Pasta with Garlic and Oil

Chapter 12: Who Wants Pasta? - Page 190
Time: 25 minutes
Cost: ~$3 for 4 servings

Drew's Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
Good... but verging on not remembering it unless I was looking through the cookbook. Really good for how easy it was.

Sara's Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
Really liked this. Would have been better with the fresh lemon. Probably not a dish I would make for company, but great when you want something fast and cheap.

This is a bonus entry for the week! Our regularly scheduled post (from Chapter 2 on Salads) will be up either this afternoon or tomorrow.

I’ve been wanting to make this dish since I first flipped through the cookbook. I LOVE the concept of a garlic and oil sauce for my spaghetti, but our past attempts have been seriously lacking. It usually ends up with pasta sitting in a pool of oil with mostly raw garlic adding a nasty bite. Not that it matters, since none of it sticks to the pasta anyway, it just gets left in the bottom of the bowl with the oil. Ew.

So seeing an ATK recipe for pasta with garlic and oil made me do the happy food dance (if you don’t know what the happy food dance is, you need to eat with me more often) and put it on the meal schedule for the week. I will preface this entry by saying you must be a garlic lover to enjoy this dish. There is TONS of garlic, and the flavor is quite strong. Drew and I are garlic fiends, but this might not be first date material.

One thing I love about most pasta recipes (and this one is no exception) is that they can often be completed in the time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta. In my head, that feels like “free time” to make a fun sauce, since it would take the same amount of time if I were just opening up a jar. I hope that makes sense outside of my head. The one downside here is that you do have to attend the sauce (lots of garlic in extra-virgin olive oil) the entire time. You can’t set a jar of sauce up to simmer and then go watch TV for 15 minutes. Burnt garlic will make for a hideous sauce, and once it’s burnt there is no turning back the clock. You’ll have to start all over again, and I don’t think anyone really enjoys peeling 12 cloves of garlic once, let alone twice. Once the garlic is nice and golden (just about the time the pasta finishes cooking... amazing!), you just mix in a little parsley, red pepper flakes, salt and lemon juice and voila! Garlic bliss.

Mix it with the spaghetti, add a little shredded parmesan on top and we had a lovely lunch.

A garlic press is your best friend in this recipe if your knife skills aren’t up to master chef level. And I definitely recommend using fresh garlic, not the pre-minced jarred stuff, for this recipe. While peeling and mincing garlic is definitely a pain, it is the star in this recipe and deserves a little special treatment. The jarred stuff may work OK for what’s cooked in the oil, but not for the portion added raw at the end.

A mistake we made was using our container of grocery lemon juice instead of buying a lemon. We could definitely taste the difference in the end result. I’m not exactly sure how to explain it, but it didn’t taste bright like fresh squeezed lemon juice would have been. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was noticeable. This is definitely not a recipe to shortcut your ingredients. Fresh garlic, fresh lemon, fresh parsley. No substitutions!