I failed at cacio e pepe for a while before I finally figured out this method. the result is no stringy cheese, super creamy rich sauce, and the pasta is hot (a common problem with other methods).
Ingredients for ONE serving:
– 100g pasta (spaghetti or rigatoni) la Molisana is recommended unless you want to buy artisan pasta.
– 40g pecorino romano make sure it is the real thing
– pepper (FRESHLY GRATED and not at the finest setting). How much? I don’t know. It should be peppery but not spicy
– olive oil 2-3 tablespoons
– butter a teaspoon or so. More butter makes the sauce less prone to splitting or making strings but too much will change the flavor in the wrong way.
– pasta water. Add it in small amounts. You don’t want soup, but it should be sloppy.
This video is for Papa.
we’re making kachu Pepe today
so very simple Pino
orano uh butter olive oil pepper and
spaghetti
which we’ll get into the details later
also and salt uh it depends on what part
of the peino you use but the Rind closer
to the Rind is saltier so if you’re
grading towards the end then you may use
less salt if you’re grading toward WS
the front then you’ll probably have to
use more salt um of course uh we’re
going to always salt the past water
that’s just what you do so we’ll start
with
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that there’s probably some specific
amount of salt you’re supposed to put in
there but I don’t know I just make it
salty
so should put in oh yeah so basically
all we need to do
is um we need to grate the cheese and
that’s basically the only manual labor
we have to do everything else is just um
letting it kind of sit and do its thing
so uh yeah you can gra the cheese
and I will start the
water
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boiling you can use any grer but the
finer the end result is better because
it’s going to melt more evenly basically
smell that I
did you don’t even have to get close
yeah it smells very sheep sheepy yeah
isn’t that weird how it like kind of
smells like sheep yeah like like milk
doesn’t smell like cows
but which is a good
thing I’ll get you a bowl maybe
something
like this
uh as for cheese
portions
it’s kind of up to how cheesy you want
it um I think I like right around 40 G
per
portion but I’ll look when it’s done and
make sure that that’s what I actually
like okay um so that’s zero toight just
great in there worry about the scill
okay okay 144 G it turns off but yeah uh
great the the other sidez that’s the
Rind it will be quite a amount of cheese
cuz it gets real fluffy in
there in the
meantime uh just olive oil in the pan
and it’s quite a bit
maybe six
tablespoons for three
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portions right wrong way there we go
like
it’s yeah maybe six tablespoons is a lot
5
tablespoons wow I can really smell that
cheese now
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you want to see how much we have yep
please okay that’s 20 g wow okay nice
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so the first few times I made this I
didn’t use butter I didn’t know that you
were supposed to use butter I was just
like oh oil it’s fat it’s fine anything
else but my T heavy always turned out
stringy the the cheese didn’t
emulsify and it’s because olive oil is
not emulsifier but butter is and so you
add just a little bit of butter you
don’t want it to be like a flavor
profile really in the food like it’s
just there to act as it anyal
but without it it’s a complete disaster
so so you do have to add it for
sure and this spaghetti says 11 minutes
which in English means like 9
minutes if you want I’ll Dent it if you
want it real soft and 11 minutes is fine
but we don’t want it to be
mushy when this arm gets tired and wants
to fall off then I use the other one
yeah let’s see how much we
have 46 G
yeah that’s that’s a lot I can take a
turn if you
want so we trying to get to
120 uh yeah I
guess
probably if I think that it’s too much
when I’m looking at it then I will not
do that much
God maybe I’m a a bad Chef I don’t know
how to make my own food
play it by
ear I think most chefs do it just like
that it’s that feeling that makes
someone a good Chef you know you’re like
looking at him you know what it’s going
to taste
like I can smell what it’s going to
taste like
[Laughter]
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[Laughter]
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92 gram yeah I think 120 g is going to
be good
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[Laughter]
okay 13 G that’s
fine then when it’s ready grate some
over the top for good measure okay okay
the water is warming
up guess there’s nothing else really all
the
okay so
now I’m going to do 100 G per person so
300
G which this is 500 G
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so this much
[Applause]
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pretty
close how many spaghetti
is call that good
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nice and then the secret to looking much
more like a chef than you actually are
is to put the spaghetti in the pot very
fancy and what you do it you just hold
it like this you twist and you
drop wow very fancy
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okay and
then set the timer
for 9 minutes which is 2 minutes 2
minutes less than what the package
says in the meantime we can start
to sizzle our pepper it’s a little bit
premature but it just needs to sizzle
for just a second let’s
see I want kind of bigger pepper
chunks and lots of pepper
okay we’ll start with that
uhoh on too high
in this case there’s really not much of
a sauce preparation but as a rule the
sauce always waits for the pasta not the
other way around
MH and then this doesn’t need to be that
hot because I don’t want to burn the
pepper I just want
to like I want to see it to start
sizzling then I’ll probably take it off
because the the residual heat will be
you know enough like the idea isn’t
to like cook the pepper it’s to
basically Infuse the pepper into the
olive oil kind of like a you could do
that with time or you could just do it
with heat which is what we’re going to
do cuz I don’t really want to stick a
bunch of pepper kernels in an olive oil
bottle that I use only for K
pppe so now we wait
again okay so
it is just starting to sizzle a little
bit you can’t hear it really but I can
see little tiny bubbles and other
movement in there it’s starting to smell
just a little bit there’s a like a
peppery smell coming up and that’s
pretty much enough you don’t have to do
it more than that and we’re actually not
going to need any more heat on this
burner because once we put the pasta in
it has to cool down or else we’ll break
the cheese when we put it in into a
string cheese mess which is not what we
want
so we have 3 minutes left until the
pasta is done in the meantime we can put
some butter in
here and I don’t know how much to put in
it’s like a it’s a balance between it
has to be enough to
emulsify but if it’s too much then
you’ll taste was it and that’s not what
you
want which
is an unknown amount
so I’ll
just take
a corner off and I know from last time
that wasn’t quite enough cuz started to
string
cheese right at the end so I’ll put in
that
much actually I’m feeling a little bit
generous one little little bit more
okay 1 minute we’re getting pretty
close and then try this real quick make
sure that
it’s actually getting done
mhm that’s
ready don’t need that
timer then directly into the
pot and we need this water because we’re
going to make a ban Marie in just a
second which means like a double boiler
using this Pan and the pasta pot the
pasta water pot
so I mean that’s one of the reasons we
need the water in the pot the other
reason is that we will need more water
to help emulsify the
sauce
okay
then you can see there’s like already
like emulsions starting to happen in
here that camera up a little bit but we
want a little bit more
water it wants to be
sloppy if you don’t have a pan that you
can toss this in like I know you only
have like big mhm pans
then you can just Stir It Like let you
just grab this stir it around like
this yeah he has just movement just
needs
to get the sauce the the starch and the
fat you need to make the water and the
and the fat or gu the starch needs to
make the water and the fat comes
together the other thing I’m looking for
is steam because if it’s still steaming
there’s a good chance it’s too hot for
the
cheese like right now there’s still
still a fair bit of steam so I’ll just
keep tossing a little bit longer cuz we
can always make the cheese warmer we
cannot unarm the cheese and and unstring
it once it has strung it’s it’s
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stringed but I mean even now there’s
technically already a sauce it’s just a
boil butter pepper sauce instead of a c
white pppe
sauce so I think that’s probably enough
of that and then
a little bit more
water and then we’ll start with the
cheese just little bit at a
time and at first it’s not going to
complet completely melt like there’s
going to be like little um like dots
almost in the sauce and that’s fine
we’ll get we’ll get rid of those
later if it starts to like not slop
around quite as much as you want then a
little bit more water
I know in a
restaurant they don’t take this long I
don’t know how they do it
exactly I know that there’s like
completely different methods of making
kach Pepe
that they probably use it’s not at all
like this
but the Romans at home they do it like
thish got a big chunk of cheese in
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there like I don’t know if you can see
that really but there’s just like little
bits suspended in the sauce
which is not ideal you could eat it like
this but we will fix
that if you have an apron a good time to
put it on with a finin like 10 minutes
ago I see it’s not like sloshing around
it’s kind of sticking to itself that
means more
water
because like it’s not supposed to be
like a
thick American gravy kind of sauce it’s
like I don’t know how to describe it
it’s like a a loose happy
sauce that just kind of like it coats it
but like if you were to lift it up like
it might drip off a bit you
know okay we’re almost through all this
cheese put the
rest bit
water and then we can finish
it wow it smells really good
so
now
put
that on there
so
and constant stirring because it can
still break even in here I learned that
last time I didn’t know that was
possible but I can do that and so we
just want to get it warm enough so that
it’s
steaming and the cheese kind of little
suspended cheese bits aren’t there
anymore or as much as possible you can’t
get rid of them completely but you can
get rid of a lot of them like already
like it’s becoming mostly a a white
sauce and not so much a guess you can’t
really see it but it’s becoming mostly a
white sauce and not so much a slurry
so now I’m just waiting for it to get
hot basically so that’s
not um cold when we eat
it and always watching for Strings cuz
if you see strings then you’re done you
just you just take it off it’s okay if
there’s a few strings but you don’t want
to just let the whole thing get
stringy like no amount of stirring or
anything is going to get rid of them so
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okay starting to get a little bit
steamy just exactly what we’re looking
for just want to make sure that the
water is not boiling up and touching the
pot or the the pan or else it’ll get too
hot
which this uh Ladle in there is leaving
making a little Gap that keeps it from
doing that for the most
part wow that is so
creamy
okay I think it’s time to try
it for salt and pepper basically
very fun oh can’t even see us having
such a good time
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wow that is so
peino yeah that is good yeah I’m not
going to add salt for sure plenty salty
which we only added salt to the water
and salt from the cheese there’s no like
added salt really besides that um I
could use a bit more pepper but I’m
going to put that on when we plate it so
right that’s fine cool yeah tastes
wonderful wow I am excited okay
so the plating
procedure guess we can just put some of
this stuff away
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right
oh you know what I saw the the Italians
doing something the other day on YouTube
probably I’m going to try
it I’m going to try putting the ladel in
here and then spinning
the
um the tongs like in the ladle to make a
little
mountain yeah Nest is actually a better
word and then
wow nice
okay and
then this
sauce to go right on top just like
that now if that doesn’t melt your mouth
right
now I don’t know what
will wow that’s
beautiful I think at least 50% of eating
is is what you see with your eyes eating
with your eyes y my favorite kind of
eating I guess that’s why people go to
fancy restaurants so they can eat with
their eyes as well as their mouths
obviously okay and then pepper
just all
around obviously you can experiment
maybe you want more pepper maybe you
want less pepper I like it pretty
peppery so everybody gets
peppery and
then cheese traditionally this would be
grated with like the little holes
greater so it’s kind of crumbled instead
of I don’t know sliced off in little
tiny ribbons which looks a little bit
better but more dishes so
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wow and that is that is that that is so
pretty awesome bury my face in it right
now