Cooking Tips

[One Day Soon]

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Carbonara

First up, and this can't be stated strongly enough, CARBONARA DOESN'T HAVE CREAM IN IT. If your recipe has cream, it isn't carbonara.

Right, now that's out the way ...

Cook some spaghetti as normal.
Fry some pancetta (or other tasty bacon) bits until crisp in a glug or 2 of olive oil in a large frying pan.
Beat an egg per person in a large bowl, add an extra yolk if you're feeling decadent.
Add about an ounce of grated pecorino per person (parmesan works too, but I think pecorino's better) stirred into the egg mixture and some black pepper.
Drain the spaghetti, put it in with the bacon and stir it about to pick up the oil and delicious bacony-ness.

Here comes the tip - now take the spaghetti/pancetta and put it in the large bowl of egg/cheese and give it a good stir round. The egg hardly needs any cooking, so doing it this way round means you don't run any risk of ending up with some sort of split/scrambled disaster.

Serve, wee bit more grated cheese on top, job done.

A wee amendment:

Always use pancetta. Separate as much of the white fat from the meat of the pancetta as you can be bothered doing. Fry the pancetta fat in the olive oil until crisp and golden. Then discard the fried rinds but retain the now flavoured oil. Then colour the pancetta meat briefly in the flavoured oil. Then proceed as per rest of recipe.