Is Olive Garden's Iconic Alfredo Sauce Really Made From Scratch?

Here at Tasting Table, our goal is to celebrate good food and the folks who enjoy it. When Anthony Bourdain defended a small-town restaurant critic who caught pretentious backlash for loving Olive Garden, we felt that. The casual dining chain champions accessibility, but not at the expense of compromising quality. Anyone who's ever seen an episode of "Restaurant Impossible" (or had the character-building experience of working in a professional kitchen) has likely had their suspicions piqued over more than a few industry practices. But happily, within the cozy Garden walls, the Alfredo sauce is made from scratch in-house daily using just a few ingredients. No pre-made jarred sauce here.

Chicken fettuccine Alfredo appears in our list of the 18 absolute best dishes to order at Olive Garden, and it scored highly in our ranking of popular Olive Garden pasta dishes. Considering the sauce's perfected assembly, these high marks come as perhaps no surprise. According to the official Olive Garden website, the fettuccine Alfredo is blanketed in "Our signature alfredo sauce made fresh in-house every morning with ingredients like parmesan, cream, garlic and butter." The entree costs $17.49 at a restaurant location in Queens, NY and includes a side salad or soup. But, to get right to the heart of all things O.G., Tasting Table sat down with Terrence Tookes, executive chef for Olive Garden, for an exclusive interview. 

As Tookes tells us, O.G.'s iconic Alfredo is a honed staple of the restaurant's kitchen arsenal, comprising parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, garlic, starch, milk, heavy cream, and butter, cooked over indirect steam heat in a double-boiler to prevent breaking. He says, "We make our marinara sauce in large batches, but the Alfredo we're making fresh consistently throughout the day." In short, there's a reason why Olive Garden's Alfredo is so rich, creamy, and luscious, and that reason is constant making, monitoring, and careful attention. 

Creamy sauces like hollandaise and mayo have a notorious tendency to separate due to the finickiness of the fat components. Added too quickly, they'll overwhelm the texture and break a silky sauce to bits, or heated too quickly, they'll curdle. Olive Garden's cultivated mastery of the from-scratch Alfredo's assembly makes fans' favorite dishes possible en masse. Reddit is even filled with threads of epicures swapping Olive Garden Alfredo dupe recipes. For ambitious fromage fans looking to recreate the beloved Italian-American chain's sauce at home, we've rounded up 16 common mistakes most foodies make with Alfredo to help you out. Or, if you'd rather take a trip to the Garden for a taste of the real deal, we also have 10 more things that foodies should know before their Olive Garden visit.