How I Make Way Better Alfredo

today we're gonna make one of my favorite dishes and one of my family's favorite dishes there's nothing traditional about this but it's so good and you're probably very familiar with it let's get into making chicken fettucini alfredo right now [Music] we have all the ingredients prepped for our blackened chicken fettucini alfredo what you just saw me do is i flattened chicken to about maybe three eighths of an inch i was about a one pound breast maybe a little bit larger i put cajun seasoning now it's just my own homemade cajun seasoning but you can buy

mccormick or any brand it's all the same the one thing i do for my cajun seasoning is i put no salt in it feel free to put salt in it if you do you don't need any extra salt so what i did was i put extra salt on there we have garlic again this is not something you would find in it i have one cup of parmigiano reggiano cheese i probably grated more than a cup but it'll be fine i have one whole stick of butter we're gonna use one tablespoon of the butter for doing

our cutlets the rest of it we will use to make our sauce we have a cup of cream to make our sauce i want to talk to you about the parmesan cheese for a second so this is a 24 month parmigiano reggiano block it's almost finished i've grated that full cup from it always buy this from costco or another discount store this is 24 month it has a seal everything it's legit it's 12 and 29 cents a pound but when you go to costco which we only go a few times a year i know it

looks like i'm always like costco everything we go we get a lot we buy five blocks of that we'll buy five blocks of the pecorino romano and they'll go in the fridge and you know they have expiration dates that are very far out the final thing is the pasta we're going to use egg pasta today so i have egg fettuccine right here and i have egg papridelli so egg pasta like this will be much lighter it'll even say thin on it and it's made with eggs so it's made how you would make regular pasta if

you wanted to do it from scratch it's traditionally the type of pasta that is used for alfredo sauce but we're not doing anything traditional here anyway so use whatever pasta you like we're gonna use the big pan again now i'm only doing a half a pound of pasta but still with the size of this chicken see the size of this chicken here that wouldn't fit in a 12-inch pan i still need this or i'd have to do two batches medium heat let this heat up for about three minutes before you put your fat down whether

it's oil butter lard whatever it'll ensure then when you put the chicken down then it won't stick i say this in every video you know many new people are watching the videos and it's just an important step but a lot of people don't use stainless steel they've had one bad experience with it something has stuck 90 percent of the time you want to use stainless it's just better you're never going to get a good sear with non-stick on your chicken i'm going to put down maybe a tablespoon of olive oil not very much [Music] and

then we'll get our chicken down it's going to get a nice sear about three minutes per side [Music] i like to start it off like this i'll put the butter in in a second i normally don't put the butter in straight away because that really high heat of the pan can tend to burn that butter right away once you put chicken in there any protein weight in the pan it's going to lower that temperature it's going to bring it down so the butter then you can slip in and it'll be all right i'm going to

take about one tablespoon of butter put it down [Music] that's looking phenomenal right there so good just don't want to overcook your chicken here you want to get it just right because you're using chicken breast if you want to make it easier for yourself use boneless skinless chicken thighs it's been maybe six maybe seven minutes total this chicken's done how can i tell if it's done now you can cut it open it's fine to do that or you just touch it pretty firm right there it's done the more you do this the better you'll get

at it and let's get this tented off to the side okay tinted like this i mean so you have a little bit of air getting out of there i'm turning this off i don't need this pan we're actually not going to do the pasta in this pan because we're only doing a half a pound medium low heat for this one and i'm going to use this pan right here when you're using a nonstick you don't need to heat it up or or anything just right away so i'm gonna put the butter in i have seven

tablespoons of butter lots of butter very very healthy dish you can put the garlic in right away with it all right we'll just let this melt let that garlic really really flavor the butter once you make your sauce here you can just lower the heat you can even turn it off and then you can do your pasta you always want to have your sauce ready for pasta not the other way around you never want your pasta to be sitting waiting for you to finish the sauce you can see the garlic is just turning a little

bit lightly gold in there i hope you can see that put the cheese in and put the cream in and the cheese and i'm going to save some of this because i definitely have more in the cup here the rest of it will be for serving to anybody who likes it [Music] i'm boiling the water right here by the way guys i always use heavy cream for all these sauces i've had multiple people ask me about like how come uh i put the heavy cream right in without tempering it or anything like that you don't

have to temper heavy cream now there are examples where you can break heavy cream but because of the high fat percentage i think it's 35 it's hard to do an acid can do it it's how you make cheese but normally you're fine [Music] i don't see the point of using half and half here it's not it's not going to make it it's it's definitely not going to make it better it'll be worse and it's not going to save you many calories a lot of recipes with half and half will then double or triple the amount

of liquid you know they'll do instead of one cup of heavy cream they'll do three cups of half and half i think if you add them together you're getting back towards the same amount of calories all right this is going to come together extremely quickly it's going to thicken up want to just let it bubble for a little bit you can taste it now but we can taste it later when we get our pasta in we'll season it up just right this is perfect already it's getting that little bubble right there and i sure hope

you can see that see that's thick pretty thick i'm gonna turn it off for now because we still have to wait for this to boil i could smell the garlic in there and everything smells so good i can't i can't wait to have this my son definitely can't wait this is boiling i'm gonna salt the water two tablespoons kosher salt per gallon of water so that would be one in a half tablespoons if you use three quarts of water i only say that because on the box here it says to use three quarts of water

to boil it but you don't have to be that precise okay these are nests we're just going to drop them right in give it a gentle stir but you got to be careful with the nest it's very delicate pasta it can all break apart and you don't want it to really break apart at the same time you don't want it to stick either passed about two minutes from being done i turned the heat back on the sauce to very low you can see how thick this sauce is right here [Music] delicious oh that garlic does

need a little bit of salt about three quarter teaspoon and i'm gonna put black pepper in here [Music] i'm just gonna pull this wet so what that means is i'm gonna pull it with my tongs that'll give it it'll thin this out just enough if your sauce was really thick you could put a little bit of pasta water like a ladle in there or whatnot but i always have it on the side just in case i need it it's really beautiful looking pasta it's uh the egg papadely [Music] i always do a pound so this

is this is less but this is the perfect amount for this sauce [Music] and then let this cook in there for about 30 seconds and then that's it if for some reason you're too loose just sprinkle a little bit more parmesan cheese in there that's all that's all you have to do and if you're too dry you just take a tablespoon at a time of the pasta water just splash it in there and then you'll get it right to how you like it all right let's cut that chicken and let's turn this heat off [Music]

what is this so you said kid chicken and um what is the pasta again it's fettuccine alfredo but it's not yeah it's made with papadely i really like it it goes together as well i always go with poppadeli because it looks better and by the way so it's been it's been about 20 minutes before since i finished this that's why it looks a little dry right now and here you can see it it's it's everything is stiffening up see this if that's the case you just use your pasta water and then it will bring it

right back and you know you're not making a video but you might be waiting for people to sit down at the table yeah special thanks to patreon producers elizabeth shaw joe hardage john andolino kenneth parker chris whalen matt fisher paul walterhauser richard c and tom branca [Music]