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Aglio e Olio

by Matt Kennard

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Garlic, olive oil, chile and parsley. Fifteen minutes from a pantry with nothing in it, with half again as much garlic as the standard recipe, and the only difficulty is not burning it.

Serves
4
Total
20 min
StovetopPasta
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The dish for a kitchen with nothing in it. Garlic, oil, dried chile, pasta, and if you have parsley, parsley.

It's also the clearest demonstration of the one rule that governs most cooking: aromatics burn, and the whole recipe is about not letting them. Garlic goes from raw to golden to bitter in about forty seconds at the wrong heat, and bitter garlic is the only way to ruin this.

So the oil starts cold with the garlic in it, and comes up slowly. That's the technique.

One change from the standard recipe: I use half again to twice the garlic. Most versions call for four cloves and I use eight or ten. It's a dish named after garlic and there's no reason to be shy about it, and since the slices cook slowly in oil rather than frying hard, more of them doesn't make it harsh.

If it's not right

  • Bitter: burnt garlic. There is no fix and it's worth starting the oil again.
  • Oily and separated: not enough pasta water, or you didn't toss hard enough to emulsify.
  • Bland: salt in the water, and then salt at the end. Three ingredients means nothing is hiding.
  • Dry: more pasta water. It keeps absorbing after the pan comes off.

Ingredients

4

Method

  1. **Pasta into well-salted water.** Cook to a minute short of al dente, and keep a mugful of the water.

  2. **Garlic into cold oil** in a wide pan, with the chile. Put it on medium-low and let it come up slowly.

  3. **Watch it.** You want the slices pale gold and the oil smelling of garlic, which takes four or five minutes. Pull the pan off the heat the moment the color starts to move past gold.

  4. **A ladle of pasta water in,** which stops the cooking and starts the sauce. It will spit.

  5. **Pasta in,** and toss hard for a minute, adding water a splash at a time, until the oil and water emulsify into something that coats rather than pools.

  6. **Parsley in** off the heat. Taste for salt.

Goes with

From the journal

  • Italian Is the Other One — Fish is one of the foods people order rather than make. Pasta is the other, and it's the stranger case, because it's flour and eggs.

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