Andrew Zimmern's Most-Watched Recipe Is Simply Onions and Pasta

James Beard-winning chef Andrew Zimmern's most-watched recipe isn't a restaurant showpiece built on expensive proteins or rare pantry imports. It's onion pasta, and the viral video he made about it has racked up massive views while sparking broader conversations about what humble ingredients can actually do when you pay attention to them.

Zimmern shared the full recipe in Spilled Milk #382, his Substack newsletter, framing the dish inside a genuinely interesting cultural context. The issue traces onion pasta to Italian immigrants living in the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries, noting that the dish "evolved with their realities." That's subsistence cooking at its most honest: stretching what you have until it becomes something worth eating, then worth remembering, then worth passing down.

The recipe itself is disarmingly short on glamour. You need four onions, peeled, halved, and sliced thin, submerged in three to four cups of olive oil in a heavy saucepan over medium heat. The move here is patience: stir every minute or so and wait until the onions reach what Zimmern calls "uniformly maple brown." Strain them out, chop them when cool, and hold onto that infused oil because it does serious work later.

From there, a few tablespoons of that onion oil go into a sauté pan with a knob of butter, sliced garlic, chile flakes, and two to four anchovies. Press the anchovies apart with a wooden spoon as they cook, letting them melt into the fat. The remaining steps in the Substack excerpt are truncated, but the finishing cast is clear from the ingredient list: 6-8 oz. of dried pasta, lemon juice, grated Reggiano Parmesan or Pecorino Romano, parsley, and salt. Zimmern writes plainly about the dish: "I make this pasta all the time at home, and I know you will, too."

The #382 issue also includes a step-by-step video walking through the full process. Zimmern's philosophy, as framed in coverage of the recipe, holds that great food comes from attention rather than extravagance. Onion pasta, built almost entirely from pantry staples, is a clean argument for that position.

One practical note worth flagging: Spilled Milk #382 was released as a free issue, but Zimmern noted in the newsletter that future issues will resume their usual cadence with recipes behind the paywall. If you want the complete, untruncated recipe including all finishing steps, pulling up Spilled Milk #382 directly on Substack is the move before access tightens.