Carbonara sauce: recipe. Video
Carbonara sauce is one of the most popular dishes in Italian cuisine. With a minimum of ingredients, a maximum of controversy arises around this recipe. Can cream or butter be added to the carbonara? Replacing pork cheek with ham or bacon? Add onions and garlic? There are not so many subtleties of preparation in the sauce, but only by following them, you can get a completely authentic dish.
Carbonara sauce, unlike many other sauces, is impossible “solo”, without pasta. Pasta is ¾ a dish. You can use the pasta in the form of thick, hollow sticks – pasta, long thin sticks – spaghetti, or long wide strips – noodles. In recent years, gourmets have often prepared carbonara with penne paste – in the form of tubes. However, if you are striving for a classic taste, then you need spaghetti and only spaghetti.
Is carbonara a creamy sauce?
Some chefs call carbonara a creamy sauce, but they are wrong. Initially, carbonara is a dish of shepherds and coal miners who spent a long time in the mountains, far from home. They could take with them only simple products that are stored in the fresh air for a long time. Neither cream nor butter is included. However, it is worth noting that for inexperienced housewives, a little butter or heavy cream is a great help, they allow you to stabilize the egg emulsion and avoid premature coagulation of proteins and yolks. The secret of how to make a “creamy” sauce is precisely to prevent the eggs from thickening, but to make them, together with the cheese, envelop the pasta in a delicate, viscous, silky veil. That is why you should not make the sauce on the yolks alone: it will be too elastic, even tough.
Another popular but not classic ingredient is white wine.
Carbonara – cheese sauce with ham
The classic carbonara sauce is not the famous hard cheese Parmagiano Reggiano, but the lesser known Pecorino Romano. It is also a hard cheese, but made from sheep’s milk, not cow’s milk. Pecorino is a salty cheese with a sharper milky aroma. Parmegiano is light, with a nutty flavor. Another traditional component of the sauce is dry-cured pork cheek, guanchiale, similar in taste to pancetta (pork belly ham), but more tender and aromatic.
For a classic sauce you will need: – 500 g dry spaghetti; – 4 fresh chicken eggs; – 250 g guanchiale; 1 cup freshly grated pecorino romano cheese – 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper.
Boil 6 liters of water, lightly salt and boil the spaghetti until al dente. While the pasta is cooking, cut the guanchiale into 1 centimeter cubes and fry in a dry skillet over medium heat until golden brown. In a small bowl, whisk the eggs and cheese into a smooth mixture. Drain off the paste by reserving ½ cup of hot liquid. Place half of the pasta in a saucepan, add the cheek cubes and the other half of the spaghetti, add the cheese and egg mixture and shake the saucepan vigorously, allowing the eggs to thicken, enveloping the pasta. If the sauce is too thick, add some hot spaghetti water. Season the finished pasta generously with pepper. One of the versions explaining the name of the famous sauce – carbonara – says: the pasta is so thickly seasoned with black ground pepper that it looks like sprinkled with coal, carbon in Latin.