It's officially mampara week, meaning everyone (including yours truly) is scouring pantries and refrigerator drawers for two ingredients to rub together. Fortunately, this spaghetti carbonara recipe only requires five staple ingredients and the boundless wonders of gastronomic science to create a delicious and filling month-end meal.
Once you've had spaghetti carbonara, it's difficult to believe that this sumptuously silky sauce is not made with any cream. Instead, the buttery texture comes from emulsifying fat-rich egg yolks with water and seasoning the whole lot with bacon fat and parmesan.
What you'll need from your pantry for this spaghetti carbonara recipe:
Long pasta of your choice
Good-quality, thick-cut bacon or pancetta (I used chorizo because we had some languishing in the fridge)
Two cloves of garlic
Two room-temperature eggs
Loads of parmesan (the proper stuff is always better than the anonymous "hard cheese" sold everywhere but, as it's month-end, we can lower our standards)
Can we all take a moment to admire this cross-section of spicy fennel chorizo from local cured meat specialist Richard Bosman? If you're in Cape Town, I highly recommend picking something up from his stall at the Oranjezicht City Farm Market on the weekend.
Carbonara is not typically made with chorizo, but we're making do with what we have this week.
How to make spaghetti carbonara from scratch
NB: If you are trying this technique out for the first time or you're a bit nervy in the kitchen, do everything one step at a time. Multi-tasking is overrated anyway.
Step 1: Prep your kak
Get your meez on. Put a pot of generously salted water on the boil and chuck in your pasta. Cube your bacon into lardons. Grate about a cup of parmesan. Roughly chop or grate your garlic cloves with a microplane. Crack two eggs into a bowl. Set everything aside.
Being prepared always helps, but it's critical for this recipe — you'll have to move fast to emulsify your sauce later on.
Step 2: Fry the bacon
Is your pasta cooking? Grand. In another pot or pan, begin to cook the bacon on medium heat until the fat is rendered out of it and the lardons are brown and crispy. Remove the cooked bacon, set aside, and turn the heat down as low as it can go.
Step 3: Prepare the egg mixture
If you haven't already, crack your eggs into a bowl and whisk. Add in at least half of the grated parmesan and set aside.
Step 4: Prepare the saucepan
Hopefully your pasta is done cooking, so drain that bad boy and reserve the pasta water, please.
In the same pot or pan that you cooked the bacon in (the one that should be simmering on very low heat), toss in your garlic and stir until fragrant. Toss the cooked bacon and pasta back in to prevent the garlic from burning and leave the pot on very low heat.
If the pan is too hot when the sauce hits it, you'll risk making scrambled egg out of your carbonara.
Step 5 (the big one): Emulsify your sauce
Pour about 50ml of warm pasta water into your egg and parmesan mixture, whisking continuously with a fork. This will temper the mixture and warm it slightly, lessening the chance of it curdling and turning to scrambled egg once you mix it in with the hot pasta and bacon.
Next, armed with tongs, pour the tempered egg and parm mixture into the cooked pasta and bacon and stir vigorously all the while.
If the sauce is feeling thick and sticky, add more pasta water. If it's a bit water, add more grated parmesan. Once the sauce has reached a thickened and glossy texture, take the carbonara off the heat immediately.
Step 6: Serve
This rich dish is best served with a crack of black pepper and nothing else. The salted pasta water, bacon lardons, and parmesan should season the dish adequately without additional salt.
Look at how thick and buttery that sauce is. Isn't emulsification astounding?
Yours in wonder of the science of cooking,
The Life & Style team
Commentaires