Fusilli Alfredo
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My alfredo journey tracks with my life journey in a way I didn’t comprehend until we were filming this week’s video.
The love affair with alfredo sauce started as a child—and what’s not to love? Pasta, butter, cheese. Calling it kid pasta demeans the depth of flavor you can get out of a hunk of Parm (aka queen of cheeses). On the other hand, I was a kid, and that was my dish. If we ate out and they didn’t have alfredo on the menu, my parents would ask them to make it. In a perfect world, in a perfect restaurant, I would be ordering wedge salad with blue cheese dressing followed by pasta alfredo. I have problems, but lactose intolerance isn’t one of them.
If it was Saturday night and my mom, Carole, was cooking, it was fusilli alfredo all the way. I loved the way the sauce would tuck into each curled ladder step of the twisted noodle, and I loved the flavor of freshly ground pepper on mine. I had never had cacio e pepe, but this was essentially cacio e pepe but with butter and parm instead of oil and pecorino.
My sister and I ate together, around 6 P.M., and as soon as the pasta bowls landed in front of us, my dad would appear, circling the table with a fork out for “tastes.” Everyone knows that dad bites are huge, so Nina and I learned to defend our dinners by throwing the top half of our bodies over the bowls while screaming.
Undeterred, he’d head the stovetop for forkfuls from the bottom of the tall pot that my mom made the sauce in. This move would elicit another round of protests; if he didn’t rein it in, our second helpings were at risk.
Everything my mom made seemed like magic then. The entire act of cooking was sorcery; I vaguely understood what went into the process but I was always amazed by what came out. Saturday night alfredo was especially witchy. I have such clear visions of my mom at the stove, her back turned to the dinner table, stirring and stirring in that tall pasta pot. Almost nothing went in, then there was the mixing, and within 20 minutes, the world’s best pasta was being dished up.
When I finally learned how to cook (in college), I ate a lot of alfredo, sometimes with chopped up green beans that I cooked in the pasta water in the last minutes before the fusilli was done. No one had taught me about emulsifying the sauce with pasta water, so those versions were very buttery and cheesy, but a little tight. Instead of a creamy sauce meandering into my pasta ridges, it was a bit dry and crumbly.
At 26, I was a line cook working at Union Pacific, a fancy and imaginative 3-star restaurant in Manhattan. I still saw the magic in cooking, but by then it was more of a scientific transformation that shook me. I had a tenuous grip on the techniques that could turn a group of ingredients into something else. When some crazy adult would bring a child to that very modern restaurant, and inevitably an order for “kid pasta” would come into the kitchen, we executed butter and cheese in a very different way than I was used to.
In a skillet, one of the cooks would bring a few centimeters of water to a simmer, and would then add small scoops of softened butter to the pan, swirling until the butter and water formed an emulsion. Then four-finger pinches of grated Parm would cascade into the mixture, until the cheese melted and the sauce was creamy and pale yellow. The pasta would get tossed right into the pan, and then spooned into a hot shallow plate. It was clingy, a little drippy, scrumptious, and, frankly, kinda French. (The butter and water technique is called beurre monté, and is the base of many French mother sauces.)
And that’s how it came to be that I demonstrated that technique for a Fettucine Alfredo video on the Bon Appétit YouTube Channel. I was a pro cook; I did things the line cook way. My sauce looked great on camera and it always worked for me; I confidently presented this method so home cooks could do the same. For many, it worked. But there were pitfalls with this method, and over the years, I heard about it. The cheese would seize up in clumps instead of melting into the buttery water, or it would get all stringy without melting. My advice was always to lower the heat, add more splashes of water, and continue stirring until the cheese finally surrendered. Whatever you do, don’t add cream! It’s an unnecessary crutch; this would work if you were patient, and it had always worked for me.
I wanted to address the alfredo feedback when I filmed an alfredo video for my channel a few weeks ago. It was kind of perfect when the cheese hardened and separated from the liquid when I was making it on camera; we got footage of what the messed-up texture looked like, and then I followed my own advice. I took the skillet off heat. I added more pasta water. I whisked, I stirred. Still, the cheese was shiny and stringy and would not cooperate. Cybelle Tondu, our incredibly skilled food stylist, theorized that the cheese was getting too hot. We tried transferring it to a measuring cup to cool and then use a hand blender to bring it back together. Didn’t work. We started a new batch from scratch and I was very careful about moderating the heat. Same thing happened.
So we cut on filming and conferred. I told our producer that I wouldn’t release a video that was giving me this much trouble. I thought about carbonara, in which the emulsification of eggs, pork fat, and cheese happens entirely off heat. I thought about the original iteration of this dish, which is said to have been made by putting hot pasta and butter in a scooped out wheel of Parmigiano and tossing it tableside until it became creamy. I thought about my mom, stirring cheese into her tall pot. I would bet you seven million dollars the flame was turned off.
Newly confident, we reset and rolled again. When the pasta was done, I scooped out some pasta water, drained the fusilli, and put them back into the hot pasta pot. I added a splash of water and stirred the butter into the noodles. It melted and emulsified. Then I gradually added the cheese, stirring and pushing it to the limit. A little more water, a bit more cheese, and so on until the pasta was enshrouded in cheesy luxury and tasted amazing.
In the middle of the finally-successful sauce making, I realized we were making Mommy Pasta. It’s Daddy Pasta without the eggs. It’s carbonara without the eggs or the guanciale. This is the alfredo my mom made in her tall pot, without a French mother sauce technique. It’s not a mother sauce. It’s Mommy Pasta, the one I ate as a kid and the one I hope my kids make for their kids.
Cooking at a 3-star restaurant is complicated. Making alfredo is not. With a measure of humility and the belief that failure leads to progress, I offer this new (old) version to you.