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)
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