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Question by smnoble13: Why are fettuccine alfredo dishes served with the pasta and sauce already mixed, but spaghetti is not?
I’m making fettuccine alfredo tonight and the thought just popped in my head. I notice that resturants will serve alfredo dishes mixed already, while most meat sauce dishes are served sauce on top of the pasta.
Best answer:
Answer by LJ
Alfredo dishes are cooked all together (pasta, sauce, cheese,chicken etc) in one pan. And Spagetti is cooked separete from the sauce so the diner can add as much or as little sauce as he wants.
Also Italians sepatare pasta from sauce French do not. And Americans well we just sit back and enjoy it how ever it comes!
What do you think? Answer below!
Where I’m from, we do mix in the sauce with our spaghetti, so that’s a very good question. I didn’t know that it was common practice to serve them separately until I moved away from home for college.
Fettucine Alfredo uses the hot pasta to cook the sauce.
(The original sauce is simply heavy cream and parmesan, salt and pepper mixed with hot drained noodles. As you toss the cream and cheese etc, it coats the pasta.)
Spaghetti is the shape of the noodle, but if you are referring to tomato based sauces, my Italian great grandmother, grandmother and mother and I always mix a small amount of the tomato sauce into the pasta before serving it, to ensure that it does not stick together. Then, we may top it with a little more, and we pass additional sauce in a bowl.
They serve different sauces with spaghetti, so they don’t mix them ahead of time.
They don’t serve alfredo sauce with any other type of pasta but fettucine.
Chef Boyiardi mixes his spaghetti and sauce.
I assume the sauce will settle (as there is cream in it) so it should be mixed in the dish. Spaghetti sauce need not be mixed in for a number of reasons, such as a) it’s not necessary 2) people like varying amounts of sauce 3) for the presentation and people can tell how much sauce they have
Alfredo Sauce due to the cream and parmesean if allowed to sit on top of or on the side of a pasta dish does thicken as the cheese re-sets. This would make for a clumpy, not very appealing looking sauce. It is tossed in with the noodles to help maintain the consistency of the sauce, as well as allow the sauce to cling to all of the fettuccine noodles.
Alfredo sauce has a higher quantity of oil so it would not cause the noodles to clump. Tomato based sauces, ifmixed with the noodles and allowed to set, would result in clumped, possibly mushy, noodles.