Roman Cacio e Pepe: The Original Mac and Cheese

 Cacio e pepe (“cacio” is the word for “cheese” in several regional dialects in central Italy; the word for “cheese” in standard Italian is “formaggio”) is one of the four iconic Roman pasta dishes together with amatriciana, alla gricia, and carbonara. One could argue this humble dish made with only four ingredients, is the culinary ancestor of the American classic mac and cheese.

As I mentioned in the article about carbonara, Italian—and especially Roman—cooking is all about using the best, freshest ingredients with great technique, but not trying to reinvent the wheel. There is one step in this recipe that can seem a little daunting, but with enough patience and practice, I’m sure you’ll add cacio e pepe to the list of dishes you cook regularly at home for your friends and family.

First, let’s discuss ingredients. In this regard, cacio e pepe could not be simpler: it only requires pasta, black pepper (whole at first, then freshly ground), Pecorino Romano cheese, and the pasta’s cooking water. Italians are very protective of the regionality of their ingredients, so, although it is much easier to find a good quality piece of  parmigiano regiano, that isn’t the right cheese for this application Parmigiano, as the name implies, comes from Parma, in the north. This dish, and thus the ideal cheese, are both Roman, so the natural choice is, of course, Rome’s best-known cheese, pecorino romano, made from sheep’s milk. (“Pecore” are “sheep.”)

This will certainly raise the price, but you cannot buy pre-grated pecorino in a tub or canister, unless you hand-selected the piece of cheese and it was grated in front of you and put into the container. You must buy a block of pecorino and grate it yourself, either with a box grater or a microplane, or do as I suggested and have someone grate the cheese in front of you if you want to bring it home already grated. (When I grate my own cheese, I prefer the microplane, and why that’s the case will be discussed later.) Any industrially pre-grated cheese will almost certainly have cellulose, calcium silicate, or some other anti-caking agent. These anti-caking agents will make it impossible to form the sauce correctly, so you should not use any industrialized cheese packed with them.

A quick word of caution: Longtime readers may have noticed the absence of an instruction I typically give several times throughout each of my recipes in the Roman pasta series (the standalone recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana that I published late in 2021 and the 3 other bases, plus papalina, which I’ve recently put out). Normally, I’ll call for layered salting of dishes. Make a mirepoix? You should season it? Add some chicken stock? Season again. And so on—for each ingredient or set of ingredients. Each ingredient normally only gets a little bit of salt at a time since my philosophy is to add salt continuously as I cook so that nothing is underseasoned. Salt’s primary function in cooking is not to act as a flavor of its own right, but rather to accentuate the flavors around it. (This is why salt, even in small amounts, is called for in sweet baked goods.)

But all of these Roman recipes contain copious amounts of either guanciale, or pecorino Romano, or both. Pecorino is already a very salty cheese which is aged for several months to allow its flavor to become even more concentrated, and guanciale is cured in lots of salt and other spices for months at a time. These ingredients are both, without any additional salt, more than salty enough to round out the dishes they are a part of. No additional salt should be added beyond what is already in the cheese and the guanciale, lest these classic dishes become so salty as to be rendered inedible.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil (with at least a gallon of water in a 6-quart pot), and cook a long pasta according to the manufacturer’s instructions. While the water is coming to a boil, place a tablespoon of black peppercorns in a dry (i.e., no oil) skillet and keep the skillet constantly moving over the burner for between 30 seconds and 1 minute, or until the peppercorns become fragrant. Then, turn off the heat, and using another pan or another suitable food-safe object, crush and reserve the toasted peppercorns. (If you have multiple pepper mills, use one that until now has been empty, if you want an even easier way to break down the pepper. Otherwise, place the heavy object on top of the peppercorns in a single layer, and put your body weight into that object. You need either the burrs of a mill—that is otherwise empty and contains no untoasted  pepper—or the whole weight of your body pressing down on them in order to crack the peppercorns.) Grate 1 cup of pecorino into a bowl and combine the cheese and the pepper.

When the pasta is 3 minutes from being done, reserve a cup and a half of the pasta cooking water. From that, start by taking 3 tablespoons of water and combining the water with the pepper and cheese. Stir. I mentioned earlier that my grating implement of choice is my microplane, rather than my box grater. Microplanes only have one grating setting, but that setting is usually as fine or finer than the finest setting available on a box grater. In order to prevent something that essentially looks like the iconic “cheese pull” (think of splitting open the two halves of a grilled cheese sandwich, or pulling a single slice of pizza away from the rest of the pizza) from happening to this sauce—which would prevent it from becoming creamy—three things absolutely must be true: you haven’t used a cheese that was pre-grated and processed with an anticaking agent, you’ve grated your own cheese as finely as possible, and you are not combining the sauce and the pasta in a hot pan or over a heat source. Be sure all of these things are true before you proceed any further.

When the pasta finishes cooking, drain it, and place it in a saucepan off the heat. Combine the pasta with your pepper-cheese-water paste. As it is now, the paste should be too thick to be a sauce on its own. Stir and toss to combine. Start adding pasta water (and keep mixing) until an emulsified sauce forms. You will probably add another cup or so of water, but I cannot say for sure, since I do not know exactly how starchy your pasta water was, or how thick you had made your paste. Your objective is to make a creamy sauce (without any cream) that coats each strand of your pasta, but which isn’t too watery.

Serve, optionally garnishing with even more grated pecorino and freshly ground black pepper. 

Photo Credits to J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Serious Eats 

Classic Roman Carbonara

Italians, but especially Romans, are known all over the world for their basic pasta dishes which are much greater than the sum of their parts. There are four basic sauces from Rome that any home cook can and should master. The first is carbonara, which we will cover this week. Following carbonara, they also have cacio e pepe, alla gricia, and amatriciana. (I covered amatriciana late last year, and you can find that recipe by clicking on this link.)

The four Roman sauces are as follows: carbonara is an egg and cheese-based sauce; cacio e pepe is pasta water, pepper, and cheese; alla gricia is cacio e pepe plus guanciale; and amatriciana is a tomato sauce with chili and guanciale.

Carbonara, authentically, contains eggs which have barely been cooked. My version of the dish cooks the eggs, so any risk of foodborne illness is removed, but, if executed properly, there should barely be any textural change between the raw eggs and the eggs that have gone through my process.

In a wide, shallow pan, dice some guanciale. Guanciale is a cured pork product like pancetta, but they come from different regions of the pig. Guanciale comes from the jowl/jaw, while pancetta comes from the belly (familiar to the average American home cook as the source of bacon). As such, pancetta and guanciale are both deeply flavorful, cured pork products. Because the traditional recipe calls for guanciale, so will mine, but I will add the caveat that if guanciale is unavailable, pancetta is a perfectly acceptable substitute. Add just a touch of olive oil—barely a tablespoon—to your skillet, and when it comes up to temperature, add the guanciale. Cook the guanciale in the oil until rendered and crispy, like you would bacon. Reserve the guanciale.

Carbonara was invented as a dish for the poor in a time of necessity, so the traditional recipe calls for whole eggs. Two eggs per portion will provide enough sauce, but that may be too heavy. My modification is to instead use 1 whole egg and 1 fewer egg yolk for a given number of portions (3 portions should call for 3 eggs and 2 yolks; 4 portions should call for 4 eggs and 3 yolks; etc.). Beat this in a large bowl until no streaks of white remain. Season this very liberally with freshly ground black pepper. The name of the dish may have come from the fact that the copious amounts of black pepper in the dish resembled the carbon dust on men’s clothes when they returned from mining or otherwise working with coal in Lazio and elsewhere. Into the beaten eggs, place ½ ounce of cheese per egg or partial egg (3 portions call for 3 eggs and 2 yolks, giving 5 parts, thus calling for 5/2 ounces of cheese, etc.).

A quick word of caution: Longtime readers may have noticed the absence of an instruction I typically give several times throughout each of my recipes in the Roman pasta series (the standalone recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana that I published late in 2021 and the 3 other bases, plus papalina, which I’ve recently put out). Normally, I’ll call for layered salting of dishes. Make a mirepoix? You should season it? Add some chicken stock? Season again. And so on—for each ingredient or set of ingredients. Each ingredient normally only gets a little bit of salt at a time since my philosophy is to add salt continuously as I cook so that nothing is underseasoned. Salt’s primary function in cooking is not to act as a flavor of its own right, but rather to accentuate the flavors around it. (This is why salt, even in small amounts, is called for in sweet baked goods.)

But all of these Roman recipes contain copious amounts of either guanciale, or pecorino Romano, or both. Pecorino is already a very salty cheese which is aged for several months to allow its flavor to become even more concentrated, and guanciale is cured in lots of salt and other spices for months at a time. These ingredients are both, without any additional salt, more than salty enough to round out the dishes they are a part of. No additional salt should be added beyond what is already in the cheese and the guanciale, lest these classic dishes become so salty as to be rendered inedible.

This dish involves cooking over a double boiler. Put an oven mitt on your non-dominant hand; you’ll need your dominant hand free to whisk and use a ladle. Set a pot of water onto a burner and bring it to a simmer—not a boil!—and place the bowl that contains the egg and cheese over the double boiler. Be sure that two things are true of the water: 1) it never comes above a simmer and 2) it never touches the bottom of the bowl. If either—or worse, both—of those things are true, you will not maintain a loose, “sauce-able” texture, and you’ll end up with tiny curds of cheesy scrambled egg.

Work on adjacent burners. My highest-powered burner is my left-front, so I like to work on my pasta on my left and my sauce (any sauce, not just carbonara) on my right. As soon as the water in the left burner reaches a rolling boil, the pasta goes in. Simultaneously, the right burner should have the pot of simmering water ready to go. With your nondominant (mitted) hand, place and hold the pot into the double boiler, i.e., put it into the top of the pan but hold it steady so your whisking doesn’t destabilize it. Whisk constantly. If you don’t, you will end up with cheesy scrambled eggs. There is a time and a place for scrambled eggs; carbonara certainly isn’t either of those. Periodically, use your mitted hand to remove the bowl from the double boiler, and whisk for a few seconds off the heat, to further help control the temperature of the eggs and prevent scrambling.

When the pasta is about halfway done (about 5 minutes into the cooking process), take the eggs off the double boiler, momentarily put your whisk down, switch to a ladle, and place 2 ladlefuls of starchy water in a heatproof container. Put the ladle down and return to the whisk. Then, practically drop by drop to start with, start pouring the water into the egg-and-cheese mixture. DO NOT dump all the water in at once. If you do, you will end up with irreversible scrambling because the eggs were over simmering water and the pasta water was vigorously boiling; that temperature difference will be enough to scramble the eggs if you are not careful. As you add more pasta water to the eggs, add the remaining pasta water faster. You will certainly need to use 1 ladleful; the second is there in case you want to slightly loosen the consistency of the sauce if it still seems too firm. Curdling is prevented by constant whisking, which disrupts the egg protein networks and prevents them from seizing up when they come in contact with the boiling water, which is hotter than the eggs.

When the pasta is al dente per the package’s instructions, immediately drain it, turn off the double boiler, and, off the heat, combine the pasta and the sauce.

Garnish with parmigiano reggiano (or, more authentically, since this dish is from Lazio and not Emilia-Romagna, use pecorino romano) and the reserved guanciale.




















(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Cured Honey-Dijon Glazed Oven-Baked Pork Shoulder Ham

Ham is often seen only as a grocery store deli counter staple, as something that belongs in a perfectly serviceable sandwich with some high-quality bread and high-quality cheese but confining it to such a supporting role does it a tremendous disservice. Ham, like so many other meats and whole poultry, deserves to be a centerpiece of a wonderful feast. Now, this is the recipe I promised would come out in time for a wonderful Easter dinner. But today is two Saturdays before Easter, and yet the recipe is already posted. This is, in fact, because if you want to make this recipe for a large number of people (and therefore you need a large ham), you need to start working with it today (or at the latest on Monday, if your ham is slightly smaller), and posting this any closer to Easter than now would make completing the recipe nearly, if not outright, impossible.

Technicality-obsessed purists will complain that this recipe isn’t for a “ham” because technically a “ham” refers to a different cut. Technically, “hams” come from pork legs. But after due deliberation and studying different recipes, I’ve concluded that a different cut, the Boston Butt part of the shoulder is superior to the traditional cut, and so this recipe will use it instead. Those of you who like American barbecue are probably familiar with the Boston Butt as a typical choice to be smoked and then turned into pulled pork.

Cooking a Boston Butt and turning it into a worthy ham centerpiece for a feast as extravagant as an Easter dinner (sides will be coming out the day before, in other words, in a week) is an extensive process. Each person you are going to feed will need anywhere from 16 to 20 ounces of pork by weight (1-1 ¼ pounds—because so much of this is bone). This ham will need to be dry brined for 16 hours per pound. So, as an example: a Boston butt being served to 6 people should probably weigh 6-7.5 pounds and will need anywhere from 4-5 days to cure. This will give each person one generous serving on the day of, and it will also provide plenty for everyone who wants leftovers.

For every pound of pork, combine the following into a bowl: 1 ounce of salt, 1 tablespoon of fresh ground black pepper, 2 teaspoons of paprika, ½ tablespoon of garlic powder, ½ tablespoon of onion powder, 1/8 teaspoon of fresh ground nutmeg, 1 teaspoon each of dried oregano, parsley, basil, and thyme. Combine this dry spice mix to ensure homogeneity, and then apply this liberally to the surface of the pork. Set the pork, uncovered, onto a sheet tray so air can circulate around it and leave it in the refrigerator undisturbed for the requisite amount of time. Take care to ensure that there are no cooked meats (or other raw meats), or anything else that could cross-contaminate against the pork shoulder, on the same level of shelves in the refrigerator.

This part of the process, which I first taught in the Super Bowl wings recipe, is an essential chemical process by which a properly seasoned, tender, and juicy final product is ensured. Dry brining works thanks to osmosis. The salt in the dry brine will pull moisture from inside the cells of the pork shoulder because the cells want to equalize the salinity inside and outside their boundaries. Then, given enough time, the salt will dissolve into this moisture and, together with the other seasonings, will be absorbed into the flesh of the shoulder, tenderizing it and rendering it perfectly seasoned. Remove everything else from inside your sink, and run the pork shoulder under cold water, then thoroughly pat it dry with a paper towel. This removes excess cure from the surface, but the chemical work of the osmosis reaction is done—so don’t worry, you aren’t taking away any seasonings. To ensure no cross-contamination occurred, wash your sink thoroughly after you complete this process.

Place your pork shoulder in the largest pan you have, together with 2 quartered onions, 3 sliced and peeled carrots, and 3 sliced ribs of celery. Fill the pot with water. Uncovered, bring the contents of the pot to a simmer, and hold the temperature there until the pork itself reaches an internal temperature of 135 degrees (medium-rare by beef standards, but still not done by pork standards). This will probably happen after about 2 hours, but this depends entirely on the size and shape of your pork shoulder and the intensity of the burner, so go by the temperature, not the time.

In the meantime, after about an hour and half, begin working on the glaze, and preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. In a saucepan, combine 1 cup of water, ½ cup Dijon or whole grain mustard, ⅓ cup raw honey, ¼ cup balsamic vinegar, and ¼ cup brown sugar. Bring this to a boil to dissolve everything and to thicken. Stir constantly, or things will burn, and you will need to start over. When this reaches and maintains a vigorous boil for 90 seconds, take it off the heat.

When the ham reaches 135 degrees Fahrenheit, take it out of the cooking vessel and reserve it somewhere else, discard the other solids, and strain out the liquid through a fine-mesh strainer. Return the ham to the pot. Find the fat cap. With a sharp knife, make several long diagonal cuts across the fat cap (just the fat cap—you’re not trying to slice the ham yet). Turn the shoulder 90 degrees and repeat, forming a grid. This will ensure the fat cap renders, making the pork shoulder perfectly moist even when fully cooked. This also has the effect of doubling or perhaps even tripling the surface area of the top of the ham, giving more space for the Maillard reaction to occur and enhance more flavor, since that increased surface area allows the glaze to coat a larger surface and the Maillard caramelization reaction will occur on the sugars in the glaze. When the shoulder returns to the pot now reading 135 degrees internally and scored, it should be placed fat-cap-up. Once the fat cap has been scored, spread the glaze all over the ham so that the whole surface is covered. Do this all at once, covering the surface in a single, thick layer of glaze.

Many recipes you will find online will tell you to use a slightly different method for glazing the ham, but I see a serious problem with this alternative method. The common way this seems to be done online is to build up the glaze on the surface of the ham over a series of 3 or 4 applications 10 minutes apart. Proponents of this glazing method will rightly point out that layering the glaze like that gives a shiny, lacquered finish that looks good. While that may be true, proponents of that method fail to consider two crucial point: First, that my method would make the ham look just as good, if not better. And second, and certainly more importantly, that my method doesn’t incur substantial heat loss/fluctuations from the nearly constant opening and closing of the oven door. The lacquering method, then, can’t be said to be any better than mine, on account of the fact that the fluctuations in the temperature cause a negative effect that cancels out or even perhaps outweighs the positive effects due to the layering of the glaze.

Bake the ham for 35 minutes undisturbed at 400 Fahrenheit, or until the glaze is set and the pork registers 165 Fahrenheit internally, and then allow it to rest at least 20 minutes before carving and serving it. For best presentation, take the pork shoulder to the table uncarved and carve it table-side. Serve sliced thick with side dishes, or sliced thin in a sandwich or other application.

Lenten Recipes: Week 5: Simple Caprese Salad

1. Wash, core, and slice 4-5 large vine-ripened tomatoes.

2. Slice 6-8 ounces of (buffalo-milk) mozzarella cheese.

3. On the intended serving platter, build alternating overlapping layers of cheese and tomato

4. Season with salt and freshly cracked black pepper

5. Drizzle with olive oil, and optionally (lightly) with balsamic vinegar, preferably aged in oak

6. Scatter whole leaves of Italian basil throughout the salad

7. Serve

(Credit to the Wikimedia Commons)