How The Best Carbonara in NYC is Made | Made to Order | Bon Appétit

Bon Appétit joins Chef Mattia Moliterni of Roscioli NYC, the iconic Roman restaurant’s New York outpost, as he makes their famous carbonara. Discover the secrets behind Roscioli’s most beloved recipe, from sourcing authentic ingredients like guanciale and Pecorino Romano, to perfecting the creamy, egg-based sauce without a drop of cream. Straight from the heart of Rome to the Big Apple, this is how carbonara is meant to be made.

#Carbonara #RoscioliNYC #ItalianFood

00:00 Intro
00:31 Preparing guanciale
02:27 Toasting peppercorns
03:31 Making carbonara sauce
05:16 Cooking pasta
05:58 Putting it all together
07:05 Plating

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[lively music]
[food sizzling] – Hi, I’m Mattia Moliterni
from Roscioli New York City and today we make our perfect version of spaghetti alla carbonara. [lively music ending] Roscioli opened in 1972. The restaurant is one of the most popular restaurants in Rome. [bell dinging] Here in New York, today we are making our traditional
spaghetti alla carbonara and a simple recipe driven by ingredients. It’s creamy, it’s rich, but not too fatty. It is a very complex dish, even if it’s something very simple. First things, we prepare our ingredients. [tranquil music] Okay, we start from the guanciale. Guanciale is the cheek of the pork. I think that guanciale for the carbonara is way better than any bacon or pancetta because the balance between
the fat and the meat. The fat is a lot. The guanciale is covered with black pepper and on the other side is the skin. We have to remove both
because the skin is inedible while the black pepper, as soon as it goes to the pan, it’s going to be burnt and bitter, so we remove both of them. Technically what we want is a cube that is very crunchy
outside but soft inside and when a meat is not fat enough, this is something that is tough to get. Now we take a pan, we like iron pan, but a regular pan is fine. We put the fire like very high heat and as soon as the pan is hot, so you can see that now it’s hot, you put all the cubes
of the guanciale here. [food sizzling] As soon as you put the
guanciale in the pan, you can lower down the
fire up to medium heat. If you overcook the guanciale, it becomes kind of burnt and bitter. Guanciale doesn’t require any
extra virgin oil, any butter because the meat is extremely fat and if you don’t use a
pan that is too wide, you will have the guanciale
frying in its own fat, which is exactly what we want. It’s still a bit translucent. As soon as it becomes
dark, we can take it off. You want to put in the bowl even the fat that the guanciale is cooked with because if the guanciale
is in its own fat, it’s going to remain crispy. Even something like for hours. So even almost the day after. In a separate pan, we put our pepper. We like to use a mix of different peppers. We have black pepper from
Sarawak, which is the one that we use the most, the
one that we use even in Rome. And then we have this
spicy pepper that is white. It’s from Muntok in Indonesia. And then we have a red
pepper called Kampot. In this way you don’t have just the flavor of the black pepper, but it’s
way more floral and aromatic. But at home, if you have the black pepper, it’s more than fine, it’s perfect. The pepper release all
these flavors and aromas. It start already smelling. It’s a beautiful smell. Technically you understand
when the pepper is ready because the pepper can start to jump. So as soon as they jump,
the pepper is ready, you can take it off and grind it. The more you screw the grinder, the more it’s going to
be fine, the texture. And so we don’t want that too fine and so we don’t screw that too much. Some grinder have the screw on the bottom to calibrate the
thickness, some on the top. This way we have the
texture that we prefer. And we can move and
start making the sauce. [lively music] We don’t make the sauce
in a pan, but in a bowl. The pan, it can be fine. The only thing is that
it’s a bit more risky because when you put the pan on the fire, you take the risk to
have the egg coagulate and the cheese can become very chewy, which is something that we don’t want. We want a sauce that
has to be very smooth. For the sauce, we need first the eggs. So let’s say that for two people, we use two yolk and half white. The yolk is very rich and fairy and this is the main
ingredients of the sauce. Fresh eggs bring this nice
yellow color to the sauce. We add some cheese. Traditionally the carbonara
require just Pecorino cheese. We prefer to use a mix. One of the key of the
carbonara is the saltiness. Balance, the saltiness is
something that is super important and so that’s why we prefer not
to use just Pecorino Romano, but to add the Pecorino
Moliterno that is way sweeter. The texture of the cheese
should be very, very fine. At home, if you have a cheese grater, let’s use the smaller one. And here we use the machine actually. Then you have to add the pepper [grinder crunching] and a spoon of the fat of the guanciale. Usually we do one spoon per person. Without the flavor of the
meat, it’s not a carbonara. I mean, it’s something different. Before mixing the sauce, we add a little bit of water. I took the water from the
pasta that is boiling, melt everything together. Then we leave the bowl with the carbonara sauce on the water. The steam is going to warm up the sauce, help to make it creamy
without coagulating the eggs. Now it’s time for us to put
the pasta in the boiling water. This is spaghettoni, so
it’s a thick spaghetti, one of my favorites. The producers are very small,
they dry their pasta slowly, at low temperature. The problem when you dry
pasta at a temperature that is too high is that it loses a lot of nutritional elements and even flavors. All the components are already
very salty, so you don’t need to add too much salt in
the pasta in the water. We prefer to use a thick
spaghetto, the spaghettoni because of its texture and it doesn’t go overcooked. It remains very al dente. You want a pasta that is
al dente, but it’s cooked. We put it in the sauce and
then we start melting it. Once the pasta is in
the bowl with the sauce, we start adding the guanciale. I’m trying not to add
the fat of the guanciale because I have it already in the sauce, so I don’t need more fat. I just need the guanciale
that you can probably even see that is super crispy. So now that we have the guanciale, we can just emulsify the sauce. Emulsifying means melting
all the ingredients together. Fair ingredients, especially the cheese, helps a lot the emulsion. If you add the right amount of water and you do that at the right temperature, it’s going to be a perfect sauce, very smooth, very homogenous, and that’s exactly what you want. The goal here is to have
a texture that is smooth. If needed, we can add
even a little bit of water with the starch. We want this emulsified, not watery, but not super thick. And as soon as you see
that the pasta is creamy, that the sauce is smooth,
you are good to go. Time to plate. A spoon is a great help. It’s pretty easy to plate the pasta because you have it in the spoon. You have just to turn it. You remove the tweezers and
you have a pasta plated nicely. Add a bit of guanciale on top. We need now to finish
the pasta with the mix of our two peppers. [lively music]
[pepper grinding] And you have even a bit of Pecorino. And here it is, spaghetti alla carbonara. [lively music]
[Mattia slurping] [Mattia chuckling] The pasta is very al dente. Truly love this mix of peppers. I think that is very aromatic and in some ways a bit unusual. Let’s say that this
can be a New York twist on our carbonara. The guanciale’s crunchy,
it’s not overcooked. And again, you have this
beautiful balance in your mouth between saltiness is
for sure, a rich flavor, but it’s definitely not unbalanced. That’s the way we like it. If you want to make carbonara at home, my recommendation is besides
following these few easy steps, is to be thoughtful about the
ingredients that you purchase because they are so important. And if you do all that, you are
going to end up with a pasta that is going to be rich,
delicious, and perfect.