Cream Cheese Alfredo Sauce

🍯 Why This Recipe Works

1. It holds onto the noodles! This alfredo sauce recipe gives you a thick and luxuriously creamy alfredo sauce that clings to cooked noodles or works great in alfredo-baked casseroles and recipes as well.
2. It's versatile. Use the homemade alfredo sauce with cream cheese to top your chicken, pizza, or lasagna with this sauce, and you will definitely be in for a good time!
3. You can adapt the flavors to your own tastebuds! Add in a pinch of nutmeg, reduce the pepper, swap out seasonings or add in some Creole. There's no limit to your creativity.

🥘 Ingredients

Ingredient Notes:

Butter- No sauce is really complete without a little butter. Add some richness to your dish by adding in some unsalted butter. If using salted butter, omit the salt in the recipe card.

Milk or heavy cream- I've used unsweetened plain almond milk, whole milk, evaporated milk, and heavy cream. All taste delicious, but the fattier milk options do produce a more velvety texture.

Cream cheese- Using cream cheese will give us a thicker consistency with a pleasant tanginess in every bite. Make sure to soften and cube the cheese beforehand so it blends more easily!

Parmesan cheese- I recommend freshly shredded parmesan cheese, not the grated stuff in a green jar. Note that I have tried the green jar cheese, and it will work in a pinch, but the consistency will be different.

For specific ingredients and measurements, please see the recipe card below.

🔪 Instructions

Step 1: Melt your butter in a medium sized pot over medium heat. Whisk in the minced garlic and stir for 30 seconds until fragrant.

Step 2: Whisk in flour, black pepper, Italian seasoning, and garlic powder.

Step 3: Slowly whisk in the milk until smooth.

Step 4: Add in the cream cheese and occasionally stir until melted and the sauce begins to thicken.

Step 5: Add parmesan cheese and whisk until blended.

Step 6: Once the sauce is smooth you can serve it as-is or you can add in up to ½ cup of reserved pasta water from your cooked pasta to help thin it down a little bit.

Serve and use as desired.

Enjoy!

🍴 Recipe Tips

Everyone likes their alfredo sauce at a different consistency, some like runny and others like thick. I personally prefer thick which is why I enjoy this recipe as-is, but there's an easy way to thin it down and stretch it out into even more servings.

How to Thin Alfredo Sauce

If using this alfredo sauce with pasta, reserve water from the boiled noodles and whisk it into the prepared alfredo sauce ½ cup at a time until desired consistency has been reached. Or, you can use very warm water or milk to add to the sauce.

How to Thicken Alfredo Sauce

This sauce is already pretty thick, but you can make it even thicker by adding a cornstarch slurry at the end. Just whisk together 1 tablespoon of cornstarch and 2 tablespoons of water until it makes a smooth slurry, and then stir it into the sauce. Repeat until the sauce is the thickness desired.

Do Not Use Cold Cream Cheese

Also, when making this easy alfredo sauce with cream cheese, you can use cold cream cheese, but remember that the texture will be different than softened cream cheese.

When cream cheese is cold, it doesn't fully incorporate into sauces and leaves behind very tiny white ball-looking pieces. Visually, they are noticeable. Texturally, they are not.

👩🏻‍🍳 Storage

You can keep any leftover alfredo sauce stored in a closed container in the fridge for up to one week. For the best tasting results, enjoy using it within 3 or 4 days.

Note that this sauce should not be left out at room temperature for more than 2 hours at a time for food safety purposes.

Freezing

I do not recommend freezing this alfredo sauce unless you plan on using it for a baked recipe later. For example, a meal prepped with lasagna, casserole, or smothered baked chicken breasts would be okay examples, whereas a jar of leftover sauce is not.

The difference is that when frozen the mixture will separate and not come back together in the same texture and appearance as it was before being frozen. When baked it's much less noticeable because it blends in better than if it sat on top of a pile of noodles.