Find out how to make a carbonara recipe that works – 10/16/2023 – Marcão’s Recipes

Pasta never fails. It’s the salvation for that dinner you don’t want to plan too much, let alone spend hours behind the stove.

If they leave me alone, inertia leaves me making pasta with tomato sauce (with some variations) almost every night. But I’m currently cooking for my family (daughter and grandson) in London. I can’t always present the same food.

That’s why I decided to make spaghetti carbonara, a dish that takes very little time.

It’s quick and easy, but it’s also treacherous. All it takes is one mistake for the recipe to go sideways. Carbonara is a creamy egg sauce, added raw at the end of preparation: it’s very easy to overcook them and end up with pasta and scrambled eggs.

Therefore, the main ingredient in carbonara is attention. Focus on the kitchen for a few minutes.

I remembered carbonara because I wrote a text, in my other column Cozinha Bruta, on 11/10, about a restaurant in Rome that offers a theatrical service: the waiter arrives shaking a shaker full of pasta and pours it onto the customer’s plate.

The affectation and exacerbated purism turned carbonara into a gastronomic beast.

Among the snobbish rules they imposed on the recipe is the exclusive use of guanciale (cured pork jowl) and pecorino Romano cheese (similar to Parmesan, but made with sheep’s milk).

Don’t pay attention to it. It’s very tasty with these ingredients, but you don’t need to have a seal of authenticity on your dish.

Guanciale and pecorino are hard to find. You can use pancetta (cured belly), but I don’t recommend bacon – the smokiness will overshadow all the other flavors. If you don’t have pancetta, use fresh pork belly seasoned with plenty of black pepper.

As for the cheese, you can use parmesan or even well-cured cheese. The important thing is the creamy eggs, with good pork and good cheese.

In many restaurants, carbonara is an intense yellow, almost orange. Color does not denote quality nor interfere with the flavor of the dish.

The bright yellow is, at the end of the day, dyeing. The place uses eggs from red hens fed with feed full of pigment, which produce “free-range” yolks.

What really matters is reserving a little of the pasta cooking water, full of starch, which will bind the sauce together. And mix the yolks in a hot container, but off the heat, very quickly.

This is not the definitive carbonara recipe, nor the best of all. But, if you follow it correctly and carefully, it will work.

SPAGHETTI CARBONARA

Difficulty: average
Performance: 2 servings
Ingredients:

• 250 g spaghetti, rigatoni or penne
• 50 g guanciale or pancettac (if using fresh belly, double the amount and add salt) chopped into 0.5 cm cubes
• 5 egg yolks
• 2 tablespoons grated pecorino or parmesan
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Way of doing:

1. Put the pasta to cook in boiling salted water.

2. In another pan that holds the cooked pasta, sauté the meat in its own fat over low heat, until it starts to brown. Turn off the fire.

3. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks, cheese, pepper and 2 tablespoons of the pasta cooking water. Reserve.

4. Drain the pasta 1 minute before the time indicated on the package. Transfer it to the pork pan, add ½ ladle of the cooking water and cook over high heat until the broth thickens with the starch (1 or 2 minutes).

5. Remove the pan from the heat and pour in the egg yolk mixture while stirring vigorously. Serve immediately (with more cheese and pepper on the side, if desired).

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