Perfect Italian: Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

Perfect Italian: Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

On any given day I love a big bowl of pasta. It’s warm, buttery, salty and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like pasta. So when I saw this recipe for pasta in a cream sauce with bacon and then topped with parmesan cheese, it practically screamed to be made. But poor directions or “methods” as the book so lovingly refers to it led to a not so tasty result.

Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

1 lb. dried spaghetti

1 tbsp. olive oil

8 oz. rindless pancetta or lean bacon. Chopped

4 eggs

5 tbsp. light cream

4 tbsp. freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper

Bring a large pan of salted water to a boil. Add spaghetti and cook for 8-10 minutes or until al dente. In the mean time, heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Add the chopped pancetta and cook over medium heat, stirring often, for 8-10 minutes. Beat the eggs with the cream in a small bowl and season to taste with salt and pepper. Drain the pasta and then return to pan, add bacon and then add the egg mixture and half the parmesan cheese. Stir well, and then transfer to a warmed serving dish. Sprinkle with remaining parmesan cheese.

I don’t typically carry cream on a regular basis in my house. It’s a treat so when I do I make every recipe I know that contains this ingredient so I don’t waste any. I definitely had a lot to work with after buying the smallest container I could find and I was surprised that this recipe only called for five tablespoons. The ratio of cream to eggs was completely off. To only have five tablespoons of cream to four eggs became an overwhelming amount of egg and I have never seen a carbonara sauce with the ratio so in favor of egg.

So here are the difficulties I encountered. The ingredients list calls for the bacon and the pasta to be by weight. Not everyone has a food scale to be able to work with this so it would’ve helped to have back up measurements. For most people spaghetti comes in 1 lb. boxes so it shouldn’t be too difficult there. But finding pancetta was not possible at any of my local grocery stores and bacon had to do. It would’ve been nice to have an estimated number of slices for the bacon. I ended up using about 8 thick cut slices of bacon which leads me to my next difficulty. Chopping bacon is not easy. Either chop it frozen or crumble it after cooking, but attempting to chop fresh bacon was a chore.

As I’m cooking and following directions I encounter where the recipe calls for me to season the sauce, before cooking it, with salt and pepper to taste. I put it a good amount of salt and pepper but I was not about to dip my finger in a bowl of cold cream and raw eggs to see if it was salty enough. I ended up adding more after cooking and serving, which was more than fine. My other problem was that the recipe wants me to drain the pasta and then return it to the same pot and pour the sauce in. They make it convenient that the pasta and bacon are done at the same time so the time transition was smooth but now they’re asking me to pour the sauce, dominated by raw eggs, into a hot pot with pasta and to simply “stir well”. In my mind I’m thinking, this is wrong, there isn’t enough cream and the eggs will scramble under that much heat so quickly, but I followed directions and did it anyway. Guess what? The eggs scrambled. I kept that mixture moving to try to keep the eggs from scrambling but the heat was too much.

I was left rather disappointed with my not so pretty result but I do have to say, even with the strange texture from the scrambled eggs, it was still really tasty. I would recommend heating the sauce separately and slowly before adding it to a hot pot of pasta. I would also recommend a different cream to egg ratio. This was my first time experiencing carbonara (I’ve always been more of an alfredo girl), but I think next time I’ll go for a different recipe.