Well.
A Carbonara should have no more than 4 main ingredients. These are pasta, egg, cheese and bacon. Mushroom? No. Onion? No. Cream? Absolutely not. I prefer, actually fuck it, this thread is about niche preferences, require, the following varieties of each:
Pasta: as above, only Rummo will do. Most recipes specify something from the strand family, usually a tagliatelle or a linguine, but I find rigatoni to be the winner here. It picks up the sauce without getting saturated in it the way a conchiglie or farfalle tends to.
Eggs: 6 free range medium eggs, the deeper orange the yolks the better. I use only the yolks from 5 and the entire egg from the 6th so they don’t end up being a gloopy mess.
Cheese: Pecorino Romana. Harder to find than your average parmesan but worth it. I also grate it with a Microplane grater I bought for this very purpose.
Bacon: you know what? Supermarket lardons are fine. I’ve tried it with guanciale but find it too fatty and difficult to cut. Some perverts use sausage but the less said about them the better.
Cook your pasta to al dente with a lot of salted water and save a bit at the end. Grate around 30g of cheese per person. Fry the bacon until it’s crispy, on a griddle pan if you have one. Drain most of the fat from the pan and add the pasta when it’s cooked, then immediately add the egg and around a quarter of the cheese. Stir it until the cheese has melted then repeat twice more. Garnish with the rest of the cheese and some fresh black pepper (some people use three different sorts of peppercorn here but that’s above my faff threshold) and baby, that’s some good nara.
I don’t care if this isn’t the way actual Italians make it or that this is the longest DiS post I have ever made. Good Carbonara is worth it.
