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 thing: “You want to get a little color on the garlic, but you don’t want to burn it,” Brandwein said, which can lead to bitterness.
“When sautéing garlic, never take your eyes off it, never allow it to become colored a dark brown because that is when the offensive smell and taste develop,” Hazan wrote.
At some point while the garlic cooks, chopped fresh chile pepper (which is what Hazan calls for in her book) or crushed red pepper flakes (Brandwein prefers the smoky flavor of the dried spice) get added to the pan.
Once the garlic reaches the right color, Hazan instructs cooks to toss in the cooked pasta and parsley, and then it’s all set. In “Lidia’s Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine,” Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali take a different approach by adding 2 cups of pasta water to the garlic and letting it reduce to form an emulsified sauce that gets combined with the pasta and parsley.
Brandwein prefers to first add the parsley directly to the oil. “When you’re cooking herbs in olive oil, it’s what releases the oils and the flavors,” she said. After that, she adds the pasta with just a splash of cooking water and tosses it until it’s evenly coated.
And for those wondering, the choice of pasta is always the same. “Romans say ‘spaghetti aio e oio’ [sic] as though it were one word, and they would as soon expect another pasta to be in the combination as the moon to change its course,” Hazan wrote. “If any substitution may hesitantly be suggested, it is spaghettini, thin spaghetti, which takes very well to the coating of garlic and oil.”
For Brandwein, the success of this dish all boils down to timing. “You have to have everything in line, because it goes very, very fast. So you need to have all your ingredients, all of your mise en place, right in front of you ready to go,” she said. “You can’t be searching around [asking], ‘Where did my parsley go?’ Because then your garlic is going to burn.” As long as you’re able to avoid this tragic fate, you’ll have a delicious bowl of pasta ready in almost no time.
If you’re looking to take the flavor profile in a different direction, there are plenty of options. Though purists may disagree, I found that a sprinkle of cheese when serving takes this simple pasta dish to the next level. Brandwein loves to use a buckwheat spaghetti that they make in-house at Centrolina — “That’s my favorite” — and said breadcrumbs can add nice texture. Bastianich gives the option to add basil in her recipe and offers adding anchovies or capers as further variations.
On the one hand, there’s beauty in the simplicity of the more streamlined version. But on the other, you’re the one who gets to eat it, so add whatever you like.
