For those who don’t know, pasta aglio e olio is the typical “male college students coming home with friends at 4 am after an unsuccessful night out to play video games” meal in Italy.
It’s a college institution.
Typical doses: 250 g of spaghetti per person, as much oil and pepper as possible. Moderate aglio, because nobody in Italy really likes too much garlic
As a chef working in a Italian restaurant:
-Start boiling some heavily salted water (if the water doesn’t taste like the sea, it needs more salt)
-Chop up some garlic and parsley.
-in a skillet heat up a good (what you think is too much) oil over medium heat. Add the parsley garlic and some chili flakes. Depending on how much heat you want in your dish.
-Let those flavours infuse while you cook the spaghetti about 1-2min less than the package instructs.
-without draining them, scoop up the spaghetti from the pasta water and add to your oil. You don’t drain the pasta cuz you want some starchy water to help bind the oil to the pasta.
-cook the pasta for the last 2 minutes on the oil and add pepper and salt to taste.
Serve with real parmigiano reggiano and make sure you have a quality spaghetti and you’ve got an amazing dish
As the daughter of a chef - skip the salt, add a bouillon cube. It’s not authentic but it tastes better and half of the NYC restaurants do it already. The umami from the bouillon cube rounds out the flavour and makes it taste less like a two ingredient poverty food.
A lot of Italian dishes taste kinda unfinished until you add an umami element to them. Thats why I prefer the Croatian version the same dishes. Pasta fagioli is a beany vegetable soup, the Croatians make pasta fažol by adding a bit of pršut (smoked ham) and it completes the flavour and makes it a delicious hearty meal. That’s why Lydia Bastianich has been so successful - she’s been passing the typical Croatian version of meals as “authentic Italian” for decades and people like it because it flat out tastes better.
If you wanna get real advanced find some Vegeta in a European grocery store and start using it to sub salt in most meals. It’s basically just a bunch of herbs, onion and garlic powder, and MSG. Use it as a meat rub, use it when making rice, use it while cooking anything savoury.
For those who don’t know, pasta aglio e olio is the typical “male college students coming home with friends at 4 am after an unsuccessful night out to play video games” meal in Italy.
It’s a college institution.
Typical doses: 250 g of spaghetti per person, as much oil and pepper as possible. Moderate aglio, because nobody in Italy really likes too much garlic
As a chef working in a Italian restaurant: -Start boiling some heavily salted water (if the water doesn’t taste like the sea, it needs more salt) -Chop up some garlic and parsley. -in a skillet heat up a good (what you think is too much) oil over medium heat. Add the parsley garlic and some chili flakes. Depending on how much heat you want in your dish. -Let those flavours infuse while you cook the spaghetti about 1-2min less than the package instructs. -without draining them, scoop up the spaghetti from the pasta water and add to your oil. You don’t drain the pasta cuz you want some starchy water to help bind the oil to the pasta. -cook the pasta for the last 2 minutes on the oil and add pepper and salt to taste.
Serve with real parmigiano reggiano and make sure you have a quality spaghetti and you’ve got an amazing dish
As the daughter of a chef - skip the salt, add a bouillon cube. It’s not authentic but it tastes better and half of the NYC restaurants do it already. The umami from the bouillon cube rounds out the flavour and makes it taste less like a two ingredient poverty food.
A lot of Italian dishes taste kinda unfinished until you add an umami element to them. Thats why I prefer the Croatian version the same dishes. Pasta fagioli is a beany vegetable soup, the Croatians make pasta fažol by adding a bit of pršut (smoked ham) and it completes the flavour and makes it a delicious hearty meal. That’s why Lydia Bastianich has been so successful - she’s been passing the typical Croatian version of meals as “authentic Italian” for decades and people like it because it flat out tastes better.
If you wanna get real advanced find some Vegeta in a European grocery store and start using it to sub salt in most meals. It’s basically just a bunch of herbs, onion and garlic powder, and MSG. Use it as a meat rub, use it when making rice, use it while cooking anything savoury.
Nope, there’s no parmigiano in aglio e olio.
I had a tiny Italian lady basically smack me around the kitchen for forgetting the parmasan… I’ll believe her