Pasta Al Limone or Creamy Lemon Pasta
An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott
Preparation time: 5 minutes
Cooking time: 15 minutes concurrently
Serves: 4 people as pasta or primi course
- Salt
- 375g/13ozs. spaghetti
- 1 lemon, washed well
- 60g/3 tablespoons butter
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced or minced
- 1/2 cup/125ml/4flozs cream (optional or sub with more pasta cooking water)
- 50g/1.7ozs grated parmesan cheese
- Black pepper
Step 1 - Place a pot of well salted water onto boil and cook the spaghetti for 6 minutes.
Step 2 - While the spaghetti is cooking, finely grate the lemon zest into a frypan or skillet (I also peeled off one piece of lemon zest to slice thinly to decorate on top). Add the butter and garlic and saute on medium heat until the garlic is starting to soften but you don't want to brown the butter or garlic at all.
Step 3 - The pasta should be ready by this time (if not, then remove the garlic butter from the heat until ready). Using a cup, remove a cup of pasta cooking water from the pot. Add some of this pasta water gradually to the buttery mixture. I ended up using 1/2 cup of the pasta water. Then add the cream and stir. Note: if you are omitting the cream, add the parmesan cheese here while adding the pasta cooking water. The sauce will be have a lovely sheen to it and become creamy.
Step 4 - With tongs, remove the spaghetti from the water into the pan and gently toss to coat the spaghetti. At first it might seem too liquid but it will thicken considerably and all of a sudden the pasta will have sucked up a lot of the sauce so veer on the side of too liquid. Season with black pepper and serve immediately with parmesan cheese.
Tip: if you are reheating the pasta the next day, save a cup of pasta cooking water to add to the pasta the next day to "re-sauce" it.