Today when you order fettuccine Alfredo at a place like the Olive Garden
you can expect a bowl of pasta drenched in a creamy and garlicky sauce,
and delicious it is
but Italian it ain't.
Now the original Italian version of fettuccine Alfredo is all together different and doesn't have any cream at all.
So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring this video as
we make my favorite way to put on weight fettuccine Alfredo,
the original recipe this time on Tasting History.
So fettuccine Alfredo or fettuccine all'Alfredo is a dish that has been made for so long
that its origins are really lost to the mists of time
but the version that we know here in the U.S. gets its name
from Roman restaurateur Alfredo di Lelio,
and it is his version of the dish that I endeavor to recreate.
Now he never actually wrote down the recipe per se or at least shared it
but in 1927 he did give away the secret to his dish,,
and it was to use the best ingredients to make his fettuccine.
Than a "Double quantity of butter and cheese and well mixed - that is my secret."
And if you're thinking well there has to be more than just that-
no there there doesn't seem to be because his restaurant or rather restaurants are still in operation today,
and say that they still make it the way that they made it then and they say that's all there is to this iconic dish.
So to make the pasta what you'll need is: 2 cups or 250 grams of Italian pasta flour, sometimes called double zero flour.
2 cups or 250 grams of fine semolina flour, and six large eggs.
Now can you just buy dried pasta you ask?
Well yes, yes you can but since Alfredo used fresh pasta that is what I'm endeavoring to make,
but I have nothing against dried pasta. I had some last night
when I made a big bowl of chicken sausage spaghetti bolognese from today's sponsor Hellofresh.
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Now unlike the dried pasta that I got from Hellofresh this is how you'll make your fresh pasta.
Pour out the two flowers onto a clean workspace and then mix them together.
Once well mixed create a well in the center where you can add all of your eggs.
Then trying not to make a mess begin incorporating the flour into the eggs,
and once all of the ingredients are incorporated you should have a shaggy dough
that you can start kneading by hand for seven to eight minutes.
Keep kneading the dough until you have a nice smooth ball.
Then wrap it either in a damp cloth or some plastic wrap and leave it in a cool place to rest for about a half an hour.
Now in the summer in my house there aren't a lot of cool places so I put it in the fridge which works just as well.
After 30 minutes take it out and cut it into pieces.
I cut mine into three pieces but I would suggest cutting it into six pieces.
It's just going to make it a lot easier when you are rolling it out.
And to roll it out you can either use a hand cranked roller, or one like the one that I have which attaches to a stand mixer.
I just got the new Kitchen Aid. It's red, it's beautiful,
and the reason that I got it was because I dropped the old one on the floor.
And luckily it didn't fall on my foot but it did break the Kitchen Aid stand mixer,
and yeah. I was devastated we've been through a lot together.
Also a little story about the shirt that I am wearing in that video.
So when I was on book tour shilling the Tasting History cookbook back in May
at one of the the signings, someone's stood up and said I've been watching you since the almost the very beginning,
you had me at garum, referring to the episode on garum the fermented Roman fish sauce
that kind of got this channel started and I just loved that so much that I decided to put it on a T-shirt ,
and I had one made for myself and you can buy them if you want I'll put a link in the description.
Anyway to use this thing press your piece of dough down a bit and sprinkle it with flour.
The key to making this whole process work is by having plenty of flour on that dough,
you don't want it sticky at any point or else it'll stick to the rollers and you'll get holes
and it'll just be a big old mess so use more flour than you think.
Then set the rollers to the widest setting. On mine it is a one and then you're going to pass the dough through.
Then fold it in half or in thirds depending on the size of the pasta and pass it through again.
And you want to repeat this at least three times but you could do it seven or eight times.
Once it's nice and smooth and uniform then you can start tightening the roller,
just one notch at a time pass passing the pasta through once each time you tighten it.
And again make sure to use plenty of flour so the pasta doesn't stick to the rollers, and you can make it pretty much as thin as you want.
I'm going with either a five or a six but you can get it up to like a seven or an eight
to get it really, really thin. Just know that the thinner it gets the harder it is to work with.
But once it's as thin as you want it run it through the machine on the fettuccine cutting setting.
Once all of your pasta is cut set it aside and boil a pot of water, about three quarts.
And while it heats you can get your other ingredients ready, so for every half pound of pasta that you're going to be making
what you'll need is 100 grams or one cup of parmigiano Reggiano freshly grated on the finest grater you have.
And being freshly grated is imperative if you use pre-grated parmesan cheese
it's not going to work because they add fillers that make it so it doesn't clump,
but it also makes it so it's not going to incorporate with the butter and you're just going to have a big old mess.
And then four tablespoons or 55 grams of unsalted butter at room temperature.
And you're going to put that in a bowl that is also either room temperature or just ever so slightly warm,
and you'll also need a little bit of the pasta water that you're going to be boiling the pasta in.
So you got your pasta, you got your butter, and you got your cheese but before we put them all together to make this fettuccine Alfredo
I think I need to tell you who Alfredo was.
Picture it, Italy 1908
a young man Alfredo di Lelio frets over the health of his young wife Ines
who is pregnant with their first child.
Unfortunately, Alfredo doesn't know what to do because he's not a doctor
and he doesn't know how to help his wife. The only thing he does know how to do is make pasta.
So after praying to Saint Anne protector of pregnant women
Alfredo goes into the kitchen and whips up a bowl of pasta with butter and parmesan cheese,
and gives it to his wife who absolutely loves it and I guess got her strength back because
a couple months later she gave birth to Armando or Alfredo II.
On top of that in 1914 when they opened a restaurant called Ristorante Alfredo on the Via de la Scrofa in Rome
she suggested putting the dish on the menu.
The thing is pasta with butter and cheese isn't really restaurant menu worthy,
because in Italy that dish was known as something that you'd whip up if you weren't feeling very well,
just kind of like a comfort food and it was usually just called fetuccine al burro or fettuccine with butter.
It wasn't new, it wasn't inventive and it had probably been made in most Italian households at least since the Middle Ages.
In fact a recipe for basically this dish appears in
Maestro Martino's 15th century 'Libro de Arte Coquinaria',
and his recipe is for long thin strips of pasta mixed with cheese and butter,
and the only real difference is that he would put sweet spices on it like sugar, and nutmeg, and cinnamon,
because it was the Italian Renaissance and they put that stuff on absolutely everything.
The other difference was the name because in Maestro Martino's time
fettuccine the term had not come into use and so instead it's called macaroni Romineski or Roman macaroni
but even by the 20th century by Alfredo time the term macaroni
was still sometimes used just to refer to any pasta at all that was long and thing,
but even with the name change to fettuccine
the dish that Alfredo made his sick wife is still pretty much the same dish that people had been making for centuries.
So if Alfredo's pasta was not inventive or unique,
why was it such a big deal?
Well the answer is Alfredo himself because when you went to his restaurant you weren't just getting served a bowl of pasta
you were getting a show starring Alfredo.
The waiters shout "Alfredo is coming" the room goes dark,
the king comes dancing under a spotlight's beam. Gold fork and spoon serve as his sceptre.
"I am King of the Fettuccine" and every waiter in the dining room stands at attention.
Now that is a description of Alfredo's performance in 1952 after he had become a phenomenon
but even before the worldwide fame people went to his restaurant in Rome for those noodles.
His noodles were famous especially with tourists.
In Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel 'Babbitt' a character planning a trip to Rome is asked
if while she's there she's going to attend concerts, and enjoy the art and culture, and music that Rome has to offer.
And she says "No, what I really go for is: there's a little trattoria on the Via della Scrofa
where you get the best fettuccine in the world."
And when two of the greatest film stars of the 1920s Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks
visited Rome for their belated honeymoon they dined at Alfredo's
and fell in love with the pasta so much that it said that they went back every single day of their time in Rome,
and when it was finally time for them to leave the city
they gifted Alfredo a pair of golden utensils, a fork and a spoon engraved with
"To Alfredo King of the noodles - July 1927".
There's a story that during World War II people would give up their gold to the government to help pay for the war effort,
and should you not do so voluntarily
then Mussolini would send the carabinieri or the National Police to come get it from you.
Well "The coppers eventually got around to Mr. Alfredo. 'The fettucine fork and sppon, if you please,' they said.
Alfredo wept. He pleaded. He got on his knees and swore it would ruin the tourist trade.
The carabinieri gave him a couple of licks to teach him patriotism.
They took the fork and spoon.
Next day, day however, they came back. They handed him the fork and spoon.
'Thanks to God!' cried Alfredo 'Roman culture is saved!'
'Keep it' said the cops. 'Gold Plate.'
Alfredo of course never accepted the fact that they were just gold plate and always insisted that they were indeed pure gold.
Now with the approval of Hollywood royalty it was time that Alfredo got the approval of his own government,
and in 1927 he was knighted
for his fettuccine and afterwards on the restaurant menus it said
"Alfredo, Cavaliere delle fetuccine."
Alfredo Knight of the Fettuccine.
And foreign newspapers wrote "Indeed, the two most discussed byproducts of modern Italy
are Facismo and fettuccine."
Quite the pair but it was the Fascismo and not the fettuccine that dragged Italy into World War II
which unsurprisingly devastated the tourism trade and made it very difficult to get good quality ingredients for the pasta.
And so in 1943 Alfredo decided to hand in his golden spoon and golden fork and retire,
and he left the restaurant in the care of his son Armando and then just a few years later in 1946
they decided to sell it all together to two of their employees.
So that's the end of Alfredo's story, right?
No, no, no, no, no, because as I said Alfredo was a showman
and the restaurant was his stage and he craved that limelight,
and so in 1950 when Italy's tourism trade came roaring back
he decided to open a new restaurant.
But he couldn't just name it Alfredo because that was already taken by the restaurant that he had once owned and sold to his employees,
and there were a lot of other Alfredo restaurants that had popped up because they were trying to cash in on his name
so instead he named it Il Vero Alfredo, the True Alfredo.
And it was sort of a shady move because it was only a seven minute walk
from that original restaurant he owned which was still selling the pasta that he had made famous
and now he's doing the same thing seven minutes away,
but the thing is people came to that new restaurant because they weren't just going for the pasta
they were going for Alfredo. You went to the restaurant to see how he prepared the the pasta,
and it kind of reminds me how people would go to Caesars in Tijuana
just to see how Caesar himself would make his famous salad and I did a whole video on that
so if you haven't seen that I'll make that pop up after this one and I'll put a link in the description.
But suffice it to say the owners of that original Alfredo's restaurant were none too happy with the new Alfredo's restaurant,
and it kind of started a feud that according to many still is going on to this very day.
And in 1952 a newspaper talked about
Alfredo's reaction to being questioned whether the true pasta
the true fettuccine Alfredo was at that original restaurant or if it was at his new restaurant.
"His mustachio vibrates with indignation.
He shows you a calloused spot on his right palm - that is caused by the spoon;
a callous on his upper third finger left hand - that is the mark of the fork -
scars earned by tossing the noodles 47 long years."
Fortunately both restaurants have been able to cash in both on the pasta and on the name,
and are still in business today owned by the same families who own them in the 1950s.
What's interesting though is that the name fettuccine Alfredo while it took off worldwide
never took off in Italy at least not outside of Rome,
because most of Italy still calls it fetuccine al burro
or my favorite pasta dei Cornuti or cuckolds pasta.
See the story goes that a woman was having multiple affairs and
would be with all of her lovers all day so that when she got home she didn't have any time left to make him a big meal
so she would just boil some pasta and throw on some butter and some Parmesan cheese
which is exactly what I'm about to do right now.
So add a little salt to your boiling water and then add in your pasta.
Now if it's fresh pasta it might take one to three minutes to cook depending on how thin you were able to get your pasta.
Mine took about 90 seconds but if it's dried pasta then it can take up to 10 minutes.
Alfredo does say that this pasta should be al dente so don't overcook it.
As soon as it's cooked pull it straight from the pot into the dish with the butter.
Then sprinkle it with about a third of the parmesan cheese and start tossing it coating the noodles with the butter as it melts.
This is really the trick to getting a creamy sauce without using any cream
and a 1937 article describes how Alfredo himself did it,
and it was with a flare.
"In serving fettuccine, Alfredo's goes in for as much style as a Hollywood opening.
A waiter comes solemnly up to your table carrying a steaming bowl of cooked noodles,
like a high priest with a special offering. Then arrives Alfredo himself with a dish of freshly grated Parmesan cheese
and a plate of unsalted butter. With reverential grace, the spoon in his right hand, the fork in his left,
he mixes and re-mixes the cheese and butter through the noodles
tossing them up in higher and higher loops every twist."
People said it was like watching a great dancer or a juggler with noodles,
and it is known that he used his golden spoon and fork, yet
in so many pictures he is shown manhandling the pasta with his hands, yummy.
Regardless I do not have his technique so I am keeping it low and in the bowl.
As you continue to toss it add in a bit more cheese as well as some of the pasta water to help thicken it up.
The starch from the pasta in the water is what's going to give this a sauce like texture.
And as the article says "Two minutes of mixing and the platters are served."
Add a little more parmesan and a crack of black pepper and here we are
the original fettuccine all'Alfredo.
I can tell right away that this is going to be very very different from a fettuccine Alfredo that you would typically get in an American restaurant today
because it just smells so different. Really the smell that I'm getting is the parmesan I mean there's a lot in here.
So I'm guessing it's going to taste like it as well but here we go.
It's so simple but that's so delicious.
And the pasta is done perfectly. You want a little bit of a bite to it, you want it al dente but really
at first you just get butter it's like this creaminess.
It is like a creamy sauce even though there's no cream in it,
and then you get hit by the cheese and that- if you don't like Parmesan cheese you're not gonna like this.
It is so cheese forward that that I could see maybe backing it off a little bit if you wanted to,
but it is supposed to be- that is supposed to be kind of the dominant flavor
and I'm fine with it because I love cheese, this is excellent.
Now like I said even if you don't want to make your own noodles from scratch
you can make this pasta using dried noodles and it's going to take you like five minutes to do the entire dish
so there's really little excuse not to do it unless you don't like cheese and then make something else
but if you like cheese make this version of fettuccine Alfredo,
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
I'm going to eat this whole bowl.