We should all make Alfredo more often.
My niece came over for the night a few months ago and her favorite food is fettuccine alfredo, and it was at that moment that I said to myself, Lindsay, you need a good pocket-sized Alfredo sauce recipe.
I have some opinions on Alfredo sauce, and here they are:
- There should be no pieces of ANYTHING. This is a silky experience.
- No specks of minced garlic.
- No flecks of Italian seasoning.
- No cream cheese.
Another interesting point: I use heavy cream in this recipe, and yes, I realize that authentic Italian Alfredo sauce often doesn’t always use heavy cream and this can be a divisive topic.
But I grew up as a kid in the ’90s thinking that Olive Garden’s fettuccine Alfredo was one of the most beautiful foods in the world. I used Jarred Alfredo in all sorts of questionable but beloved culinary creations in college. How could I not put cream on my Alfredo? I want and I have to do it. And when my niece orders fettuccine alfredo, THIS is the kind she wants.
That said, I think using ONLY cream results in a sauce that’s a little too much. (This is where he goes into an oddly long monologue about all the things I’ve spent time thinking about in relation to Alfredo sauce.) I find that thinning a cream-based sauce with a little broth, then adding the cheese to thicken, gives you the perfect alfredo sauce – salty, smooth and sticky, but not TOO sticky, that just begs you to wrap your favorite pasta in a hug.
Fettuccine would be the standard pasta to use with this sauce, but I also LOVE a good egg pappardelle (DeLallo for life) and it feels the closest thing to homemade pasta without being truly homemade. The chewy layers and folds of pappardelle wrapped in that silky Alfredo sauce? Yuck. Very good.
The weather is getting colder, the leaves are falling and in our house, we are loving fettuccine alfredo night right now. I’ve been making a skillet with shrimp and broccoli for a complete and balanced meal. A little sauce here, a silky twist of a fork there. The vibes are really good.
