Contents
Intro
Among childhood friends, there is no other food group more synonymous with my family and me than pasta. For as long as I can remember, Pasta Thursday has been a food tradition in my life, and even though my mom doesn’t make the pasta anymore, I still have pasta on Thursdays whenever I can. Therefore, my 26 dish adventure would be incomplete and unauthentic if it didn’t contain at least one pasta dish.
Ample amounts of garlic, cheese, butter, and olive oil attracted me to this “Scratchy Husband” pasta recipe (not my title!). Delightfully, those ingredients plus some crushed red pepper flakes and the pasta, of course, were the only ingredients in this dish.
Prepping the Dish
The most time consuming part of this dish was slicing up all ten (yes 10!) cloves of garlic for the dish. Even though I knew I was going to halve the amount of butter and extra virgin olive oil (evoo) per comments on the recipe I’d seen and input from Katie, I knew we wouldn’t be reducing the garlic. Pro tip for the garlic: microwave it in a microwave-safe bowl for 10 seconds. This makes it easier to peel the garlic, and since you’re slicing it, you can’t go with the satisfying smash and peel technique.
Cooking the Dish
Not a lot to say here because it’s a really simple dish to make. Once the pasta goes in, the sauce comes together, and neither of those cooks requires a lot of attention. The issues I encountered I believe to be more in the sequence of how things were cooked, which I’ll elaborate on below.
Overall Impressions
Sometimes when I make pasta, I’ll just put olive oil and cheese on it, and this dish didn’t taste any different from those dishes to both my surprise and disappointment. My suspicion is the garlic didn’t infuse into the oil for long enough, which in hindsight doesn’t surprise me. I say this because the recipe notes that for this step, it may be necessary to adjust the heat to make sure the garlic doesn’t brown too much. Wanting to play it safe, and knowing I tend to use higher than necessary heat, I kept it on low the whole time.
When I make this dish again, I’m going to see if the sequence is the problem. I plan on putting the oil in the pan, then getting the water going for the pasta. Once that’s done, I’ll microwave the garlic and slice it. When I’m on my last three cloves, I’ll add butter to the oil and put it all on medium heat, and when warm and when the butter’s melted, I’ll add the garlic. If the garlic becomes nicely browned before the pasta is done, I’ll just turn the heat down to low, or off entirely and rewarm it just before the pasta is done. If things are moving too slowly, I’ll turn the heat up.
Will this work? I’m not sure, but I believe this will be a good way to try and get those ten cloves more involved in the olive oil, and the overall dish.
Visually, the dish leaves A LOT to be desired. Here, a mild green herb such as some chopped or minced, fresh parsley wouldn’t be the end of the world. For a more intense flavor, sage – either added to the sauce with the garlic or as a finish garnish – would be a fine option as well.
Also keep in mind this is a dish that can certainly be made and enjoyed during any season, and recipe books can never have to many year round dishes that can be done in half an hour or less.
Final Word
If you’ve made pasta before, you can cook this dish with confidence. More than most recipes, I view the guidance here as much more of a suggested direction rather than a set of ironclad rules. At its core, this is an oily, garlicky, cheesy dish. Once you realize that, the dish becomes remarkably flexible, easily able to be tailored to who’s eating it, something I’ll certainly do for future iterations and would suggest you do from the get go if you’re feeling so adventurous.
For me, I’ll want to give the garlic a lot more time to infuse into the oil in order to create a more dynamic flavored oil. A shade of green from some parsley would be welcomed as well.
Scratchy Husband Pasta
Time: 30 minutes Yields: 3-4
Ingredients
- 1/3 cups extra-virgin olive oil
- Half a stick unsalted butter
- 1 whole head of garlic, or at least 10 cloves, peeled, sliced thin across the grain
- 1 pound dried spaghetti
- Chile flakes to taste
- A generous 1/2 cup of grated pecorino or Parmigiano-Reggiano
- Many, many cranks of the pepper mill
Directions
- Bring large pot of water to a boil. When water simmers and is about to break to a roiling boil, place a 10-inch deep-sided sauté pan on low heat.
- Add the olive oil and butter and sliced garlic to the pan and let the butter melt, as the garlic begins to warm through. Add the dry spaghetti. Add chile flakes to the warming garlic-oil mixture and swirl the pan a bit.
- Stir the spaghetti and make sure it is cooking evenly and the strands are separated. Swirl the garlic-chile-oil pan smoothly and frequently, and let the garlic soften and start to turn golden as the butter starts to foam and the chile blooms its heat and color into the oil. (On my stove, the burners run quite hot, so I keep it on low the whole time, but if your home burner is weak and you are not getting any foaming or toasting of the garlic by now, tap the heat up a half-step.) At 8 minutes, pull the pasta from the boiling water with tongs, let it briefly drip its excess water above the pasta pot, but then place it right into the garlic-chile-oil pan, letting the last drips of water go right into the sauce.
- Turn up the heat under the pasta now and stir vigorously, also tossing the pasta with short sturdy flicks of your wrist, for just about a minute, listening to the water hiss a little as it evaporates in the oil.
- Turn off the heat, add cheese and a lot of black pepper. Toss and distribute all the garlic and the cheese and the chile flakes using two forks like you are tossing a salad, making sure every bit is coated and luscious and on the edge even of greasy. (The amount of salt that I put in the pasta water, combined with the salt of the cheese, is enough for us. If you feel it needs it, season with a little more salt, according to your tastes.) Serve immediately.
The Quincy Kitchen 
[…] conclusion Katie and I reached was that neither of us liked the dish. This wasn’t like the pasta dish I made two weeks ago where I was disappointed in how the dish turned out, but still happily ate it […]
LikeLike