Joe Tsao

Intersession provides me with time to pursue a few interests, and one of my interests is food. Exploring new foods to eat, and cooking food.
Recently, I bought a cook book – The New Best Recipe, a product of Cook’s Illustrated. So far, it is an amazing book, for it gives not just recipes, but the science and the trial-and-error behind each recipe as well. Hopefully my recommendation for the book counteracts the words of wisdom I’m stealing from it and feeding to you. Anyways, my first project from this book – Pasta with Garlic and Oil (or Aglio e Olio).

Pasta with Garlic and Oil

Here are the ingredients (well the butter shouldn’t be in here). This recipe is really quite simple, but I’ve learned a lot from following the book instructions (apparently I’ve been cooking pasta all wrong over the years).
Some lessons learned:
1. Salt is actually for taste, not raising the boiling point (you’d have to pour a ton of salt in there to raise the bp by just a few degrees).
2. Rinsing the pasta after dumping it in the colander? Bad idea. This removes starch from the pasta which sticks to the sauce.
3. Always stir the sauce into the pasta, rather than just putting it on top. This helps the pasta not stick to itself.

Nice and simple. The ton of garlic put into it isn’t overpowering at all! In fact, it is absolutely delicious. Helps to have a pasta cooked perfectly al dente.

Add a little Parmesan cheese, and it is perfected.

My ratings
Taste: 4/5.  Nothing special, but still tasty.
Difficulty: Relatively easy. Would be much easier if I had a garlic press.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Cooking, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.