Ingredient Notes:
Cream & Butter – You’ll heat heavy whipping cream (no substitutes, please) with butter and garlic to warm it through.
Cheese – When you’re making homemade Alfredo sauce you need lots of good quality Parmesan! You’ll want shredded Parmesan cheese, not the dry powdery stuff. We make our Alfredo sauce with cream cheese (just a little!) to add extra richness and creaminess to the sauce.
Seasoning – Salt and pepper, to taste, is all you’ll need.
How To Make Alfredo Sauce From Scratch:
Heat: Start by melting the butter and cream together with a little blob of cream cheese (optional – see notes below). I do a garlic Alfredo sauce by adding in a teaspoon of minced garlic to the butter and cream while it’s heating. The garlic flavor is perfect with this creamy pasta sauce!
Cheese: When you’ve finished heating the butter and cream remove the pan from the heat and stir in the shredded Parmesan cheese! Keep stirring until it forms a smooth sauce.
Season: We sprinkle in a bit of salt and pepper to taste.
Serving Suggestions:
This Alfredo sauce recipe makes enough to generously coat one pound of pasta, but we usually reserve a half cup of the sauce for dipping our breadsticks in. Serve this sauce/pasta with one (or more!) of these sides:
Air Fryer Breadsticks
Tuscan White Bean Soup
Ham and Bean Soup
Marinated Cheese and Olives
Tuscan Roasted Vegetables
You can also add a variety of ingredients and proteins to your pasta. Grilled chicken is the perfect addition to fettuccine alfredo, but our shrimp alfredo and tortellini alfredo are also very popular around here.
Alfredo Sauce with Cream Cheese:
This recipe originally did NOT call for cream cheese – it was just butter, cream, and Parmesan (and a little garlic, for flavor). I’ll always stand by the fact that this was a delicious authentic Alfredo sauce that just works!
If you don’t love cream cheese, just leave it out.
But, we did start adding in a couple of ounces of cream cheese to our Alfredo, because it does add an extra layer of creamy richness and flavor. We’re hooked, but we wouldn’t hesitate to make this sauce without the cream cheese if we were out, either. 😉
Garlic Alfredo Sauce:
We’re obsessed with garlic, so we add just a little bit to this recipe…it really makes the best Alfredo sauce!
We just add the garlic straight in with the cream and butter as it’s warming to let the garlic flavors infuse the sauce. So simple and delicious!
