Spaghetti Carbonara - Simply Made Recipes (2024)

FAQs

How to make spaghetti carbonara step by step? ›

While a simple spaghetti carbonara recipe uses pancetta as the meat and a traditional Italian recipe may use guanciale, a cured pork, De Laurentiis combines bacon and pancetta to give her dish a unique salty kick. But she ups the ante even more with a secret ingredient — cinnamon.

The golden rule to silky carbonara is to whisk your egg whites so that they're completely incorporated with the egg yolks.

Carbonara is made with guanciale (cured pork), eggs, Pecorino Romano cheese, spaghetti pasta, and lots of black pepper. Italians don't add extra ingredients like cream, milk, garlic, or onions.

Whisk Like You Mean It

You're using more egg yolks than whites here, which is what makes carbonara so rich and luxurious. But there's still two eggs-worth of whites in there. Whisking your eggs so that the whites are completely incorporated into the yolks will give your sauce a more uniform texture.

Don't add cream or milk or butter. Don't substitute bacon for pancetta. Don't let the egg mixture ever sit still while it is in the pot with the pasta. Keep it moving until you transfer it to a plate.

Now quickly pour in the eggs and cheese. Using the tongs or a long fork, lift up the spaghetti so it mixes easily with the egg mixture, which thickens but doesn't scramble, and everything is coated. Add extra pasta cooking water to keep it saucy (several tablespoons should do it).

Must-have ingredients

that there are only five ingredients: pasta, pork cheek, eggs, cheese and pepper. That's it. A real carbonara does not contain onion, garlic, or cream.

I like to use a ratio of 1 whole egg to 3 egg yolks because it balances the richness. If you are looking to avoid using raw eggs, I would recommend making my Cacio e Pepe recipe – this is another one of the four classic Roman pastas but requires only three ingredients (cheese, pepper, and pasta).

How to stop eggs from scrambling in carbonara? ›

Using a large mixing bowl and setting it over the boiling pasta water to create a makeshift double boiler helps prevent you from accidentally scrambling the eggs.

What cheese should I use in carbonara? Pecorino Romano, a sharp sheep's milk cheese, can lean salty, especially when combined with cured pork in carbonara, but a 50:50 ratio of Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino Romano hit the ideal mark, balancing sharp, salty, and nutty flavors.

Carbonara (Italian: [karboˈnaːra]) is a pasta dish made with fatty cured pork, eggs, hard cheese, salt, and black pepper. It is typical of the Lazio region of Italy. The dish took its modern form and name in the middle of the 20th century.

Top tips for classic spaghetti Carbonara

While guanciale is preferred, we realize that it's not easily accessible so if you can't find it you can use pancetta, similar to how we did in our Bucatini Amatriciana recipe. The cheese. Since pasta Carbonara is a Roman pasta, the cheese that is used is Pecorino Romano.

Carbonara (Italian: [karboˈnaːra]) is a pasta dish made with fatty cured pork, eggs, hard cheese, salt, and black pepper. It is typical of the Lazio region of Italy. The dish took its modern form and name in the middle of the 20th century. The cheese is usually pecorino romano.