak.

Use a good chef's knife and slice the onion into thin half-moons. Slice the garlic thinly.

Add the olive oil to a large non-stick skillet, and sauté onions over medium heat until caramelized and beginning to brown, about 25 minutes. If some of the onions are cooking faster than others, you can add a splash of water to the pan from time to time. I find this helps the caramelization as well since it softens the onions a bit.

Once the onions have been cooking for about 15 minutes, get a large pot and start the water to boil your pasta. Add enough salt so it "tastes like the sea".

While the onions are cooking, use a box grater to grate the fontina and parmesan cheese. I prefer freshly grated cheese because it melts better in recipes like this, but you can use pre-grated.

Add the garlic and sauté until fragrant and just beginning to become translucent, 1 - 2 minutes.

Drain the radicchio, then add it to the skillet and cook for 3 - 4 minutes until wilted. Add the balsamic vinegar and a pinch of salt and stir to throughly combine.

The pasta water should be boiling by now. Add the noodles and cook until very al dente, 6 - 8 minutes.

Now that the noodles are boiling, make the goat cheese sauce.

Add the heavy cream and goat cheese to the onion and radicchio mixture over medium low heat, stir contstantly until it just comes to a simmer. Once the goat cheese is completely melted and fully incorporated into the sauce, remove from heat and set aside.

Do NOT heat the cream over high heat. This will cause the mixture to curdle. Goat cheese can be fickle.

Reserve one cup of the pasta water, then drain the noodles. Add them back into the pot along with the goat cheese mixture, add the pasta water, and stir to combine.

Add about ⅔ of the fontina cheese and stir until it's all melted and gooey.

Transfer the pasta to an oven proof skillet or casserole, top with remaining fontina and the grated parmigiano. Bake for 25-30 minutes until the cheese is browning on top and the sauce is bubbly.

I baked this in my Lodge enameled cast iron casserole pan. I find it works really well for baked pasta dishes like this one because it heats evenly and doesn't stick.

Disclosure: I am a part of the Lodge Cast Iron Blogging Partners Program. This enamel casserole was provided to me free of charge by Lodge Cast Iron. All opinions are my own.

Can you substitute red cabbage for radicchio?

No. They are very different in flavor and in how you cook them. Radicchio is in the chicory family, has a little bitterness, and wilts quickly when heated. Red cabbage is sweet, has a lot more water in it, and takes much longer to cook.

You'd have pretty raw cabbage if you swapped them in this recipe. You'd also turn the entire thing pink, because as the cabbage cooks, it will release water and color the rest of the dish. And that would be pretty weird.

Can you freeze baked pasta with goat cheese, radicchio and red onion?

I don't recommend baking this to store as a freezer meal because the texture of the creamy goat cheese sauce will change significantly, and pretty much disappear. That is typical for many cream sauces once they hit the freezer.

The leftovers of this pasta freeze fine, as long as you're willing to put up with the change in texture to the cream sauce. Just heat it in the microwave for a few minutes. You'll still have cheesiness from the fontina and richness, just no real sauce to speak of.

More pasta recipes

• Creamy Pasta with Bacon and Cheese
• Red Wine Spaghetti
• Linguine with Green Olives, Capers, and Fresh Herbs
• Penne all'Arrabbiata