Spaghetti with Chicken (Espagueti con Pollo)

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Spaghetti with chicken and bacon in a cream sauce with garlic and grated cheese. The bacon fat is the only fat in the pan. Twenty-five minutes including the pasta, for three.

Prep Time5

Cook Time20

Total Time25

Course: Main Course

Cuisine: Colombian

Keyword: Chicken spaghetti

Servings:

Calories: 1411kcal

Author: Angela Giraldo

Ingredients

500 gr spaghetti
300 gr chicken breast diced
150 g bacon cut into strips
4 cloves garlic finely chopped
300 ml milk
200 ml cooking cream
200 g grated cheese
1 handful parsley chopped
Oil only if the bacon gives up too little fat
Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

Bring a pot of water to the boil, add the pasta and cook it for 10 to 12 minutes.
While the pasta cooks, start the sauce. Put the bacon, cut into strips, into a large skillet over high heat. Do not add oil: bacon has plenty of fat and cooks in its own. After a couple of minutes, once it has crisped, lift the bacon out and leave every drop of the fat in the pan.
Turn the heat down and add the finely chopped garlic to that fat. After a couple of minutes, when it starts to colour, add the diced chicken breast. Raise the heat and stir often to brown the outside. It will still be raw in the middle at this point, and it finishes cooking in the sauce.
After two minutes, add the milk, the cooking cream, the grated cheese, the bacon you set aside, and the spaghetti, cooked and drained.
Add a small pinch of black pepper and mix everything together over the heat so it comes together.
If the pasta is not creamy enough, add a little more cream or some chicken broth. Stir in the chopped parsley and mix again until it has the consistency you want. Serve hot.

Notes

The bacon fat is the whole sauce base and the second step is emphatic about not adding oil. A hundred and fifty grams of bacon renders a considerable amount, and that fat is what the garlic and then the chicken cook in. Adding oil on top makes the finished dish greasy. The chicken goes into the pan raw and comes out of that stage still raw in the middle, which reads alarmingly and is correct: it browns on the outside for two minutes and then finishes in the milk and cream, which is a gentler heat and keeps it tender. Two hundred grams of grated cheese is what thickens this, not flour. It has to go in off a hard boil and be stirred until it melts, because cheese added to something boiling will split. If it goes stiff as it sits, a splash of chicken broth loosens it better than more cream.

Nutrition