Spaghetti Carbonara – Feel Good Great Food in 15 Minutes

Authentic Spaghetti Carbonara is one of those essential, tasty and incredibly easy to prepare meals that you need in your toolkit! Don’t be fooled by recipes that use cream to make this creamy, follow the process and you’ll end up with the original recipe for spaghetti carbonara that will impress not just you but your family and friends too! Buy your Guanciale from our web shop.

Have You Had A Proper Spaghetti Carbonara?

There’s good versions of this Roman classic and there’s so many loose variations, as a brand that creates amazing Guanciale, we’re obviously purists when it comes to sticking to the proper recipe. The question is though do most people know the real recipe? The one below is as close as we can find to being the one used in Rome and by most Italians. Variations between whole eggs or just yolks, Guanciale vs Pancetta, the list goes on. What we don’t like to see is when a celebrity chef decides to use the phrase carbonara and it has no meat, includes mushrooms, peas… You get the idea.

The one thing you won’t find being added to a carbonara recipe in Italy too is cream, when you learn to cook this properly, you soon realise the process and the ingredients is what makes the sauce creamy with the cream. The Italians have a great way of making food taste rich without using cream, take a risotto for instance that tastes creamy when cooked right, all about the way the chef works not cheating by adding cream!

Spaghetti Carbonara How To

The best thing you can do is to find some good Guanciale, yes click the word Guanciale and you’ll be able to get it delivered to your door. As there’s not many ingredients going in this, we do recommend that you buy good quality ingredients, the pasta that we’d recommend is the De Cecco Spaghetti No. 12. Why you ask? It’s pushed through a bronze dye which gives the pasta a rough edge, you need this to enable the creamy egg, pasta water, pork fat and cheese sauce to stick to it. This brand of pasta is available in lots of places, yes there’s other but it’s certainly a good price, accessible and a good product.

Spaghetti Carbonara

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Course: MainCuisine: ItalianDifficulty: Medium

Servings

2

servings

Prep time

5

minutes

Cooking time

15

minutes

Calories

600

kcal

Total time

20

minutes

Ingredients

• 250g Dried spaghetti

• 1 whole eggs

• 3 egg yolks

• 80g Pecorino cheese

• 60g Guanciale

• Black pepper

Directions

• Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil, add spaghetti and boil for 9-10 minutes until al-dente (I recommend a good spaghetti such as De Cecco as it’s rough edge holds the sauce, because it’s pushed through a bronze dye)
• Cut the rind off the guanciale, then slowly render your guanciale over a low flame in a large heavy pan. Don’t be concerned about the amount of fat that comes out of the guanciale, it’s supposed to be fatty – tutto sul grasso (“it’s all about the fat” as you’d say in Italian!)
• Whilst the pasta and the guanciale are doing their thing, get a large bowl, crack in the two whole eggs, the two egg yolks and season with salt and pepper before whisking, next add the cheese to the eggs and whisk again.
• Once the last has cooked, turn off the heat (especially if you’re cooking on gas as you don’t want a fire if you splatter the fat!), transfer the spaghetti to the guanciale pan, stir to coat in the oils and reduce the heat of the oil as you don’t want to scramble the eggs!
• Add 1 1/2 ladles full of the salty pasta water and stir, you want to see a little water in the pan that doesn’t get re absorbed by the pasta.
• Now add the egg and cheese, move it around the pan quickly and it should go nice and creamy. This is the emulsification process between the egg, cheese, fats and pasta water. Yes no cream here!!! Depending on how creamy you want your food perhaps add a little more pasta water. Test for seasoning, open the wine and then…
• Serve onto plates sprinkled with a little more cheese and ground black pepper.

So fundamentally it’s about using the right ingredients, don’t skimp by buying the wrong ingredients, do the process properly and after a few goes you’ll have the knack of creating this classic like a chef in Rome. You’ll soon realise that you can cook this better than 99% of other people! Give it a go and share your photos on social media, we love to see people having a go at our recipes and using our products.