The Perfect Alfredo

For a couple years now, I have been working on figuring out a perfect recipe for Alfredo sauce. There are a few things about how I make Alfredo sauce that can be perfected. The few that I’ve thought about over the dozen or so times I’ve tried are: the thickness and consistency; how cheesy it tastes; how much garlic taste it has; and, how well it warms back up.

A basic Alfredo sauce consists of:

1. A roux or roux substitute. Roux is when you melt butter and mix flour in. Roux is most common, but in the end what you need is something that gives the milk product a sauce consistency once heated. I usually use a 1:1 ratio for the butter and flour in some amount of tablespoons. 4, 6, or 8 is what I’ve normally used depending on which milk product I used and how much I was experimenting with thickness.
2. A milk product – the only two I’ve seen work are half and half or heavy whipping cream (also in the milk aisle at the grocery store). From how it appears, half and half is thinner so you will probably need more roux.
3. Cheese – Parmesan for sure, others are possible but use extremely sparingly. I recommend Parmesan and Romano.

Thickness and consistency of the sauce can make or break the whole thing. My last batch was in a hurry and I didn’t have measurements from my last adjustment to the recipe. As a result, it was so thick the pasta and sauce was closer to a casserole than sauce and noodles. As a result, I didn’t care much for it, event if my kids thought it was good. A few things I have noted on the consistency, thickness, cheesiness, and garlic taste:

1. Parmesan cheese works well cause it cooks into the sauce well. Most, if not all, other cheese will make the sauce very stringy, just as most melted cheeses do. I’ve tried the Kraft Italian cheese that has Parmesan, Mozzarella, Provolone, Asiago, and Romano. You can use it, but use almost none. The Mozzarella makes it too stringy and it doesn’t take much to get there. My recommendation: stick to the grated Parmesan and Romano cheese. If you have any problem with that combination being too thick, the roux needs adjusted or add more milk product. To adjust the roux after you have started cooking the milk with the roux, you can add plain milk to thin it but it doesn’t take much milk before you get too thin.
2. A butter and flour roux makes Alfredo almost impossible to re-heat. One thing I’ve discovered recently is using less of the butter and flour mixture and use a mixture of chicken broth and corn starch. The cornstarch mixture makes it stay fairly consistent when re-heated, and the cornstarch mix can act just as good as roux for thickening. And, in the end, what is needed is a thickening agent. The last two times I steamed chicken in the Instapot with chicken broth. Then used the chicken broth in the sauce and shredded the chicken to used with the Alfredo. The downside to that was that the chicken seemed rather dry to me, but chicken tends to be dry anyway.
3. Watch the garlic powder (or salt) and onion powder proportions! It does not take much onion powder to drown out the garlic. I have usually used onion powder, maybe a thought I should revisit and scrap. Maybe in a few iterations of the recipe.

I will note the exact measurements I use the next few times and record them here along with my take on how good it was.