Creamy Pasta alla Carbonara

Pasta alla Carbonara is a very well known dish from Rome’s culinary tradition. Despite its very simple ingredients, this dish is an absolute delicacy. Made with with only a few ingredients, it perfectly embodies the essence of Italian cooking – it’s simple, genuine, and incredibly flavorful.

We’re not yet fully certain of when exactly this dish came to be or was first “created”. The most acclaimed theory at the moment is that, while inspired by other dishes, we believe it was created in the years after 1944 thanks to the military rations brought by allied forces in Italy, which contained bacon and eggs.

Let’s go and make ourselves a creamy and flavourful Pasta alla Carbonara now, shall we?

Recipe for Pasta alla Carbonara

Ingredients-wise, we’ll only need pasta (preferrably spaghetti), Guanciale, Pecorino Romano (cheese), eggs and pepper!

Guanciale, eggs, black pepper, Pecorino Romano and spaghetti on a cutting board.

Preparing guanciale and eggs

To start, if your guanciale still has the hard skin on the side (in Italian, the “cotenna”), you can remove it. Dice what remains and put it on a pan, on medium fire. This doesn’t require any oil, the fats contained guanciale will do the job! What we want to do is to let it sizzle slowly, until it becomes just slightly crunchy but not burned.
It’s also a good time to put a pot with water on the stove. We can let it warm it up while we prepare the rest!

Guanciale on a pan, cooking on medium fire.

Egg yolks, Pecorino Romano and black pepper, mixed in a bowl.

Crack the eggs open and separate the egg whites from the yolks. In a bowl, put the egg yolks, some pepper and the Pecorino cheese and mix it well! Egg yolks are the most nutrient-rich part of the egg, and they’ll give a great taste and a creamy and silky consistency to our Pasta alla Cabronara. You’re free to also add in a little bit of the egg white if you wish, although it’s best to keep it so that the majority of the sauce is made of egg yolk! Otherwise, just save them for later, there are plenty of other dishes and desserts you can use them for!

Final steps

When the water is boiling, salt it and put the pasta in. Stir often to prevent it from sticking and let it boil until ready. This will take anywhere around 9-12 minutes depending on the kind and brand of pasta you are using, so refer to the package for the correct boiling time.

Once ready, drain most of the water out, but do keep just a tiny bit of the cooking water in the pot. You don’t need a lot: in quantity, it should be very little compared to the volume of the sauce; this is going to help keeping the sauce creamy and prevent it from turning into an omelette. With very low fire or even no fire at all (just using the heat of the pot and pasta), add in the guanciale and then the egg-pecorino-pepper sauce. Mix well and then quickly take the pot away from the stove, before the egg cooks too much.

We’re done now! Serve it topped with Pecorino Romano and a little bit of black pepper (optional, according to taste)!

Good to know!

Why did my sauce turn into an omelette? This is a common issue. It can happen if there it too much heat when you add the sauce at the end, or if the sauce contains too much egg white.

Why isn’t my sauce red enough? If you didn’t add too much egg white then it might be normal. Not all eggs are equal, and the colour is also affected by the amount of cheese you put in the sauce! It will taste delicious either way though 🔥

Check this out!

Want to learn more about pasta or try out other recipes? Look no further!:

Who really invented pasta?

Have you ever talked with someone or made assumptions about who invented pasta? I’m sure you have heard of the story that pasta was invented in China and that the Italians learned it from there. According to the story, it was Marco Polo who, in his travels to Asia along the Silk Road, imported pasta…