Spaghetti Aglio e Olio

Today, we’re going back to basics with spaghetti aglio e olio, a Neapolitan pasta with a family twist. Everyone should have this simplest of pasta dishes in their repertoire. It tastes great, it’s cheap, and its ridiculously easy, so even a beginner cook (even a kid, with proper supervision!) can make this without much of a fuss.

Aglio e olio is so simple, and yet so flavorful. This will, quite possibly, be the shortest recipe I’ve ever written. Bring a gallon of water to a boil in a large, lidded pot. When the water comes to a boil, put in a pound of high-quality spaghetti or another long pasta. Cook that according to the package’s instructions, reserving a cup of the cooking water into a heat-proof container at the halfway mark.

Finely chop 3 large cloves of garlic. Coat a sauté pan with about 4 tablespoons of olive oil—enough to generously cover the whole surface of the pan. Be more generous than you think you should be since this oil will form the bulk of your sauce. Fry the garlic until aromatic. Zest and juice one lemon into the oil, being sure to catch any seeds. Lightly season the oil with salt and pepper, bearing in mind that more salt (from parmesan) will be coming later.

Once the pasta has cooked according to the manufacturer’s instructions and drained into a colander, place the pasta into the lemon-garlic-oil sauce, and start stirring. Keep stirring, and slowly stream in your pasta water. Go slowly to avoid splattering. (This step and the draining of the pasta—getting rid of a gallon of boiling water—are steps that require not just supervision but hands-on help from an experienced adult if a kid is making this.) Use as much or as little as you need to form a glossy, emulsified sauce. 

Garnish the pasta with parmesan. Serve.

Our family twist is that we serve this alongside sauteed broccoli; the fact that we sauté the broccoli in garlic-infused oil (separately from the sauce, but with the same intentions of infusing the garlic into the oil) brings a nice unity to the dish, and the cooked-through-but-still-somewhat-crunchy broccoli provides not only a good color contrast (yellow/green) but also a nice texture contrast against the pasta.

This pasta truly is a work of genius. Don’t embellish it too much; let it speak for itself. That something so simple can be so good truly is one of the marvels of proper authentic Italian cuisine.