Garlicy Cream Sauce (For any Pasta)

Pasta is one of those ingredients that become unexciting quickly; hence you need to keep a repertoire of sauces in order to make the monotonous pasta refreshingly electrifying. Earlier I jotted down the walnut sauce recipe in which you can always make a few changes like – add toasted and pureed almonds/cashews, use slivers of pine nuts, minus the cream, add rosemary instead of oregano. That recipe had so many versions and you can quickly manipulate it to suit your palate. (Please avoid the maneuvering if you are a kitchen virgin)

Here comes another one of those recipes that is extremely quick to put together, requires very few ingredients and also doesn't really require any skills.

This is my version of the alfredo sauce; I decided to complete ignore the use of butter as I am already using cream and egg yolk. For people who wants to make it extra creamy, they can go for heavy cream instead of single cream. I do add a squeeze of lemon at the end as it cuts through the richness of the silken cream sauce. The garlic gives it a good punch thus I leave out chili flakes (which is optional. Sometimes the volatility of my temperament changes and I add a good pinch of red chili flakes to the sauce)

For the Sauce:

1 cup single cream

½ cup grated parmesan cheese

1 egg yolk

½ tsp grated or minced garlic

Salt, pepper and sugar to taste

A squeeze of lemon

Parsley (Fresh or dried)

For those who are not familiar with the double boiling method, here it goes – take a saucepan with about 1 inch of water. Place a bowl over it. The bottom of the bowl should not be touching the water. Bring it up to a boil. Put the cream, salt, sugar, pepper and the parmesan cheese in the bowl and let it come up to temperature. The indirect heat will melt the parmesan. Once the mixture is warm, add the egg yolk and stir until the cream thickens a little. Take it off the heat.

In a separate pan, add a tsp of flavourless oil and toast the minced garlic until soft and brown. Dump the garlic into the sauce. Let the sauce cool down a little before adding the lemon, if it’s warm there are chances that the sauce will split.  

There is another way to cook the sauce but if you are not careful, the egg yolk will split and hence you will get cream and scrambled egg. So unless you have done this before and are absolutely sure that you can handle it, I suggest using the double boiling method.

Heat up the cream in a saucepan until you can see bubbles arising on the sides. Give it a swirl. Take it off the heat and beat in the egg yolk. The residual heat will cook the egg yolk and make the sauce thick. Throw in the parmesan cheese and let it gradually melt in. Add salt and pepper to taste. To finish the sauce give it a squeeze of lemon. Finish off with chopped parsley.

You can use this sauce with spaghetti, fettuccine, tagliatelle. Sometimes I just add strips of fried chicken to it and it tastes absolutely fantastic.