Hi, I'm Amy Riolo. Today, we’re making a garlic oil and chili sauce or Aglio E Olio as it's known in Italian.
The first thing that we’re going to use is a half of cup of extra virgin olive oil, then we’re going to use about four cloves of finely minced garlic, a tablespoon of freshly chopped Italian parsley and a few pieces of a red hot chili pepper or some crushed dried red pepper flakes.
So I’m going to start by putting my oil into the pan. We’re going to turn the pan onto low or medium-low heat and we’re just going to allow the oil to get a little bit of warm before we add our garlic into it and this is called the sauce but it's so simple. It's actually like a condiment or a flavor enhancer. This is something that in addition to putting spaghetti or spaghettini in with it, you could also do a broccoli, spinach, mushrooms, a lot of different vegetables in with this kind of flavoring. It makes them taste absolutely delicious and it's a very healthy sauce also.
This sauce was originally from Naples in Italy and it's very common, it's a poor sauce, but it's one of those sauces that even though it doesn't cost a lot, people still really like it and it's one of the things that people make on a normal day, when they are home by themselves. They usually don't entertain with it but it's a very good sauce, and sometimes people even make jokes about it. So this is what our olive oil looks like when it's heated. You could see how the lines are starting to move through, the oil. This is when we know that it's ready to add the garlic. You could actually start to smell it a little bit too. So when you smell that nice olive flavor, you start putting your garlic in. And garlic and chilies have really wonderful antioxidant power and anti-inflammatory power.
So this is a little bit of our red chili pepper. You can add less if you want and you can leave it out if you want to or you can add more depending upon how hot that you like things. But because of their anti-inflammatory properties, it's really amazing that people actually feel better and sometimes people eats this as like a traditional medicine because they have problems with arthritis and things like that. So this type of sauce will make them feel better.
One of my favorite Italian soap operas always talks about the sauce. One time a woman was getting ready to invite her new boyfriend over for dinner and she was asking her mother what should I make and she said, you could make Aglio E Olio for all he cares, he’s not worried about the food. So this sauce is something that gets a lot of jokes made about it.
But now, we can start to smell our garlic, it's not brown yet but it's just releasing the smell. When it starts to release the smell, that's how we know it's ready and we turn our heat off because it's still going to have a little bit of carry overtime and it’s still going to cook because the oil is hot. So we don't want to let it go to that brown point and then we’re just going to add our parsley into it and at this point, you will just put it on your spaghetti, your spaghettini or you could put your fresh mushrooms or your spinach. If you put spinach in at this point and let it wilt, you would have a great side dish in just a matter of moments. It just has a great flavor and it's very, very healthy.
This recipe serves four to six people and it's good for one pound of pasta. So that's how we make our Aglio E Olio or garlic oil in chili sauce.
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