Rachel - a food blogger based in Rome - wrote in this funny post about the carbonara-phobia that only recently she managed to overcome. The trauma (Post Bad Carbonara Stress Disorder, in her words) had been caused by weird versions of the recipe that she tasted over the years in various restaurants outside of Italy. She mentions overcooked spaghetti, cream, bad bechamel sauce, mushrooms, scrambled eggs and on one especially unfortunate occasion, sausage.
Traditional carbonara is a very simple dish. It's made with 3 (three) things:
cheese
eggs
pork fat, like guanciale or pancetta
and nothing else - well, salt and pepper. And you need spaghetti, too. But no cream, no onions, no mushrooms.
This simplicity is also what makes the sauce deceptively difficult to prepare, because of course carbonara needs to be creamy, and the key to get it creamy using only these ingredients is to bring the temperature of the beaten eggs somewhere around 65º. Not enough heat will produce a very liquid sauce and cold spaghetti (bleah), while too much heat will produce scrambled eggs - this by the way is by far the most common mistake of a carbonara beginner, that often pours the eggs directly in the pan with the sizzling fat.
Now, let's ask a couple of legitimate questions. Is this worth the hassle? Why use only these three ingredients and noticeably raise the difficulty level when we can just throw in some cream and basically be 100% sure that the final result won't resemble a badly shaped omelette?
Answers: yes, it's worth the hassle, the semi-cooked-eggy personality of a traditional carbonara is unique in terms of texture and taste. If you add cream you get something that looks similar but that is actually different, just like Chicago pizza is different from traditional pizza napoletana. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly fine to add cream, lots of people do it; it just won't be carbonara, it will be something else. Plus keep into account that the above mentioned semi-cooked-eggy personality is rather addictive, it's likely that once you get used to it you won't be able to add cream to your sauce anymore. And finally the preparation of traditional carbonara has an elegance of its own: getting your timing right, the simplicity of the moves... this kind of things.
Rachel's post is comprehensive, informative and clear, I would almost be tempted to link it and lazily skip the actual recipe part. But then again, like she herself points out, there are many carbonara variants and I think mine (the Italian-living-in-Madrid-with-no-easy-access-to-guanciale version) is worth putting on paper. Another very interesting one is Dario Bressanini's yolk-only type; see below for some more detailed comparisons.
A word on pasta
I use only long varieties: spaghetti, spaghettini, linguine, bucatini, et cetera. Some people use short pasta too (Rachel goes for rigatoni), but personally I like it less, I think the whole dish doesn't come together as it should. I admit this is highly subjective, though:).
Here in Madrid it's easy to find Italian brands such as Barilla, Agnesi or De Cecco, all good options. Thanks to Chiara I also found out not long ago that some Hipercor pasta (Hipercor is the house brand of El Corte Inglés supermarkets, in case you don't know) is actually produced by pastificio Garofalo, one of the best pasta makers around. So now I always buy that, it's excellent and cheap. Just check the look of the product name: if it's sort of fake handwriting, like this
it's made by Garofalo. There should also be a small Garofalo logo somewhere on the package.
A word on pork
Traditionally carbonara is made with guanciale, which is pig's cheek cured and peppered (I love the stuff:)). A common alternative would be pancetta (bacon); the most obvious difference between the two is that guanciale has more fat, i.e. the white part of the meat is largely predominant over the pink part.
You can use a number of Spanish products as replacements: panceta fresca, panceta curada or tocino if it has at least some pink part in it and it's not 100% fat. I would not use smoked products, they usually don't release enough juices when frying. Whatever you use, it should look something like this piece of guanciale:
A word on cheese
Tradition dictates pecorino romano, but parmesan is often used as a replacement; sometimes you have a mix of the two. Here in Madrid I would go for a 100% parmesan, as it's not hard to find, or maybe a very strong queso de oveja curado (seasoned sheepmilk cheese).
Ingredients for 2:
200g pasta
2 eggs
80g tocino/panceta/guanciale...
40 g grated parmesan
pinch of salt
pepper
a glug of extra virgin olive oil
Heat a large pan of salted water until it boils. In the meantime put the parmesan, two eggs and pinch of salt in a small bowl, then whisk them together with a fork. Cut the pork fat in small strips or cubes, then put it in a large anti-stick pan, with a bit of extra virgin olive oil.
When the water boils, throw the pasta in and at the same time start cooking the fat in the anti-stick pan, on medium heat - Rachel says it perfectly, it should be fried until translucent and crisp at the edges. If it reaches this state when the pasta is far from ready, just lower to a minimum the heat under the fat.
Around two minutes before the pasta reaches the cooking time written on the package, turn off completely the heat under the pork fat. After another minute, grab some tongs and quickly transfer the pasta (which should be almost ready) in the pan of the pork fat. In the process you will also transfer quite some salted water; this is ok, it will make the sauce creamy and tasty.
If the pork fat reacts to the pasta with a lot of sizzling, it means the pan is very hot, so wait another 30 seconds; if there is some sizzling but not too much, this is the moment: pour the mix of eggs and cheese on the pasta, then toss/stir until the sauce is evenly distributed (and hopefully, not too liquid nor too solid).
Transfer the pasta to the individual plates, top with a generous amount of pepper and grated parmesan cheese, then serve.
Variants
Rachel and Dario describe different ways of dealing with the crucial add-the-eggs moment: Rachel tosses the pasta in the pan with the pork fat, then removes it from heat and add the egg mix still in the pan; Dario has a less risky approach, as he tosses the pasta, move it to a bowl and only then adds the yolks. This way he is sure that the eggy substance won't get in contact with any very hot surface - then again, he is only adding yolks; if he added whole eggs the temperature of the whole thing might drop too much, resulting in a very liquid sauce. Since I use whole eggs, I usually prefer Rachel's approach.
A sauce made only with yolks is definitely more powerful and filling, and is usually "cut" with some of the boiling water used to cook pasta - that's what Dario does. Rachel uses whole eggs, but add a couple of extra yolks at the end, and insists a lot on the importance of adding not less than a full cup of water (for 4 people). I am sort of in the middle: I use whole eggs, I don't add extra yolks, as I find the sauce tasty and thick enough, especially if I am using deeply flavored fat; and some water gets added to the sauce when I transfer the pasta using tongs.
The bottom line is, you should try and experiment, see what you like. Just remember that the key moment (the part that can go wrong) in all carbonara recipes is always the "baking" of the eggs.
