Shrimp Alfredo

Think you have to go out to dinner to indulge in a plate of out-of-this-world shrimp alfredo? With just 45 minutes and less than 10 ingredients, you can whip up this delicious recipe for an epically delicious dinner.More than any other component of a dish, making a sauce from scratch has the power to elevate a recipe to the next level. A sauce is versatile and can layer in new flavors, lend richness or acidity, and introduce different textures.Making a sauce from scratch can sound intimidating and time consuming, but hear us out. You can make this alfredo sauce, and we'll show you how—and just how easy it is.Most Alfredo recipes are heavy with cream, and the fat in the cream mutes the flavors of anything else incorporated into the sauce, creating a flat and heavy pasta. But for something as delicate and sweet as shrimp, we developed an Alfredo sauce that's both rich and savory while allowing the taste of pasta and shrimp to stand out. Instead of cream, our alfredo sauce calls for pasta water, milk, and an egg yolk to create the sauce's base.The two secrets to our recipe are real Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (which is more expensive in the grocery store but leaps and bounds higher in quality and flavor) and two strips of lemon peel. Slowly sprinkling the cheese into the hot liquid while you whisk creates a creamy and powerfully complex Alfredo sauce, and the lemon peel releases its oils into the sauce as it cooks, giving a subtle citrus note to the garlic-parmesan sauce.Finished with the heat of cracked black pepper and the crisp freshness of chopped parsley, this shrimp Alfredo balances the fresh, sweet, and juicy flavor of shrimp, parsley, lemon with the deeper flavors of garlic and Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's a recipe designed to boost your cooking confidence and forever raise the bar for what you expect from a shrimp Alfredo.