Green Angel Hair with Garlic Butter is excerpted from Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics for Your Forever Files by Deb Perelman. Copyright © 2022 by Deb Perelman. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Green Angel Hair with Garlic Butter
In the 1990s heyday of roasted garlic, it was in restaurants everywhere: whole heads of garlic roasted until the cloves were soft and slightly sweet, easily squeezed from their skins and spread across breads, dropped in salads, and mashed into potatoes. Then, as will always happen post-ubiquity, the pendulum swung the other way and roasted garlic heads seemingly went into hiding. But if overalls and bucket hats can make a comeback, why not this? A few New Year’s Eves ago, I set out to make my case for its return, except, instead of roasting the garlic with a drizzle of olive oil, I used a stick of butter (“Whoops!”), roasted it for the better part of an hour, and blended it smooth, and we smeared it on pieces of bread and, did you know, I also made a cheese soufflé that night? And beef Wellington? (The theme was old-school decadence.) Neither of those dishes made the impression that the roasted garlic butter did.
This headnote should stop here. But what if you want weekday garlic butter confit in your life? And your life doesn’t have crostini and sparkly cocktails on a Tuesday, much as that needs correction? Well, then, you should take this garlic butter and blend it with spinach until the garlic butter is brilliantly green, and toss it with spaghetti finished with black pepper and sharp Pecorino cheese for—please don’t tell the other ninety-nine recipes in this book—what might be the best thing I have ever made for dinner.
Serves 4
Ingredients
- ½ cup (4 ounces, or 115 grams) salted or unsalted butter, sliced into a few pieces
- Kosher salt
- 1 large head garlic, halved crosswise
- 1 pound (455 grams) thin spaghetti, such as angel hair or capellini
- 5 ounces (140 grams) baby spinach
- Freshly ground black pepper and/or red-pepper flakes
- Pecorino Romano, to finish
Directions
- Heat the oven to 375°F(190°C).
- Arrange the butter slices across the bottom of a small (2-cup) baking dish. Sprinkle with salt: ¼ teaspoon if using salted butter, and ½ teaspoon if unsalted. Place the garlic halves, cut side down, over the butter and salt. Cover the dish tightly with foil, and bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until the garlic is absolutely soft when poked with a knife and golden brown along the cut side.
- Carefully remove the foil. Empty the garlic cloves into the melted butter. I do this by lifting the peels out of the butter with tongs, allowing most cloves to fall out, and using the tip of a knife to free the cloves that don’t. Scrape any browned bits from the sides of the baking vessel into the butter.
- Meanwhile, cook your pasta in well-salted water until 1 to 2 minutes shy of done. Before you drain it, ladle 1 cup pasta water into a cup, and set it aside. Hang on to the pot you cooked the pasta in.
- Place the spinach in a blender or food-processor bowl, and pour the garlic butter over it, scraping out any butter left behind. Add another ¾ teaspoon salt and several grinds of black pepper, and/or a couple pinches of red-pepper flakes, and blend the mixture until totally smooth. If it’s not blending, add 1 to 2 tablespoons of reserved pasta water to help it along. Taste for seasoning, and add more if needed.