How to Make Alfredo Sauce

Transcripts

Amy Riolo: Hi, I am Amy Riolo and today we are making Alfredo Sauce. The ingredients that we are going to use are a quarter cup of unsalted butter, that's a one half of our regular stick of butter. One cup of heavy cream, three quarters cup of Parmesano Reggiano Cheese, that's been grated, a few shakes of freshly ground pepper and a handful of freshly chopped flat leaf Italian parsley.

So to get started, the first thing that we are going to do is to melt our butter and cream together. This is again unsalted butter. It's very good to use unsalted butter when you are cooking because it allows you to control the amount of salt that you put into the recipe instead of already starting out with the salted product and in this Alfredo Sauce, since we are using the Parmesano cheese that already has a lot of salt in it. So we don't need to add more salt in with the butter and we are just going to let these melt together over low heat and it takes just a second. You will be amazed at how quick and easy this sauce is. It only takes five ingredients and it's made in less time that takes to boil pasta.

So if are making this with your pasta of course, the traditional pasta for Alfredo Sauce is Fettuccine, but you could also use a spinach pasta, little spinach fusilli, tastes very good with Alfredo sauce and all that you have to do is get your pasta water boiling, add your pasta, make it and right after you have add your pasta, you start making the sauce because it's going to be ready that quick. So on those nights when you want to maybe order out or do takeout or something like that this is much easier, it's very quick and it's much less expensive than a restaurant meal.

So now you can see how our cream and our butter are just melting together very very nicely and this is important because you want to keep it on low. You don't want to let that curdle or anything like that and then the minute that they come together and melt together, you turn the heat off. That's all of the cooking time that this recipe requires and then you add a little bit of fresh black pepper. Just a little bit, you don't want to go too much because since the sauce only has these very creamy rich ingredients you don't want to add too much pepper. And then you are going to add your Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and then you just whisk them in together and the cheese it's what gives the sauce its body and it kinds of holds it together. This is a traditional sauce from Rome but you can see now here we have it with five ingredients.

So you buy a jarred variety, it has a lot of ingredients in there and a lot of things that we don't want. This is just a very simple, easy ingredients and it tastes great. It's very delicious and you can have this kind of thing anytime you want because it's so easy to make. Now you could make a lot of other recipes with it. You can add different things in with the Alfredo sauce. Like of course, it's very common, in United States people add chicken or tomatoes or things like that. But this is just the basic recipe that you have and you make -- this is not a good recipe to make in advance, this is a great recipe to just serve as you have it. So here is our homemade Alfredo sauce and when we come back we are going to be making homemade Basil Pesto.

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