Don’t be fooled by the name Leonardo’s Pizza Palace – alongside the 15-inch pies, pasta is royalty here too. Leonardo’s features a blend of Italian-American influences, giving chef Matthew Butterworth plenty of ways to subtly update classic pasta dishes.
“I quite like trying to play the classics but put a little tweak on them,” he says. “We’ve a carbonara on at the moment which is pretty close to traditional, but personally I like to play the old school and give it a breath of fresh air.”
Butterworth’s alio e olio isn’t on the Leonardo’s menu anymore, but the dish is great to whip up at home because it’s incredibly simple (it literally translates as “garlic and oil”) and easily embellished.
“Any soft herbs you could get away with,” he says. “Anchovies could sneak in there. Cheese, that’s a funny one – you might offend some of the old timers, but by all means, get cheesy.”
Butterworth hasn’t strayed too far from the Neapolitan original, but the addition of slow-cooked black garlic on top of regular garlic gives it a Leonardo’s twist.
“Black garlic is more of an Asian ingredient,” says Butterworth. “The colour is fully dark. It’s sweeter and has a real depth of umami.”
With only a handful of ingredients going into this dish, it’s more about mastering the technique. Get your spaghetti on the boil, then follow Martin Scorsese’s lead with the (regular, not black) garlic.
“Slicing your garlic up really fine is a good technique, like in Goodfellas,” says Butterworth. “Then keep that temperature under medium to low – if you cook it too hard too fast it’s going to go bitter and you’re going to be upset, so really pay attention to that.”
“There are a few tricks to getting the pasta right. You can cook it in the pot until it’s about 70 per cent of the way, and then you can add the pasta into the pan. The last 30 per cent of the pasta cooking is in the pan, so it’s got a good minute or two to really absorb all that business.”
The final trick is to add some of the leftover pasta water into the pan, which helps the sauce coat the spaghetti instead of becoming an oily pool at the bottom.
Butterworth is all about going carb-on-carb by pairing the dish with a beer – a Coopers Original Pale Ale will do the trick (just make sure you give it a gentle roll on a flat surface to unlock the beer's full flavour.
“There are some floral and hoppy notes, and that’s absolutely going to pair with not only the big garlic vibes but the black garlic especially,” he says.
Recipe: Matthew Butterworth’s black garlic aglio e olio
Serves 2
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 10 minutes
Ingredients:
200g dried spaghettino or spaghetti
4 tbsp olive oil
4–5 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
15g black garlic (around 3 cloves)
3g cracked black pepper
10g dried chilli
20g parsley, chopped
10g lemon juice
Salt, to taste
Method:
Bring a large pan of heavily salted water to the boil. Add pasta and follow box instructions.
While your pasta is cooking (it should take around 8 minutes) heat a large frying pan on a low and add your oil. Add sliced garlic and gently cook for a minute or so, stirring until aromatic.
Add black garlic, pepper and chilli. Keep cooking on low heat until the edges of the garlic start to darken. Remove from the heat before the garlic gets too dark or starts to smell bitter.
Once pasta is 70 per cent cooked, add it to the garlic pan with a generous amount of pasta water. Allow the pasta to continue cooking in the pan. Add small amounts of pasta water if needed until your spaghetti is approaching al dente.
Add parsley, lemon juice and any additional salt and serve.
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Coopers.
