Alas, my taste memory of Carbonara is a superfatted concoction. Yes, one with copious amounts of thickening cream. Maybe halfway to a goopy cafeteria Alfredo. Perhaps studded also with invisible onions and peas. Needless to say, I havn't had any Carbonara in a while.
Thus, the far simpler recipe featured in this month's Saveur - spaghetti in an emulsion of egg yolk, parmesan, olive oil, cured pork and pepper - came as something of a surprise. My curiosity not entirely reconciled, I did some reconnaissance in my Italian cookery texts before diving in.
Nika Hazelton in The Regional Italian Kitchen, specifies butter, bacon, white wine and a small proportion of onion which sautés on the stove and then goes into a slow oven to warm. She uses only 3 whole eggs and 2/3 cup of cheese to 1.5-2 lbs of noodle, and tops the dish with some fresh ground pepper and parsley.
The Silver Spoon, Phaidon's weighty translation, starts with a mild garlic flavored butter and lots of diced pancetta. 12 oz. of spaghetti gets 2 whole eggs, a half cup of Parmesan and, gasp, a half cup of Romano.
The Rome-Lazio chapter of Italian Regional Cooking by Ada Boni, details a recipe for Carbonara using 1 1/4 lbs. rigatoni, lard or oil, garlic (also discarded), 5 oz. streaky bacon, 5 whole eggs, and both Parmesan and Pecorino.
Onward...
I was immediately stymied by a lack guanciale, so I resorted to the magazine's suggestion of substituting the pork jowl with 3 parts thinly sliced pancetta (why doesn't anyone ever sell this in hunks?!) and 1 part Boar's Head bacon. All four of my sources advised "cooking" the sauce off the stove with hot noodle heat, but I followed the instructions from Saveur to fry copious amounts of coarse ground pepper in the olive oil rather than simply seasoning at the end. I also added a small ladleful of pasta water to wet the dish when tossing (Lidia Bastianich was the first to show me this actually). The result was a super silky dressing with peppery bite (could've used more. 2 tsp is a lot of grinding though.) However, the parmesan (an admittedly not so good specimen) sort of evaporated into the background more than I would like. I imagine that real guanciale, more tender and assertively flavored, with some top shelf parmesan would definitely put this dish over the top. The peas though, I just had to put them in. Carbonara wouldn't be the same without them.
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