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The original was posted on /r/askculinary by /u/SignificanceWitty654 on 2023-09-23 16:40:44.
I’ve been trying out different ways to make spaghetti aglio olio, and what I’ve found is that making a sauce with the right texture and thickness is critical to the flavour of the dish. You could pack all the garlic in the world into the sauce, but if it doesn’t stick to the spaghetti, the dish would be bland.
I typically use supermarket pasta, and what I’ve found works best is to use less water when boiling the pasta, salt the pasta sparingly (my guideline is for it to taste like a lighter soup), and finish cooking the pasta in the garlic/chilli oil together with a generous amount of starchy pasta water. Doing so leaves me with a reasonably viscous sauce that coats the pasta with the delicious garlic/pepper/olive oil sauce.
However, I do not see any chefs online recommending this. The closest to this “technique” I’ve seen online would be from Alex the French guy, who concentrates the pasta water to make a richer cacio pepe sauce.
Have I gotten aglio olio seriously wrong? It’s definitely not traditional, but I would like to at least capture the “essence” of the dish