Creamy Mushroom Pasta | Jamie Oliver

Hey guys, hope you're well. We're gonna make the most delicious mushroom pasta with garlic, spinach, mushrooms. A rich sauce. We've got a crunchy thyme and garlic breadcrumb topping. It's just joy, joy, joy. Let's get cooking. Put the pan on a medium high heat and a pot of boiling water. First job, garlic breadcrumbs. Finely slice two cloves of garlic. This is my wife's favourite bit. So what she loves and what I love about this is the crunch of the breadcrumbs with the soft delicate pasta. It's a really beautiful combo. We're gonna go in here with some olive oil. Go in with the garlic, get that sizzling. The next ingredient, thyme. Fresh thyme is joyful. A few nice little stalks. Just pull the lovely little leaves off the stalk. They normally pop and spit a little bit but the flavour from thyme is amazing, especially with mushrooms. Listen to that. And then in with the breadcrumbs and we can turn that temperature right down. Just toast off these breadcrumbs and this will make the most amazing little sprinkle for any pasta, any ravioli, even soups. Gorgeous on salads. So once it's gorgeous and crispy, put it in our little bowl and this people will fight over. Pan back on the heat. I've got two packs of mushrooms but you really could use oysters, button mushrooms, anything you like. So four cloves of garlic. Garlic and mushrooms, classic flavour. Back in the pan, we're gonna go in with some olive oil. In with the garlic, that will perfume the oil. Then I'll take the other half of that thyme and pick in the lovely leaves there. Nice generous pinch of black pepper as well. Go in with the mushrooms. Now that looks like a lot of mushrooms but if you give that about 10 minutes of cooking, stirring nice and regularly, that is going to half in size. It's going to intensify and double in flavour and that's going to be amazing. So we'll let that cook out then I'll show you what to do next. So if you look at the mushrooms now, the water's starting to cook away and it'll go now from boiling to frying. Can you hear it? And you can see it's dried up. Smells amazing. Right let's taste. Amazing. So normally at this stage I put in a little cream or creme fraiche and that's definitely very traditional but I got told about a little tip that is just naughty and it's basically a tin of mushroom soup and it basically means you get double mushroom flavour. So put all of it in, nice little tin of quality mushroom soup. Fill this tin up with a little bit of water and then like half a tin, a whole tin, depending on how thick the soup is. Just put that in there and let that simmer away. You get this silky old school sauce. You've got extra seasoning in there. You're down on the saturated fats and up on the veg, so it's a nice little trick. Mix that up, let that simmer. The water here is now boiling. We'll just put a little salt in there and we're going to go in with 300 grams of your chosen pasta. Look you could use whatever you like. I'm going in with tagliatelle. Lid on until the water comes up to the boil again. The pasta sauce is already looking good. So we've got an ingredient to go in there, spinach. I'm using the frozen spinach because it's super convenient. You get that really nice kind of dense dark spinach nutrition through the roof. Just going to put two little cubes like that in, that's about 100 grams and that will just defrost and cook into it. Those pops of green, amazing. What I like to do now, you don't have to do this, some people take pasta and put it in a colander, the water goes down the drain and it's the water that helps the sauce be silky. What I like to do is use some little tongs and drag the pasta and some of that water along with it. Now what's nice about that is we're just going to get the most incredible textures and then a little bit of parmesan. So you just need a little bit for seasoning and having fresh parmesan makes all the difference. Just toss it like this. Can you see how elegant this is? The smell is incredible and that's the beauty of cooking right? You can take the cheapest mushrooms and make them joyful. Look at that, look at the way it comes out. Silky, that little hack with the tinned soup is naughty but nice. With a little of those breadcrumbs on the top, come on. A long stroke of parmesan and then let's portion up a little bit. I mean look at that, how elegant is that? Come on, that's a dish right there. Look at that, right let's try some. My missus doesn't like mushrooms but I put it in quite a lot of the cooking that she says she loves. So don't be a hater, be a lover or just put it in and don't tell them. Oh that is bonkers. Enjoy.