Fettucine alfredo, also known as fancy mac and cheese, is an Italian staple and my mom’s least favorite dish.  This week I decided to attempt to make this recipe using BA’s fettuccine alfredo recipe… it was a far from the perfect attempt.  But let’s dive into what’s happening and where I went wrong.

Cooking the Pasta

Cooking pasta is debatably the easiest task in the kitchen, and it’s pretty hard to mess up (sorry if I just attacked your cooking abilities).  Essentially, pasta is gluten and proteins (flour and eggs) that when placed in boiling water the proteins change shape and gain a “sticky” soft texture as a result.  Water from the boiling water is being diffused into the dried out pasta noodles enlarging them and rehydrating cells.  While the heat of the boiling water starts to denature and change the shape of existing proteins in the pasta noodle.  Now the most important part of this step is heavily salting the water…and I mean heavily.  This is the only time in the recipe the pasta can be directly seasoned, the noodle is able to diffuse mineral water through osmosis and diffusion.  Also, adding salt lowers the boiling point of the water making it boil faster than if it was just tap or distilled water.

The Sauce

Sadly the alfredo sauce is not as easy as making the pasta.  If you remember what emulsion is from last week, this whole sauce is essentially an emulsion (if you forget it’s when 2 substances don’t want to be together but are forced to be).  To start off you have to melt butter (an emulsion in itself) in the pasta water.  Trying to combine fatty butter, and water poses many issues.  You have to vigorously, seriously vigorously, whisk the butter into the water to force it to combine and emulsify.  Next, you have to melt parmesan cheese into the water and butter mixture.  Cheese is not fun to work with and melt, due to its finickiness.  At 90 degrees F bonds in cheese begin to break, but not until 180 degrees F does the cheese actually melt into that liquid puddle.  If removed from heat right after melting the cheese and sauce will be that perfect liquidy consistency.  However, if left on even a little too long the cheese will toughen up, due to water being evaporated and turn into a tough chewy consistency instead of the plush liquid.  This can (and will) ruin the alfredo sauce.  When making the pasta I overworked and overheated the cheese causing it to coagulate leaving me with a still delicious but chunky cream sauce.

Plating and Summary

When plating the pasta, it’s important to cut the excess fatty and heavy taste with something light.  An aromatic like Italian parsley will add a subtle acidity and necessary lightness to the otherwise heavy sauce.  Some lemon will do the same job- the acidity will cut through the heaviness of the sauce making it practically addicting.  This recipe is far from difficult, but due to the emulsion-based sauce, it can be tricky.  Cooking is a little more free-spirited than baking and can require more adjustments on the fly.  This is a great first (or even 100th) recipe to try.  As always this is a BA test kitchen recipe and can be found here if you want to try for yourself: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/fettuccine-alfredo.  Next week, we’ll go back to something a little sweeter… until then keep on cooking!