If pasta carbonara is on a restaurant menu, it’s a winning bet pasta carbonara will be my order. I am obsessed with this dish. It’s creamy, cheesy, peppery, and full of crispy bits of pork. It’s also perfectly acceptable as a dinner, lunch or brunch dish! What’s not to love?
Recipe Evolution – Alden’s Country Pasta Carbonara
Before I moved from the city to our farm, I had never attempted to make carbonara, I ordered it at restaurants. I also had a pre-conceived notion that the dish was very technical and best left to the professionals. These days, I’d have to drive about an hour to find an Italian restaurant and carbonara isn’t even on the menu! Even if it was, farm life rarely allows that much time for just dinner. I CRAVED this dish so much, I took a deep dive into how to re-create at home. Necessity is the Mother of invention, right?
To my surprise, the dish is incredibly simple, both in process and the ingredients. The hardest part was sourcing some of the traditional carbonara ingredients. In a memorable foodie conversation with a bartender at my FAVORITE Italian restaurant in Kansas City, Ragazza, he said “Italian cooking is about cooking locally and simply with what’s available to us.” That’s Alden’s Country Pasta Carbonara was born and has quickly become a household favorite.
Keys to Success
While the equation for carbonara is simple, long pasta + cured pork + hard cheese + eggs = carbonara, you must follow the order of operations correctly for success!
Preparation is key
From start to finish, cooking carbonara is finished in under 20 minutes, so having all of your ingredients ready is key. Cut your bacon, shred your cheese, crack your pepper, and separate your eggs before you start cooking the pasta water. I’ve found I can do all of my prep in about the time it takes to bring the water to a boil.
Do not discard the pasta water
The starch that cooks out of the pasta is key to developing the sauce, a free ingredient if you will. This recipe says to move the pasta from the water using tongs vs draining for this reason. Pasta water is the key to bringing the sauce together! Keep a ladle on hand to easily add pasta water from your pasta pot as you build your carbonara sauce.
Toss and temper
The only tricky thing with carbonara is adding uncooked eggs to heat without scrambling the eggs. The goal is a lusciously creamy sauce, not scrambled eggs. Don’t skip tempering the egg mixture with the pasta water to slowly bring the temperature of the mixture up and when adding the egg mixture to the pasta, make sure the heat is either off or on the absolute lowest setting possible while continuously tossing the pasta with the mixture.
Serve immediately
Since this dish comes together so quick and easy, it’s ideal to whip up and serve immediately. Sadly, if there are leftovers, they just don’t reheat super well. The taste is still amazing, but you’ll lose the silky luxurious texture of the sauce. If you must reheat, it’s best to do so over the stove vs. the microwave, adding small amounts of water to bring the sauce back to life.
Choose your cheese wisely
I go into detail on cheese choices below when I compare the traditional carbonara ingredients with the ingredients used in this recipe. While expensive and sometimes hard to find Parmigiano-Reggiano or Pecorino Romano are traditional, always easy to find parmesan cheese gets the job done deliciously! This recipe is a rare occasion where I give full permission to use a pre-shredded cheese, usually in a clear container in the cheese section, if a block of parmesan cheese isn’t available. However, please, for the love of all things cheese, DO NOT USE THE SHELF STABLE POWDERED CHEESE IN THE GREEN CANISTER.
Alden’s Country Pasta Carbonara
Equipment
- large sauce pan or stock pot
- 12"-14" high sided sauté pan, bonus if it's pretty enough to go from stove to table
- tongs
- ladle
- Measuring cups and spoons
Ingredients
- 1 lbs box long pasta bucatini, spaghetti, linguine
- ½ lbs thick cut bacon in 1/2" pieces or slab bacon 1/4" dice
- 1 ¼ cups shredded parmesan cheese fresh grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, Pecorino Romano, or a combination of the two if you can find them would be fantastic also!
- 2 whole eggs
- 4 egg yolks
- 2 teaspoons coarse ground black pepper + more to taste
- 1 tablespoon salt + more to taste
Instructions
- Over medium heat in a large, deep sided sauté pan, render bacon until crispy on all sides. Once bacon is crisp, turn the heat as low as it can go. Spoon out all but about 3 tablespoons of bacon fat.
- While the bacon is rendering, begin heating the amount of pasta water directed on the box, adding enough salt added to make the water as salty as the ocean, at least a tablespoon.
- While the pasta water is coming to a boil, beat the eggs and egg yolks together in a 2 cup liquid measuring cup with a spout for easy pouring, until they are homogenous, then stir the parmesan cheese and black pepper.
- Once the pasta water is boiling, add your pasta, cooking 1 minutes less than box instructions.
- Do not drain the pasta. Add one ladle of pasta water to the bacon pan. Using tongs transfer the pasta from the pasta pot to the bacon pan. Toss the pasta in the bacon fat and pasta water until coated.
- Slowly add 1/4 cup of the hot pasta water while stirring to the egg and parmesan mixture to temper the eggs.
- While continuously and vigorously tossing the pasta with the tongs, begin slowly adding the parmesan egg mixture; keep tossing until the pasta is evenly coated in the parmesan egg mixture. Keep moving the pasta and begin adding additional pasta water ¼ cup at a time until the sauce develops a sheen and desired consistency.
- Taste for seasoning, add additional salt and/or pepper if needed. Garnish with more parm and black pepper, serve immediately.
Notes
Nutrition
Traditional vs. Alden’s Country Pasta Carbonara
In it’s traditional form, carbonara ingredients while simple, can be expensive and tough to find out here in God’s country. Long pasta + cured pork + hard cheese + eggs = carbonara. My play on a traditional carbonara doesn’t compromise on the delicious experience that is a warm dish of fresh carbonara, but you can find all of the ingredients at any grocery store in one stop.
- Parmigiano-Reggiano vs. Pecorino Romano vs. parmesan cheese
- Traditional – Parmigiano-Reggiano – a hard raw cow’s milk cheese which must be produced in specific regions of Italy. Known as “the king of cheeses,” there are strict production guidelines which must be followed to earn the name. If you can find it at your grocery store, it will be in the artisan cheese section.
- Traditional – Pecorino Romano – a hard sheep’s milk cheese often used as a substitute for Parmigiano-Reggiano. The Italian word for sheep is pecora and the cheese has historically been produced in Rome, thus the name. Like Parmigiano-Reggiano, if you can find this cheese at your grocery store, it will be in the artisan cheese section.
- Alden’s – Parmesan – the imitation of the “king of cheeses,” Parmigiano-Reggiano and the easiest to find. To be called parmesan, it just needs to be a hard, cow’s milk cheese You’ll find block, shredded, and shelf-stable grated. As a rule avoid any shelf stable grated parmesan cheese and go for the block or shredded versions you find in the regular refrigerated cheese section of your grocery store. It usually comes in a plastic container with lid and it’s next to the feta or blue cheese crumbles. The price tag is significantly more wallet friendly than Parmigiano-Reggiano or Pecorino Romano, and it works GREAT in this recipe! I’ve tested it over and over, and it works. My sincerest apologies to Italy.
- Guanciale vs. pancetta vs. bacon
- Traditional – Guanciale – salt and spice cured pork jowl or cheek. Very difficult to find. If you’re lucky enough to find guanciale, you’ll find it at the butcher counter. Guanciale will cost you a pretty penny!
- Traditional – Pancetta – salt cured pork belly. Less difficult to find than guanciale, but often sliced very thin in grocery stores. For carbonara, choose bulk pancetta cut at least 1/4″ thick for a proper carbonara dice. The butcher counter or the specialty meats section by the artisan cheeses is where you’ll find pancetta.
- Alden’s – Bacon – smoked and salt cured pork. Typically from the belly, but could also come from the back. Bacon is also the most wallet friendly of the three. Thick sliced bacon from the refrigerated breakfast meats section of the grocery store is great for this recipe, but unsliced slab bacon from the butcher counter, hand diced is the ultimate. I did a whole blog post on perfectly rendering bacon. You can find it here.
Creamy, but no cream?
The silky creamy sauce in carbonara doesn’t come from cream! Cream is bad word when talking carbonara. The creamy texture comes from emulsifying the ingredients of the sauce together. Emulsification is just a fancy way of saying you’ve convinced two things that don’t usually like to go together, to go together. That’s where the starch in the pasta water comes in. The starch brings the bacon fat, cheese, and eggs together with a process a chemist could explain, but I just know it works. A carbonara recipe with cream in the ingredient list has gone more rouge than I already have!
Buon appetito!
Happy cooking,
Alden
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