Just sauté a hefty amount of mushrooms, add cooked pasta and spinach, and stir until the spinach wilts. Just like that, dinner is ready!
The Secret Is in the Sauce
With so few ingredients you might think this dish would be too plain. But that’s where the magic of brown butter comes in. Brown butter transforms this very basic pasta into something special. You might have seen it used in recipes for baked goods, like Elise’s Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies, but its nutty flavor is also great with pasta. If you’ve never made it before, this pasta is a great place to start experimenting.
How to Make Brown Butter
Here’s your science lesson for the day: Butter is comprised of clear butterfat, water, and milk proteins. When you brown butter, you’re allowing the water to evaporate and then browning the solids. Use with a heavy-bottomed pan—any kind will work, but if this is your first time, use a stainless steel or aluminum pan so that monitor the browning of the milk solids (which is harder to do in cast iron or non-stick pans). Add the butter to the pan and let it melt. Once the water evaporates (it will bubble and spatter), the milk solids quickly turn golden. Keep the heat low and keep stirring. Take your time at this point, and then quickly take the pan off the heat when you notice the particles at the bottom of the pan start to brown and smell a nutty aroma. That’s it!
Check out this step-by-step guide: How to Make Brown Butter
With such a small amount of butter in this recipe, it may take only a few seconds to brown once the butter is melted, so watch carefully. Once you try it, you will want to use brown butter again and again—and there’s honestly nothing wrong with that. Brown butter helps improve the taste of both sweet and savory dishes.
More Recipes With Brown Butter
Browned Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies Cauliflower Mashed “Potatoes” with Brown Butter Seared Scallops with Brown Butter Caper Sauce Butternut Squash with Browned Butter and Thyme Mashed Potatoes with Brown Butter, Goat Cheese, and Sage
Scoop out 1 cup of the pasta cooking water and drain the pasta in a colander. Set aside. For a full tutorial on making brown butter, see this post. Stir in the browned butter, lemon juice and lemon zest and toss. Taste and add more salt and pepper, if you like.
