Carla's Optimized Alfredo Sauce

I don't know if I've already blown everybody's brains wide open with this, but if you don't have enough pasta water, you can just use water. Yeah, that's right. We lied to you for like seven years. Hello all my little parm hunks. It's Carla and I'm here again in my kitchen today making one of my all time absolute favorite pastas. Today I am making Fusilli Alfredo. I have been eating Alfredo since I was a little kid. I cooked it constantly all the way through college because it is so easy. You may have even seen me make fettuccine Alfredo in a video I did for BA. I got a lot of reports of cheese not melting, cheese clumping, cheese sticking to the bottom of the pan. Comments like these upset me and I also take them very seriously. So today I have completely revamped the Alfredo method. It is truly one pot now. It is faster, it is easier, it is better, and it is totally dependable. Turns out those fancy restaurant tricks don't work as well as the ones you learn from your mom. Before you start making your Alfredo sauce, assess the quality of your parm. You need to be able to look at the rind of your hunk of parm and see the stamp that says Parmigiano Reggiano. That is how you know that you're getting real parm. The other thing that I encourage you to look for is like a really fresh hunk of cheese. When cheese has been sitting around for a long time, it starts to dehydrate and as a person who has scraped down to the absolute rind of my cheese, desperate for a cheesy pasta dinner, I can tell you that when the cheese starts to dry out, it won't melt as nicely. So we've got a fresh hunk of parm and I'm just using the tip of my knife to break it into nuggets. This is also a way that I like to serve parm at parties and everybody can just shear off their own piece. This is probably more than I'm going to need for the recipe, but I will keep a little jar of blender parm in my fridge for a few days. It gets used up. It is definitely possible to buy blender parm, but if you're buying already grated cheese, buy it from a cheese store. Even at a good grocery store, sometimes you'll look at the already grated cheese and there will be stabilizers or binders and all you want to see on the label is Parmigiano Reggiano. So starting on low speed and everybody's going to bounce around and don't go for so long that the cheese gets ultra ultra tiny or it heats up enough that it starts to melt. So as soon as you see it in this like light and fluffy small place, that's when you turn off the blender. You don't need a Vitamix to make blender parm. You can make it in other types of blenders. You can definitely make it in your food processor. We think you can make it in a mini chopper, but obviously a smaller quantity. And now my patented chopsticks are the best tool for getting cheese out of the nooks and crannies. So I just like to go in and loosen it up with the chopsticks. The beads of parm at this point, they're not all the exact same size, but they're small enough to where even the biggest ones are going to melt at the right rate. I would describe the finished texture as something like small and fluffy. I think a thing that happened to us here in America is that when microplanes like jumped the shark and became the thing, that is how everyone everywhere grated hard cheeses. Over the course of like making this a lot over the years, I've come to realize that the microplane texture, while fabulous for making fluffy towers of cheese, is not really what you want for an emulsified sauce like Alfredo. This is what you want. You want little fluffy beads to compare and contrast. When you use a microplane to make parm, you know it originated as a wood carpentry tool, right? And it makes shavings. They're great. They're ethereal. They're light. They're very fluffy. But they're in these long, very thin planks. And so something that people report a lot is that they see the cheese immediately like stretch out into these long strands that get all tangled up. And I believe that the microplane is just not the best starting texture. It is too thin and it immediately starts to dry out. And as I already said, a dry cheese wants to clump, a wet cheese wants to melt. When I was in college, I did not have a blender. I had this cheese grater. And this is what I would use to make cacio e pepe and to make Alfredo. And when you grate that, the pieces are a little bit thicker and a little bit clumpier. So blender parm for the win. Aside from the blender parm, this is the rest of the ingredients in the recipe. Kosher salt for the pasta water and possibly for the sauce. I have butter. I have black pepper because I like a lot of black pepper in mine. And then of course, pasta. I love it with fusilli because that's what I ate growing up, but you can use really any shape that you want to to make this. Importantly, you will notice the omission of cream. There is no cream in Alfredo sauce. I repeat, there is no cream in Alfredo sauce. They will do this shortcut a lot in restaurants because you're picking up a lot of things at once. You don't have time to like slowly be whisking and making your cheese sauce come back together. But it is not authentic. It is not true to the original. It is not necessary. And frankly, I don't like it. The pasta is very al dente. The water needs to be scooped. I'm going to scoop probably more than I'm going to use. Better to have too much pasta water than not enough. This is what makes this version of Alfredo a truly one pot meal because we're going to go back in to the same pasta pot. It is nice and hot and the noodles are hot and then we're going to build the emulsification in this pot, which really is how Carol did it. She didn't have a separate pan of a buttery cheesy thing. And the original, the dude who is credited with making this, the way that they would do it in his restaurant was they would hollow out a giant wheel of parm, kind of like table side Caesar. They were making table side Alfredo and they would take the hot pasta and put it in that cheese bowl and come table side. That also does not require a separate pot. It does require like a 70 pound wheel of parm, which none of us are purchasing. All right, I'm adding my butter first. It's going to coat the noodles. This is very similar to cacio e pepe. I'm coating the noodles with fat. There's pasta water in there too, so it doesn't just get greasy. And this is also similar to like carbonara. You don't want to do carbonara on the heat because it's too hot and it will cook the eggs. And so everybody's coated. I think we need a little more water. I'm going to add some cheese and stir that in. So what I want is for the cheese to melt, for the available liquid in the pot to start to emulsify and for these beautiful little fusillies to be coated in every nook and cranny. And that's why I use fusilli instead of fettuccine because you want cheese caves, cheese pockets, cheese crevices, cheese curbs, just places for cheese to be. Mmm. It is my belief that as long as I keep going back and forth with my starchy pasta water and I keep my stirring and my heat level is good, I can keep adding cheese. This is very, very similar to daddy pasta, but the reason why daddy pasta is actually a little bit easier is because with daddy pasta you have eggs. The eggs have fat and they have liquid, which is very similar to heavy cream. This is why a lot of people put heavy cream into their alfredo because it has fat and it has liquid and both of those things give the cheese something to melt into. So technically I would say if we were ranking these, alfredo has a higher difficulty level than daddy pasta because we are not relying on the binding power of the eggs. It truly tracks back to Carol. She was the mommy making this pasta. And is it alfredo or is it mommy pasta? I kind of feel like it's mommy pasta. My cheese is very melty. My sauce is opulent and corpulent as well. I'm adding black pepper because I love it. If you don't love black pepper, you shall not add it. But this is looking sicko delicious to me. Mmm. I think when you're young, you just want to make everything so complicated. Sometimes the best way is the easiest way. Eight ounces is not enough for two people. This is like enough for me. And then you go back to the pot and you just get all of everything that's in the bottom because that's the deliciousness. The year is 1982. I'm in my childhood apartment. I have some version of like a side pony and I'm having this for dinner. And then afterwards, 100% back to back Love Boat and Fantasy Island. That is the stuff that dreams are made of. Mmm. This pasta mommy is very happy. If you identify as a pasta mommy, why don't you go ahead and throw that bathtub emoji and that like mommy emoji in the comments and we will know that the pasta mommies are out there. I think this is the appropriate time to apologize. I'm sorry for the wayward path I may have taken you on before. The beauty of getting older is getting wiser and I'm bringing you with me.