We Should All Be Making Alfredo More Often.
My niece came to stay for an overnight 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 back-pocket Alfredo sauce recipe.
I have some opinions about Alfredo sauce, and here they are:
- There should not be chunks of ANYTHING. This is a silky experience.
- No flecks of minced garlic.
- No flecks of Italian seasoning.
- No cream cheese.
Another hot take: I use heavy cream in this recipe, and yes, I do realize that authentic Italian Alfredo sauce often does not always use heavy cream and this can be a divisive issue.
But I grew up as a kid in the 90s thinking the fettuccine Alfredo from Olive Garden was one of the most beautiful foods in the world. I used jarred Alfredo in all kinds of questionable but beloved food creations in college. How could I not put cream in my alfredo? I want to and I have to. And when my niece asks for fettuccine alfredo, THIS is the kind she wants.
That being said, I find that using JUST cream results in a sauce that is a bit much. (This is where it goes into a weirdly long monologue about all the things I have spent time thinking about related to Alfredo sauce.) I find that thinning a cream-based sauce with a bit of broth, plus then adding the cheese to thicken, gives you the perfect salty, smooth, clingy but not TOO sticky Alfredo sauce is just begging 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 about as close as you can get to homemade pasta without being actually homemade. The chewy layers and folds of pappardelle wrapped up in that silky Alfredo sauce? Ugh. So good.
The weather is cooling down, the leaves are falling, and in our house, we are loving fettuccine Alfredo night right now. I’ve been making a pan of shrimp and broccoli along with it to make a full, balanced meal. A dunk of sauce here, a silky fork twirl there. The vibes are real good.
