This Chicken Alfredo Pasta Bake is Pure Comfort Food

Today we're making chicken alfredo pasta bake and there is four simple things that we need to do. We need to cook our pasta, cook our chicken, make our mornay sauce and then piece it all together and bake it getting that nice crusty top. Super simple, super cheap and it is delicious. So the first thing we'll do is place a pot of water onto our stovetop, whack it over a high heat and you can chuck on a lid as well just to speed up the process and we'll let this go in the background. In the meantime grate four cloves of garlic along a microplane to create a paste. You can also roughly chop it but paste is best for this recipe. If you do roughly chop it just make sure that it is quite fine because we want it to mix through our roux making it into our mornay sauce. An optional ingredient is a little bit of flat leaf parsley. This can be roughly chopped, not going to give an exact weight for this, just a matter of if you have it in the fridge and want to use it. It's only going to be used as a garnish so it doesn't really matter how much you use. If you are using it though just make sure that there's no large leaves or stems. For the chicken I'm using 600 grams or 1.3 pounds of boneless and skinless chicken breast. With it lengthways slice this into even sized strips, you'll get about two or three strips. Rotate and then dice into bite-sized pieces. You can also thinly slice it if you prefer. Add the chicken into a large mixing bowl, add in one teaspoon of Dijon mustard and one teaspoon of dried Italian herbs. Season with a little bit of salt as well as some cracked black pepper and you can add a garlic, onion powder, smoked paprika to this but I feel like I use it so much it deserves a break. Give that all a quick mix around, make sure the Dijon mustard is coating the chicken and we won't add any oil right now, we'll just add the oil to the pan when it goes to cooking otherwise we'll end up adding too much moisture to this and we won't get that nice colour all over. Once the water's at a boil carefully remove that lid, generously season it with some salt and add in 400 grams or 14 ounces of any pasta of your choice. I'm using penne. Give it a mix to prevent it from sticking and we're going to cook this for about two minutes less than the packet instructions as we are going to be baking this after so we don't want it to be fully cooked. Now whilst our pasta's cooking place a pan over a medium high heat and get this nice and hot. Once lightly smoking add in one tablespoon or 20 millilitres of olive oil, add in all of that chicken, spread this around so it's not sitting on top of one another and then let this sit for about two minutes to build up a nice crust. Mix it all through, make sure nothing's stuck together and cook this for a total of about five to six minutes or until fully cooked through and you have that really nice golden brown chicken. One thing to keep in mind when it comes to cooking chicken like this, if you keep mixing it around too much you're going to knock too much heat out of the pan and then that's going to result in all of the moisture coming out of the chicken and then the chicken cooking in its own moisture or stewing you don't get any good colour and then your chicken ends up overcooked and rubbery. So after five minutes on the chicken you've got that nice colour all over, this is cooked through right now so we can turn off the heat and then remove it from the stove top. Once the pasta's cooked it's nice and al dente we can turn this off the heat, remove it from the stove top and then drain it through a colander and then for our Mornay sauce we're going to place a saucepan over a low heat and pour in 500 millilitres or two cups of full fat milk and all we want to do with this is warm it, we don't want it to come to a simmer or even a boil, this is just going to help prevent lumps when we're making our bechamel sauce before we add the cheese to then turn it into Mornay. Now to make a roux which is spelled r-o-u-x, this is a thickening agent and it's the base to our bechamel sauce. Place a saucepan over a medium heat, add in three tablespoons of unsalted butter and then allow that to melt and we can also add in our grated garlic, give this a good mix around allow that butter to fully melt and break up the garlic, we want to get that nice fragrance throughout the pan. We're only going to cook this for about 30 to 45 seconds just until that garlic is fully mixed through and your kitchen smells really really nice. At this point add in three tablespoons of all-purpose plain flour that's been sifted then mix this all together, this will start creating that really nice smooth paste, looks a bit lumpy to start with but once you mix it around start creating that roux which like I said is that thickening agent. We're going to cook this for about a minute to a minute and a half possibly even two minutes just to cook out that flour taste then we can start adding in our warmed milk. Also depending on the application or the recipe that you're making there is different types of roux, for this one we're just going to be making a blonde roux which is a very simple base and clear roux. Also I like to take this to the point where it starts looking like wet sand and that's when you know that the flour has been