Presenting the ultimate alfredo

There’s a popular online trope that if someone thinks they can cook and wants to impress you, chances are they’ll make you a chicken alfredo. Oddly enough, in my experience this has a strong kernel of truth to it. Fettucine alfredo is rare to find as a home cooked meal here in North America (outside of many Italian-american households) but it is a dish widely considered to be versatile, filling and packing a powerful flavour punch, while presenting an illusion of difficulty. . . which pretty much makes it a perfect way to wow someone with your cooking skills.

What makes alfredo sauce so tasty is a combination of three or four basic ingredients; cream, parmesan cheese, garlic, crushed peppercorns and even butter are the most commonly used ingredients for a genuinely great alfredo sauce. What’s more is that they can often take on the subtle flavours of other ingredients, which can be cooked (at least partially) in the sauce itself, such as chicken, bell peppers, broccoli and many others.

A few years ago I was working at a restaurant (which shall not be named) and the owners had asked me to make a few dishes for the house. I was floored, and so naturally I came up with a line of signature burgers (still used today, much to my ire) a few basic seafood dishes and three signature pastas, the main of which being a fettucine alfredo that culminated my best techniques (at the time) in use for the pasta and it turned out to be the restaurant’s number one dish after a mere week (blatantly bragging, but indulge me). This all-star fettucine incorporated all of my best flavours for creambased fettucine in “a symphony of loud flavour percussions accompanied by a subtle choir of murmuring flavours to make every mouthful a moving experience”, or at least that’s how I described it on the menu – I was feeling fancy.

Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado; I present: