The Magic of Fried Shallots (and a Simple Aglio e Olio to Show Them Off)

Get my Spaghetti Aglio e Olio e Fried Shallot recipe here (free gift link to NYT Cooking): https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1023190-spaghetti-aglio-e-olio-e-fried-shallot?unlocked_article_code=1.1F0.eHWF.LRByC37FnIvI

Adding homemade or store-bought fried shallots to classic garlic spaghetti gives it extra caramelized sweetness and depth of flavor, along with crunch. Add the shallots in two stages so that some of them soften and give their flavor to the sauce, and the rest remain crispy. Cooking the spaghetti in a relatively small amount of water concentrates its starch, making it easier to form a creamy, emulsified sauce. If you can’t have your pasta without cheese, feel free to grate some Parm or pecorino on top at the table.

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CREDITS
Photo: David Malosh for The New York Times
Photo Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne
Shot by: Michael Weiner
Edited by: Alex Oh
Produced By: Kenji Lopez-Alt, Lena Davidson

Yeah, Jen, here you go. Good boy. Maybe we can lady in the trumpet. Hey everyone, it’s Kenji. Today we are going to be making spaghetti alio eolio e fried shallot. So, it’s a classic garlic spaghetti with a fried shallot twist. This is one of my recipes from nytcooking.com where I’ve been a featured contributor for a number of years. So, you can find this recipe and all of my other New York Times recipes as well as recipes from other the other great contributors there uh at nytcooking.com. All right, let’s get into it. All right. So, spaghetti alio eolio is a classic classic real simple Italian uh spaghetti dish. Um it’s made with just garlic, olive oil, uh pasta water, and then sometimes a little pinch of red pepper flakes, maybe sometimes a little parsley. Um and my little spin on it is that we are going to add some uh fried shallots, which are one of my favorite ingredients. I use them for everything from, you know, topping like an iceberg wedge salad to um to topping a casserole. Uh and um or or putting them in a taco or in a sandwich, uh sticking them on top of a burger. Um they go great in this dish. We’re going to incor incorporate some of the fried shallots directly into the pasta. Um and then some we’re going to sprinkle on the top at the end. Um all right, so I’m going to start out with some garlic cloves. Uh, the New York Times recipe calls for six medium garlic cloves, but I only have these small guys today, so I’m doing more of them. Um, it’s all, you know, to taste anyway. You don’t need exactly six garlic cloves for a garlic spaghetti dish. Um, smash them, give them a rough chop. It’s my favorite way to do garlic. So, these are fried shallots. I bought them from the store. You can make your own fried shallots. Um, but storebought fried shallots are generally pretty good. Um, what you want to do is you want to find ones that uh only have shallots and oil in the ingredients. Sometimes they add starch to them uh to get them a little sort of crisper on the outside. Um, but I find it sort of robs them of flavor and changes their texture a bit um in a way that I don’t particularly like. Um, they are almost never seasoned. So, one thing you’ll find when you buy fried chars from the from the store is that they need to be salted. So, usually what I’ll do is I’ll buy them in a jar and then as soon as I get them home, I’ll just open up that jar, add a real big pinch of salt to it, and then shake it up uh to season the shallots because they taste much better when they’re a little bit salty. Um, all right. So, what I’m doing right now is I’m just going to toast them. You could do this in a toaster oven or in your regular oven. Um, but I’m going to toast them in this dry skillet here just to give them a little bit more uh a little bit sort of more depth of flavor. Get them a little bit slightly browner cuz sometimes I find the storebought fried shallotss are a little pale. We want to toast those. All right. Pinch of salt. It only takes, you know, 30 seconds. This is over s sort of a medium low heat. As soon as it hits, you’re going to start you’re going to start smelling them. Um, and as they toast more, they will get more and more fragrant. Um, I might have to jump off in a second because my my daughter is uh home from camp this week uh and she has a friend coming over for a playd date and this is going to be this is going to be their lunch. All right, I think that’s looking good. It’s been about a minute. Let’s taste them. Delicious. going right back out into our our bowl here. If I if I had my my wits about me, I would have uh I would have had the pasta water already boiling. Um because this, you know, this is one of those dishes that comes together in about the time it takes to um actually just boil the pasta. So, I’ve got my toasted fried shallots. I’m going to get my fancy extra-virgin olive oil. We’re gonna go pretty low heat here. Let’s see. Because what we want to really do is kind of gently toast the garlic. Or not even toast the garlic. We want to sweat the garlic. We want it to get soft without much browning at all. So, we’re going to go for as low as we can get there. And quite a bit of olive oil. So, about 6 tablespoons of olive oil is what we’re looking for. You know, this this is one of those dishes where the the sauce, you know, you’re adding quite a bit of oil, but the finished dish should not be greasy at all. Um, it should be sort of a creamy emulsion where the water and the olive oil, the water that we’re going to add to it and the olive oil uh combined and emuls combine and emulsify so that rather than being sort of a slick of oil on top or surrounding each piece of uh pasta instead, um it’s a really sort of creamy sauce. All right. Garlic. Pinch of. I’m using this pimont despite. You can use any kind of chili flakes you’d like. Just let that garlic kind of sweat down in here. Maybe even slightly lower heat. So, we want this to sort of slowly soften and release its flavor over the course of a couple minutes. Um, and hopefully by then our pasta water will be boiling and we can come back and finish this dish up. Actually, let me get my parsley minced in the meantime. Minced parsley. You pick the leaves off. You kind of bundle them up like this in your hand. And then once they’re kind of scrunched up, give them a give them a chop using your uh your finger here as a guide. So, your knife should be sort of right against this middle middle section of your finger with the tip curled back so that you don’t cut yourself and your thumb behind so that you don’t slice the tip of your thumb off. You could also finish this dish with uh minced chives if you want, you know, sort of go triple up the aliums. So, you got the the shallots and the garlic and the chives. Um but we’re going to keep it simple today and do just the just the parsley. this back in the bowl. So, we’re ready to go. So, our garlic actually looks pretty nicely softened. It’s not sizzling much anymore, which means that the moisture has mostly evaporated from it, and it’s going to start sort of heavily browning if we leave it on there too long. So, I’m just going to pull it off and set it to the side while I finish boiling my pasta. So, when I’m cooking cooking pasta, um I never virtually never, unless I’m cooking fresh pasta, I never follow the advice to use, you know, a ton of water. Um I find that with um with pasta, it it doesn’t make a difference. I’ve done a bunch of sideby-side tests, um taste test, blind taste tests with, you know, a panel of tasters, and I’ve found that um whether you cook your pasta in a ton of water or in just enough water to cover it, um it actually ends up tasting virtually the same. Um the difference is that in dishes that really utilize um the past yes Jen that really utilize the pasta water uh as an element in the sauce um using less water actually um will give you more starch like more concentrated starch which is what makes your sauce emulsify. Um so I cook my my pasta in a shallow saucepan like this. Chen is getting really worked up over this. Don’t season it too heavily because we’re going to be adding that pasta water um to our sauce and if you season it too heavily it will um it will get too salty. That is Chen’s um I want to have a bite of this bark. His oh wo means I want some of that whereas whereas if he goes aba aba that means I don’t like what’s going on. I’m going to go feed Chenna’s lunch uh and then I will let my daughter’s friends into the house. Uh and by then the pasta will be done. We’re going to cook it shy of al dente. So, maybe a minute or so less uh than what the box says to do. Uh giving it a stir every so often. All right, so I’ll see you in our pasta’s real close to done. Um I’m going to take half of those fried shallots, put them straight into this part. Um and then I’m going to add some of this pasta water. Just lay a little bit to the pan. By the way, if your uh oil is a little too hot and it looks like your garlic is sort of on the verge of burning, um adding a ladle of pasta water to it or any water to it is going to halt it immediately. Um so that’s a good way to make sure that your garlic doesn’t start burning. We pulled ours off in time, though. Um all right, so now I’ve got the pasta water in there. So the gar the shallotss that are in there are going to sort of start to soften and they’ll give up sort of some of their brown, sweet, caramelized flavor um to that pasta water and oil mix. Um, so that will coat the spaghetti when it’s done cooking. And let me try tasting the spaghetti now because I think it’s on the verge of being shy of al dente. [Applause] Yeah. All right. So, still slightly chalky in the center, which is just how we want it. I’m going to just pull it out of the pan using some tongs and go straight into the pan here. And you don’t have to let it drain too much. Um, you want sort of some of that water, that pasta water to come with it. You can see sort of how nice and starchy this pasta water is, how it’s like very cloudy looking. Um, that cloudiness is all the excess starch from the exterior of the pasta. Um, that has sort of rubbed off and sloed off into the water and that’s what’s going to make our sauce emulsify. Hey, lunch in a couple minutes. Okay. All right. So, now we’ll put this pot over high heat and we want to just bring this to a simmer. or even a a hard boil. And the pasta will finish cooking in this pan. And meanwhile, that hard boil is going to sort of vigorously mix that pasta water and oil. Right now, you can sort of see there’s this watery layer with an oily slick on top. You know, by the time this pasta is done, that layer um should disappear and instead of being uh watery with an oil slick on top, it’ll just be one sort of solid creamy liquid. Take just a just a minute or two. And if we timed everything right, the pasta will be perfectly al dente by the time the sauce is nice and creamy. One thing you do, you know, to do as you’re as you’re cooking this dish or any any pasta dish really, um that has a sort of creamy emulsified sauce like this is you want to keep an eye on it and if it looks um if it looks watery with that oil slick on top, that means you need to reduce it more. However, if it starts to look sort of dry, you know, at some point the water layer is going to completely evaporate off. Um and so instead of looking like water with an oil slick on top, it’ll just start looking greasy. You know, it’ll start looking like your pasta’s tossed in plain oil um because the water has evaporated too much. And if that happens, um, you want to add a ladle full of of of more water, more pasta water. So, you know, you kind of have to adjust it as you go. Um, so right now, I think I could use just a little more pasta water. I think I want it to be slightly saucier. Um, but you can see it sort of coming together now into this creamy creamy liquid as opposed to a greasy one. That’s exactly what we’re looking for. When I learned how to make pasta or sauce pasta the right way, I thought it was incredible that you can make this, you know, take these two things, oil and water, one of them’s watery, one of them’s greasy, and you combine them together and you get something like delicious and creamy like that. Definitely need some salt. And obviously, you know, the more you reduce that, the more you need to adjust it with extra extra water here. So, don’t be shy about adding the water if it looks like it’s it’s going to need it. That’s delicious. Finish it off with that parsley. One last ladle of pasta water. You want it to be slightly sort of soupier in the pot than you’re going to serve it because as it cools um and it sits in the the dish on the table, it will um sort of continue to absorb some of that water and also as it cools it will the sauce will thicken up. But I think that looks good. You see how nice and creamy that mixture is? Beautiful. Get this into our serving dish. Hey girls, lunch time. Okay, we’ll keep going. Finish it off with some more fried shallots. All the fort. You destroyed the whole fort? Yeah. Rebuild it. Okay. It’s bigger and stronger than ever. Here. You like this bit, huh? All right. Parsley. Shallots. And that is our dish. I’m going to take one bite. M super simple dish. Pasta, garlic, olive oil, and fried shallots. In the New York Time in New York Times cooking, nytcooking.com, we call this dish pasta alio olio fried shallot. Um, you can find the recipe on nytcooking.com. Um, and you can find all of my other recipes there, all my other New York Times recipes there. I’ve been contributing uh as a featured contributor for uh a number of years now. We’ll leave a free gift link to this recipe so that you can uh get it even without paying for it. It’ll be a free recipe. Um, but I do encourage you to check out all the other great recipes there. All right, guys, gals, non-binary pals. I’m gonna serve this to my kids and uh I’ll see you later.