“It’s one of my favourite things to eat,” said Amy Brandwein, chef and owner of Centrolina and Piccolina in Washington. “It’s delicious. It doesn’t take very long to cook.
It’s easy to digest. You don’t have to go shopping for it.” Spaghetti aglio e olio is the object of Brandwein’s affection, and it’s one of the most basic staples in an Italian kitchen.
As the name suggests, it consists of just a handful of ingredients: spaghetti, olive oil, garlic, crushed red pepper flakes or a fresh chile, and parsley. But even with such a classic dish, different cooks offer various ways to achieve their ideal version. No matter the recipe, it always includes cooking garlic in olive oil until golden.
“You can go out and buy super expensive olive oil, [but] I don’t necessarily recommend that for this because you don’t really want the olive oil to overpower the pasta and the garlic,” Brandwein said. “You want to have something that’s kind of fruity, balanced,” which is typical of the olive oils from Liguria that she prefers for this dish. “In typical Italian restaurant kitchens, we always have our garlic sliced paper thin,” Brandwein said, which conjures that one scene from “Goodfellas” where Paul Cicero, a.
k.a. Paulie (Paul Sorvino), uses a razor blade to achieve the precise result.
However, in Marcella Hazan’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” she calls for chopped garlic instead. Regardless, all the sources I reviewed agreed on one.
