Cooking: fettuccine alfredo sauce

Self-tutoring about cooking: the tutor mentions a fettuccine alfredo recipe.

A few nights back I needed a starch to go with chicken breasts. In a pinch, I decided on fettuccine alfredo. I knew it was a risk: alfredo sauce sounds simple, but getting it right isn’t necessarily so.

In hurry, I settled on this recipe from allrecipes.com. Yet, I’m sure I’ve heard, many times, that you can’t successfully mix butter or cheese with milk, just by themselves: they won’t stay mixed (called, I think, “breaking,” when they separate). Flour needs to be present, to bind them, I’ve been told. On the other hand, I reasoned, the recipe must work, or it wouldn’t be so prominent.

Of course I didn’t have Romano cheese – I used mozzarella instead. Moreover, I used light cream, not heavy, and margarine, not butter. (My cooking is full of substitutes:).) As I mixed the recipe together in a saucepan, it started to break – exactly as I was expecting.

I tossed a few tablespoons of flour into the mix, and it stabilized. I know that’s not the ideal way to do so – you should mix the flour and butter beforehand – but it worked. The sauce tasted great.

The chicken I roasted that same night – I learned something there as well, which I’ll hopefully relate in a coming post:)