Spaghetti Carbonara

I had the day off earlier this week and decided to knock two recipes off the list at once, wanting to create two classic comfort food items - Spaghetti Carbonara and Elvis Presley's Pound Cake (post on the pound cake coming up in the next few days).

I've made Pasta Carbonara in the past using a few different recipes and I figured this wouldn't be much different than those experiences.  I unfortunately was mistaken.

The recipe calls for E.V.O.O., garlic cloves, pancetta, white wine, spaghetti, finely grated Parmesan, finely grated pecorino Roman, finely chopped parsley, eggs, salt and pepper.

I put the pasta pot onto boil first - and spoiler alert ...while I prepared the rest of the recipe, I cooked the pasta.  After heating the olive oil, I added the peeled and crushed garlic.  Funny thing about our garlic press, I always think remember seeing it in an exact spot in our kitchen utensil drawer but I can never, ever, seem to find it.  I have actually purchased multiple garlic presses, at different times, then found them intermittently while searching for something else, but can NEVER find one when I need one.  In this case I made due with our potato masher and a plate.

One of the issues I had with the recipe was that it called for me to add the crushed garlic to the oil, cook for a few minutes, then remove.  Removing any small items from hot oil is not a fun, or even safe, task, but removing crushed garlic seems to be near impossible.  In retrospect, it would have probably been just as effective to have sliced the cloves.  Regardless - it got done.

I added the pancetta and fried it until the edges browned...creating a delightful smell that drew my wife into the kitchen a few times.  Once browned I added the white wine and reduced it.  Once it had reduced by about half I pulled it off the burner.

While that bubbled away happily, I combined the cheeses, parsley and egg in a large plastic bowl to prep for the tempering process.  To the gentle readers not used to working with eggs in cooking (other than over easy and poached), they are part of some of the most phenomenally textured dishes when used correctly.  Sauces (Hollandaise for example), soups, ice cream and of course Spaghetti Carbonara owe their silky texture to eggs.  In order to achieve this state however, the egg must be slowly brought up in temperature so that they don't curdle.  It requires a certain amount of patience because if you try to push your temper you will end up with a bowl full of scrambled eggs.  In this recipe, you take a 1/4 cup of the boiling pasta water and slowly drizzle it into the cheese/parsley/egg mixture.  The heat from the water is then supposed to not only melt the cheese, but bring the egg temperature up and slowly thicken them.

While I didn't end up with very salty scrambled eggs, I did have some difficulty.  I believe that there were three things that contributed to the issue:

1. The temperature of the ingredients - This is usually a fairly quick recipe to turn around.  I had pulled the cheeses and eggs out of the refrigerator approximately 15 minutes prior to attempting to temper the eggs.  Obviously this was not long enough.

2.  The cheese I used - This one is my fault and a lesson that I should have learned when I made Kibbeh to kick off this project.  The recipe called for finely grated Parmesan and pecorino Romano cheeses.  The cheeses that I used were shredded and probably not of the highest quality.  Through my experiences in data management I should know - Garbage in, Garbage out.  If you use low quality ingredients, your final product will be low quality.

3.  Big plastic bowl - I'm not sure if this made a large difference in the process, but a warm bowl would have probably helped the mix keep its temperature better.

I slowly drizzled the 1/4 cup of pasta water into the bowl while whisking the mixture.  The ingredients began to break up a bit, but the cheese did not melt in any way.  I did a little temperature check and the mixture was stone cold.  I quickly went through my options for heating the eggs.  No amount of whisking would have brought the eggs up to a higher temp and throwing them into a saucepan and trying to bring them up to temp on a burner greatly increased the likelihood of scrambled eggs.  I could have simply added the hot pasta in hopes that by tossing the hot pasta in the mixture, the cheese would melt and the eggs would coagulate into the silky sauce, but, there would have been just as much of a chance that the noodles would have not brought the temp up enough and I would have the same issue, only with watery, eggy pasta.

Instead I popped the bowl in the microwave for 20 seconds at 50% speed.  When the time was up I removed it, gave it a good whisking, then popped it in the microwave again for another 20 seconds.  I did this about 6 times and ended up with a passable sauce that I then tossed the cooked spaghetti in.  I then added the pancetta mixture, tossed a bit more, then plated the meal, applying some sea salt and an ample dose of fresh black pepper.

 The pasta was not as bad as I thought it would be.  The texture wise it was comparable to my other Carbonara efforts.  The taste seemed a bit off however.  I'm not sure if it was the cheese or the parsley (2 tbsp seemed like a lot) but it seemed to have a very metallic taste.My wife didn't mind it as much, but only gave the recipe a 5 out of 10.  I will say that on day 2 (leftovers), the metallic taste abated a bit and the pasta was more enjoyable.

The experience of this recipe has let me know that I need to do more research prior to attempting the recipes and make sure I have all the correct equipment (or at least a passable substitute) and the exact ingredients in the recipe.  More on that in future posts.

After dinner I moved onto the next recipe, Elvis Presley's Pound Cake.  I'll save that post for another day, but foreshadow a bit by letting you know that as wrong as the egg portion of the Spaghetti Carbonara went, the egg portion of the pound cake went oh, oh so right.

3 down, 98 to go!