Lisa's Dinnertime Dish: Pasta Carbonara: Simple and Delicious!

     Lisa's Dinnertime Dish has moved. Please visit me at my new and improved blog site! The new address is http://lisasdinnertimedish.com. I look forward to seeing you at the new site!!

This past week I found Silvia's Cucina while I was online exploring other blogs. The first recipe that I saw on her blog was for carbonara and it just jumped right off the page at me! I LOVE spaghetti carbonara and her recipe looked SO delicious. I was also amazed at how few ingredients went into it, pancetta, eggs, cheese, pasta, salt and pepper.  This is the way they make it in Italy, she explains, not with garlic or cream or even parsley. I have made carbonara before, but it has always had some of these extra ingredients in it and it has never turned out as creamy and good as hers looked. I decided I had to try this recipe to see if my result would look anything like Silvia's.

     Saturday night was the perfect night to give this a try. Nicole and her boyfriend, Nate were over, which made five home for dinner. I thought hanging out together and making a delicious pasta dinner would be a fun way to spend the evening. So I went to work on the carbonara, Nicole made some delicious garlic bread and Steve put together a salad. What a team! Well, I have to say, the pasta turned out SO good!! It was creamy and extremely flavorful, it does not need another single ingedient in it.

     I made the recipe exactly as Silvia wrote it, with two exceptions. I used fusilli pasta instead of rigatoni, the store I went to was out of rigatoni (crazy, I know!). And I used Parmigiano Reggiano instead of Pecorino cheese because that is what I had on hand.   Also, her measurements were in grams and so I converted them to ounces.

Carbonara

From Silvia's Cucina

1 lb rigatoni, cooked according to package instructions
5 ounces pancetta, diced
4 eggs
7 ounces grated pecorino
salt and lots of pepper

Heat a small amount of olive oil in a pan over medium-low to medium heat. Add the pancetta and cook until crispy and bright pink in color.

While pancetta cooks, prepare the egg mixture. Crack eggs into a bowl and whisk.

Add some salt and LOTS of pepper and whisk in.

Now add the cheese and whisk in until well combined.

Once the pancetta is cooked, add the pasta and toss together, allowing the flavors to combine.

Remove pan from the heat. Add egg mixture and mix through very quickly so that the eggs don't over-cook (you don't want scrambled eggs). If it looks dry, add a little bit of the pasta water. The residual heat of the pan, the pasta and the pasta water will cook the eggs, but will allow them to stay creamy.