Pasta with Olive Oil and Three Flavors of Garlic - Kelsey

I probably mentioned this in my first Citrus Project post but something about my friends and me is that we love a project. We love a club, we love a reason to start a blog.

Less than a week ago I messaged Missy and Mariam and said:

Me: What if we all cook out of the same cookbook and blog about it?

Mariam: like Julie & Julia 

Missy: I'm in 

Reddit suggested The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt and we all ordered it.

When I cook, I tend to look at recipes to get a rough idea and then fall into my own habits. This has already gotten me into trouble with this recipe lol. My goal with this project is to follow his recipes as closely as I can (at least the first time I make them).

I started with this recipe because I wanted something easy that I could make after work and pasta sounded good.

I went with pre-peeled garlic because peeling 12 cloves of garlic after work did not sound like something I wanted to do. Here is my mise en place. Or as close to it as I'll get. I see so many videos with all the separate little bowls holding each ingredient. I can't stand the thought of the extra dishes. 

In this photo you see one thing that if I was not doing this for a blog I would have omitted. Parsley. If a recipe calls for parsley I will skip it 100% of the time. 

I smashed, sliced, and microplaned my 12 cloves. I would say my knife skills are adequate for a home cook but my garlic certainly could have been sliced thinner and my parsley more finely chopped. I got the pasta water boiling (I should have taken a picture but I didn't want evidence of how much salt I accidentally added to the pasta water. Let's just say I did not have to add any additional salt to the dish. It was a lot).

I got my oil infusing with the smashed cloves. The recipe said this should take 5-7 minutes. Either my stove is too hot or I overestimated what temperature he wanted it set at but this went pretty fast. I didn't time it but I would guess closer to 3-4 before I was worried it would start to burn.

I discarded the smashed cloves and added in the sliced garlic and some red pepper flakes. This also went faster than the recipe suggested and I ended up taking it completely off the heat when I added in the grated garlic because it was too hot and I didn't want the slices to burn. 

I threw the butter in and let it sit to the side as the pasta finished cooking.

Here's where my cooking habits created a problem. I threw the pasta water away. I even had a cup set aside to scoop some up but I just didn't even think about it when the time came. I never save pasta water. For the most part I think it is fake but in this case it was kind of important since it made up half the sauce. 

Oh well. I used water straight from the tap and hoped the pasta has enough starch on it that it didn't matter. And guess what? It was fine. I guess I would need to do it side by side to be sure but I feel like it would be hard to tell the difference. 

So I drained all the pasta water and mixed everything together. The recipe says to stir for two minutes to help emulsify. I sprinkled in the parsley and it was done! Top with a little parm and bon appétit.

It was good. And for how easy it was I would say really good. But this isn't one of those recipes that is greater than the sum of its parts. I think it's exactly what you expect with what is going in it.

My mom was surprised by the lack of pungency from the garlic. My dad liked it. I would make it again just because it was so easy! Making it this first time I didn't want the pasta to be done first so I let the water boil for a few minutes before adding in the pasta. But preparing the garlic and then making the oil probably took the same amount of time or even shorter than boiling the water and the pasta cooking so I would just do everything at once next time.