Spaghetti aglio e olio
Like many of you, we suspect, spaghetti aglio e olio is our failsafe 15-minute meal. It’s not all that difficult to make, and there’s no denying it’s delicious.
The trick is to keep the oil at a temperature that allows the ingredients to release flavour rather than cook. From our experience, this means moving the pan around a bit and possibly even removing it from the heat altogether, but it definitely produces the best results. But most of all, we love that you can do everything for spaghetti aglio e olio in the time that it takes to cook the pasta. We’ll drink to that!
Ingredients
– Serves 2 –
250 g spaghetti
2 garlic cloves
sea salt
100 ml extra-virgin olive oil
4 anchovies
a handful of fresh breadcrumbs or panko
a handful of parsley
½ lemon
chilli flakes (optional)
Method
Pour yourself a glass of light-medium bodied dry white such as Pinot Grigio, or Fiano. Rosé would be brilliant too! We drank the 2015 Jericho Fiano.
Cook the spaghetti in plenty of boiling salted water.
While the pasta cooks, finely chop the garlic, adding a pinch of salt as you go. Once the garlic is as fine as you can manage, crush it with the side of your knife until it forms a paste.
Heat 80 ml of oil in a heavy-based frying pan over low heat. Add the garlic and anchovies and stir until the anchovies break up and begin to dissolve into the oil. If the garlic stars to colour, remove the pan from the heat to cool down – you’re just trying to flavour the oil, not cook the ingredients.
In a separate frying pan, fry the breadcrumbs in the remaining oil until golden.
Finely chop the parsley.
Zest the lemon.
When the spaghetti is al dente, drain well and add to the pan with the garlic and anchovy oil.
Add the parsley, lemon zest and breadcrumbs and toss gently to ensure the spaghetti is well coated. Adjust the seasoning if necessary, and add a squeeze of lemon and some chilli (if using) to taste.
