Chat GPT's Roast Chicken

Ingredients:
1 (4-5 pound) whole chicken
1 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp dried thyme
1 lemon, quartered
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 sprigs of fresh rosemary
2 sprigs of fresh thyme
2 tbsp olive oil

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 425°F (218°C). This high temperature will help to cook the chicken evenly and create a crispy skin. (Andre's commentary: ChatGPT nails the fact that preheating is necessary, but honestly, I'd go even higher-- 500, if your oven can get there, or whatever your highest temperature is, if not 500 F/260 C) 

Rinse the chicken inside and out and pat it dry with paper towels. Rinsing the chicken removes any bacteria, and patting it dry ensures that the seasonings and butter will stick to the skin. (DO NOT DO THIS!! Doing this has the opposite effect ChatGPT thinks it has, and will only contaminate more surfaces in your kitchen. This is a food-safety nightmare. Pat your chicken dry to remove surface moisture, yes! This step is critical to ensuring better browning and seasoning adhesion, as GPT says. But DO NOT WASH YOUR CHICKEN-- disregard that step, as a matter of food safety)

In a small bowl, mix the butter, salt, pepper, and dried thyme. This mixture will add flavor to the chicken. (Good ideas!)


Rub the mixture all over the chicken, including under the skin. Rubbing the mixture under the skin allows the flavors to penetrate the meat. (Great idea! Adding fat through that compound butter will create a really tender final product)


Stuff the lemon, onion, garlic, rosemary, and thyme inside the cavity of the chicken. This will add additional flavor to the chicken as it roasts. (Wow, it's almost like ChatGPT knows my personal recipe and copied it 😅) 


Place the chicken in a roasting pan, breast side up. Cooking the chicken breast side up helps to keep it moist and tender. (Roast it breast-side-up, yes, but be careful to avoid the opposite of what GPT said about moisture and tenderness coming true. Start the chicken in a really hot oven for about 20 minutes, and then drop the temperature to 350F/175C until the thickest part of the thigh reaches 165F/75C. Keeping the temperature high the whole time drastically increases the chances that the breast will overcook)


Brush the chicken with olive oil. This will help to prevent the skin from drying out and give it a golden color. (Totally agree that this step needs to be done, yes, but not now. If you're doing this now, you're too late. This step should've been done before the chicken went in the oven, not once it's been roasting for several minutes. Keep your oven door closed while preheating, open it only to put the chicken in, and then keep the door closed again until it's time to take the chicken out.)


Roast for 1 hour, or until the internal temperature reaches 165°F (74°C) in the thickest part of the thigh. Cooking the chicken until it reaches this temperature ensures that it is fully cooked and safe to eat.


Let the chicken rest for 10-15 minutes before carving and serving. This allows the juices to redistribute, making the meat more moist and tender when carved.

Chat GPT's Spaghetti Bolognese

Spaghetti Bolognese is a classic Italian dish made with a meat-based sauce and served over spaghetti noodles. Here's a recipe along with an explanation of why each step is important:

Ingredients:
-1 lb. ground beef
-1 onion, finely chopped   
-2 garlic cloves, minced
-1 can of diced tomatoes
-1 cup of beef broth
-1 tbsp. tomato paste
-1 tsp. dried basil
-1 tsp. dried oregano
-1 tsp. salt
-1 tsp. black pepper
-1 lb. spaghetti
-2 tbsp. olive oil
-Parmesan cheese (optional)

Instructions:

Cook the spaghetti: Cook the spaghetti in a large pot of boiling, salted water until al dente. Why: The spaghetti is the base of the dish and must be cooked first to ensure that it's ready when the sauce is ready.


(Andre's commentary: It's true that we want he sauce to finish in time with the pasta-- or even for the sauce to be ready before the pasta-- but timing it like this seems like not nearly enough time. In my home kitchen with a relatively high-powered stove, I can boil a gallon of water and cook my pasta in about 30 minutes. That's not enough time for bolognese. Let's  see if GPT catches that mistake)


Heat the olive oil: In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Why: The oil prevents the ingredients from sticking to the pan and helps to distribute heat evenly.

(Perfect explanation! The development of a fond from the soffrito-- onions, carrots, celery, garlic, etc.-- and the meat is crucial to a good Bolognese, and the oil helps create an even heat transfer mechanism to facilitate even cooking and browning. Good job, GPT!)


Sauté the onion: Add the chopped onion and minced garlic to the skillet and sauté until the onion is translucent. Why: The onion and garlic add flavor to the dish and cooking them until translucent helps to release their natural sweetness.

(The most traditional Italians would say that celery and carrots are missing from this vegetable base, but if you don't like or don't have celery and carrots available, just onions and garlic are perfectly fine. Props to GPT for telling you to sweat the onions, i.e., to cook off their moisture without adding color. After all, this is Bolognese, not French Onion soup.)


Cook the beef: Add the ground beef to the skillet and cook until browned, breaking it up with a wooden spoon. Why: The beef is the main source of protein and must be cooked thoroughly to ensure that it's safe to eat. Breaking it up into smaller pieces helps it cook more evenly.

(A few good points here: the beef goes in after the onions, garlic, etc., so that the alliums can serve as a flavor base. Textbook technique. Way to go! However, it's traditional in Italian cuisine to not just use pure beef-- but to mix equal parts of ground beef, pork, and veal. If you don't have, don't like, or cannot eat pork or veal, skip it, and just follow GPT's instructions to just use beef, or substitute with another ground protein like chicken or turkey. Again, props to GPT for pointing out that you need to break up the protein as it browns. If you miss this step, you'll end up with oddly-textured pseudo-meatballs-- not Bolognese, not spaghetti and meatballs.)

Add the tomato products: Stir in the diced tomatoes, beef broth, tomato paste, dried basil, dried oregano, salt, and pepper. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and let it simmer for 20 minutes. Why: The tomato products add flavor and texture to the sauce, and simmering the sauce for 20 minutes allows the flavors to meld and the sauce to thicken.

(Traditionally, I'm not quite sure why GPT wants to include both tomato paste and diced tomatoes. Just one is fine, and if I had to choose, I'd go with the paste. Just a few tablespoons are all you need for this much sauce. No more than half a tube. GPT is absolutely right that Bolognese is, at its heart, not a tomato sauce, but a meat/stock/wine sauce with a little tomato in it. Most consumers-- and GPT-- probably don't know the difference between stock and broth, so I'll let that slide; either is fine. Beef stock is the most traditional, but you can use chicken, turkey, or vegetable if you don't have beef. But this also brings us to the biggest problem I pointed out earlier with GPT's recipe: it only asks that you simmer the sauce for 20 minutes. That's at best 1/3 of how much time a Bolognese should simmer, if not 1/12 of the time. 20 minutes is nowhere near enough, and 1 hour is a much more realistic minimum. If you have time, 2-4 hours is best. But be sure to add water as the sauce reduces over that time to prevent anything from burning. )

Serve: Serve the sauce over the cooked spaghetti, and top with grated Parmesan cheese (optional). Why: The sauce is the centerpiece of the dish and must be served over the spaghetti to create the classic spaghetti Bolognese experience. The Parmesan cheese adds a salty, nutty flavor that complements the sauce.

(GPT made a slight mistake here: just putting the sauce over the pasta isn't quite enough. We need to undergo the process of mixing/tossing, called "mantecatura" in Italian, from the word for "buttering up" to evenly coat each strand of pasta in the sauce. You can be chef-y, and toss with just the leverage of the pan, but if that is too difficult, spoons or tongs work just as well. On the other hand, I definitely want to give credit to GPT for having picked parmigiano reggiano-- the right kind of cheese to top this dish, since authentic reggiano is and can be made in Bologna.)

A new experiment: ChatGPT writes some recipes

Recently, my family and I watched a news story on ChatGPT, and I've been testing it out to do lots of things: check its factual accuracy on historical dates related to previous and current Popes, see what it knows about Beethoven and his works, sketch out the code for an app I thought I might develop (before realizing the market for that software was already saturated), and develop some recipes. The next few posts will be recipes that ChatGPT generated at my prompting with my commentary (in bold, italicized, and underlined) after each step.

I really don't know what to expect from this, but I imagine that, even if ChatGPT misses the mark as we start the series, as the folks at OpenAI continue to train the bot, it'll get better. 

I cannot recommend only following ChatGPT's instructions at this point because I do not know how accurate they will be. Whatever the bot tells you to do, do it only after having read my addenda/commentary. 

Happy cooking, and good luck to ChatGPT on this test of its culinary skills!

Pasta al Limone

 This week’s recipe is from Sicily, not Rome, and yet you’ll see so many similarities to the process I laid out in our Roman Pastas series. Sicilians are famous all over the Mediterranean for their citrus crops, especially their lemons. Accordingly, pasta al limone has been an instant hit from the moment of its inception.

I mentioned several times throughout the previous series that a keystone of Roman cooking was to source only the best ingredients and to use them well and simply to create something so much better than the sum of their parts. This is also completely applicable to the cuisine of an island a few hundred miles to the south, in Sicily. It is important to remember that by no means is Italian cuisine monolithic, but that nevertheless, the same basic fundamentals apply to food from any region.

This pasta recipe is one of the fastest I’ve ever put up here on the website. It comes together in the amount of time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta, very similarly to cacio e pepe.

In fact, think of this as a derivative or descendant of cacio e pepe. Recall that for basic cacio e pepe, a pasta is boiled, a paste of pasta water, pepper and pecorino is made, and then the two are combined until emulsified with extra reserved pasta  water. We will follow the same basic steps, and our only modification to this process will come in how we deal with the stars of the show here, the lemons.

Before we get to the specifics on this simple recipe anyone can make—even on the tightest of budgets—let’s talk citrus. As a note to any Brazilian or otherwise Lusophone readers: My family originally comes from Brazil, and so I know that in Portuguese, there aren’t distinct words for “lime” and “lemon” as there are in English. In Portuguese, we differentiate yellow from green by the location which we add to the generic word that means both “lime and lemon.” If a fruit is a “Sicilian lemon,” then it’s a “lemon” in English; if it’s a “Tahiti lemon,” then it’s a “lime.” For any readers from the Lusophone world, this recipe is meant to be made with the former, not the latter. And for those of us in the US or elsewhere where a distinction exists between generic “lemons” and “Meyer lemons,” this recipe is meant to be made with the former; Meyer lemons are sweeter than regular lemons, possibly as a result of crossing regular lemons with oranges or clementines to create the Meyers. That extra sweetness in the Meyers won’t work with this dish, so make sure to get the best regular lemons you can find.

The lemon will be the star of this recipe, so don’t be shy with it. Wash, zest, and juice 2 whole large lemons. Be careful to only scrape off the outermost yellow part. That yellow outer layer is almost entirely natural yellow pigments and scented oils which together make lemons very aromatic, all of which we want to make use of in our final dish. That layer, however, is very thin, and directly underneath it is the much thicker and far more acidic layer of white pith. Generally, don’t get any—or get as little as possible—of the pith when zesting citrus of any kind (oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, etc.). Either before zesting or between zesting and juicing, roll your washed lemons against your countertop or another flat surface. Doing so weakens or even pre-ruptures some cell walls inside the lemon, thereby making juicing easier later, and increasing yield at that point.

We will also make use of fresh mint to balance out the acidity in this dish. Fresh herbs like mint and basil bruise very easily when hacked at indiscriminately with a knife.

Place 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in a wide, shallow pan, and as the oil warms, place the zest into the oil together with a few leaves of mint taken directly from the plant, without any chopping or tearing. There are several compounds in both mint and lemon zest which are (only, or in some cases, more) soluble in oil versus water. When the oil becomes noticeably aromatic, turn off the heat and remove the mint leaves.  

Cook 1 pound of a long, dry pasta according to the manufacturer's instructions to al dente doneness. When 3 minutes remain, reserve 1 ½ cups of pasta water. Grate 1 cup of pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano and combine it with the juice and zest of the two lemons juiced and zested earlier. Take 2 tablespoons of that pasta cooking water and combine it with the cheese and lemon juice and zest so that a thick paste forms. Season this paste liberally with black pepper, just as one would make cacio e pepe.  

From here, the process is identical to cacio e pepe. Drain the pasta once it is al dente, and combine it with the aromatic oil, the cheese-zest paste, and thin and emulsify the sauce by gradually adding pasta cooking water and tossing. Garnish with black pepper, Parmigiano Reggiano, lemon zest, and fresh mint leaves.
   

Pasta al limone, as prepared by Vincenzo's Plate

(Photo Credits to Vincenzo and his team) 

Pasta alla Gricia: the Dark Horse of Traditional Roman Pastas

Of all the Roman sauces, alla Gricia is certainly the dark horse—so much so that, when I started learning Italian in early 2020, I mistook “alla Gricia” (the actual name of the pasta, which came from the name given to small-volume food sellers in Rome in the days of the Papal States, before Italy had even unified) for “alla Grecia” (which would’ve meant that this was “[pasta type] in the manner of the Greeks”). There is in fact nothing that is particularly “Greek” about this dish: no feta, no Kalamata olives, nothing else of the sort. I share this with all of you just to illustrate how obscure this dish actually is. But the truth is, it really should not be: many more people should know about, cook, and enjoy spaghetti alla gricia than currently do. And even though I recognize how small my audience is, I aim to do what I can through here, reaching all of you, to try to help put this wonderful sauce (back) on the map.

By now, you’ve probably seen how similar amatriciana, carbonara, and cacio e pepe are to each other. (If not, go back and revisit the other recipes.) The techniques used for those three are very similar, and the recipes only usually differ by an ingredient or two. Alla gricia is no exception.

A few words about ingredients: Alla gricia contains guanciale, a cured pork product from the jowl. (This can be rather hard to find, so in a pinch, if absolutely necessary, you can use pancetta, which is a cured pork product from the belly instead.) As with the other recipes in this series, the guanciale should be cut into small cubes. Unlike the other related recipes, for alla gricia, I will stipulate the use of a short pasta (rigatoni and penne rigate are the best), rather than a long one. This way, the guanciale will be able to enter into the tubular structure of each piece of pasta, providing an essential contrast in taste and texture.

Alla gricia comes together quickly, in the amount of time it takes to bring a gallon of water to a boil in a 6 quart pan, cook it to al dente per the package’s instructions, and drain it. Start getting everything ready for mise en place as soon as you put the water to boil.

As with the other recipes the call for guanciale, this one calls for smaller-than-bite-size cubes of guanciale. Cut the guanciale exactly as you would cut bacon to be made into lardons, if that were called for in a recipe—about that size, and for those reasons. Our objective is to have both meat and fat on each piece of guanciale. Place the guanciale in a skillet in a single layer (or work in batches if necessary). Do not add any extra fat to the pan. There is already plenty of fat in the guanciale, and there will be more added fat from the pecorino still to come.  Without any preheating, bring the pan and the guanciale to the stove, and turn on a burner to low heat. Let the guanciale render slowly. Turn it often to encourage even browning and rendering, and to prevent anything from sticking to the pan. 

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.

 When the water comes to a boil, place a pound of pasta into it, and cook per the manufacturer's instructions, just to al dente—never further. Grate 1 cup of pecorino romano. If you cannot find pecorino where you live, you can either use parmigiano regiano, or for an even better substitution, a local firm sheep’s milk cheese. However, do not buy or use industrially shredded or grated cheese of any kind: they often contain anticaking agents that, while they prevent the cheese from clumping (and from my experience, not as well as the manufacturers had hoped), those same anticaking agents also make it nearly impossible, if not entirely so, for the resulting sauce to become creamy and properly emulsified.

2 minutes before the pasta has finished cooking, reserve a cup and a half of pasta cooking water. Take 3 tablespoons of that pasta water to create a thick paste with the cheese and black pepper. Drain the pasta when it finishes cooking per the manufacturer's instructions to al dente, and then, away from the heat, combine the cheese-water paste and the guanciale with the pasta. With only the paste of water and cheese, this “proto-sauce” is too thick to be sauce by itself. Little by little, while mixing constantly and never returning anything to an open heat source, add more pasta water until a rich, creamy, emulsified sauce forms which is capable of not only coating the exterior of the pieces of pasta but also of going inside of them and transporting the guanciale into the center in the process. Once you have added enough pasta water to turn the paste into a creamy sauce, you are ready to serve. Garnish with extra pecorino, black pepper, and guanciale.  

Photo credits to America's Test Kitchen

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)