Perfect Spaghetti Carbonara At Home

Spaghetti carbonara like an Italian grandmother would make it. Rich, savory, and creamy flavors combine to make this the perfect comfort dinner.

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Let’s make carbonara. [Music] We’ll begin by making our fresh pasta. And that all starts with some flour onto our cutting board. And we’ll then use our bowl to press down in the center and make a nice well in the middle. There. I’ll crack in two whole eggs. And then I’ll separate out four additional egg yolks. And keeping everything inside this well here, I’m going to begin to whisk up those eggs. Pretend the flour is a bowl and that you’re whisking some eggs inside it. And make sure not to break the edge of that bowl or the egg’s going to spill everywhere. Once your egg is fully scrambled, you can begin pulling in some of that flour from the edges of your well. And then slowly and gradually, we’ll want to incorporate that flour into our egg. I call this whole process the Italian grandma method for making fresh pasta. Eventually, once that inner egg mixture is thick enough that it’s not going to run all over the board, you can go ahead and pull everything together all at once. This is when you’ll want to get in there with either your hands or preferably a bench scraper. I typically use both at the same time. And at the next stage in this process, your pasta will start to look sort of like dry and crumbly scrambled eggs. Once everything’s been scraped off the board, we can lose the bench scraper and fully get in there with our hands. Now, it’s time to pull everything together, squeezing and rolling and pushing it all into one ball, keeping your whole work surface nice and clean as you do it. You want to knead your dough for about 10 minutes. And this is very important because it’s what develops that chew in your pasta. Pasta dough should be pretty dry, but if you feel like it’s too dry, you can always add a little tiny sprinkle of water bit by bit until you feel the dough is workable. If you’re doing it right, it should be a bit of a workout. You really want to use the force of the palm of your hand to push down into that dough, kind of rolling it into and over itself. And again, that’s going to develop all the gluten in this dough. I tend to tell people that if you’re kneading pasta dough in the right way, you’re probably going to be sweating a little bit at the end. But really, what you’re looking for is that dough to look and feel nice and silky smooth, just like this. We’ll cover and let this dough rest for somewhere between 1 and 3 hours. And the difference between this and rested dough is that when I press my thumb into this one, it should spring back. We’ll cover this up now in plastic wrap or a damp towel and let it rest at room temperature for 1 to 3 hours. And here’s our rested dough. You know, I never like to make you wait. All righty. Since this dough has been resting for so long, you can see it’s very easy to shape and move around, and that’s exactly what we want. It’s really fun to play with. First, I’ll remove my plastic wrap and then cut this into four even pieces. Anything I’m not using can sit off to the side. so it doesn’t dry out. As for our first pasta sheet, I’ll press this out just a little bit. And then on the widest setting, I’ll begin to pass this through my pasta machine. At this first stage here, you’ll also want to fold it over itself to really get rid of any of those air bubbles that might be in there. And the overall key here is just to be gentle. Every pasta machine will come with different numbers. And our goal here is to get this up to number six. That number is always going to dictate how thick or thin your pasta ends up being. The key to rolling out pasta this way is to be both patient and gentle. If you’re doing this correctly, the pasta is going to do most of the work. Your job is simply to guide it and nothing more. Immediately, you’ll notice the pasta already wants to stick to itself. So, the way we fix that is with some semolina. I’ll go ahead and drape that pasta into the semolina, coating it with that flour. And that’ll give the outside of my pasta a very light coating just to make sure it doesn’t ruin all of our hard work and stick to itself. And now, just like that, we’ve got a beautiful fresh sheet of pasta. While I roll out my second sheet here, I’ll let you know that normally we would switch on another attachment and use this same machine to then cut our pasta into those thin pasta strands. But not today. Instead, I’m really excited because we’re using this tool called the kit, which translates to guitar in Italian. It’s a very traditional way of rolling out the spaghetti you use for making carbonara in Italy. So, I’ve never done it before, but I wanted to try together, and I think it’s going to be really cool. This is our kittara. It does look exactly like a guitar, but it’s not. It’s for rolling out pasta. And the purpose is to cut your pasta into perfectly even squares sided strands that apparently holds that carbonara sauce better than any other pasta shape. To use this, we’re going to take our pasta sheet and cut out some portion of our dough, just enough so that it fits nicely in the center of our roll to cut it right through those strands where the pasta should then fall and slide right down. Then immediately, just so the pasta doesn’t stick, you’ll want to grab it and toss it around in your semolina. Making sure it’s been really well coated. And then we can drop it down. I’m going to try something for rolling this out my second time here. Going to place down a damp kitchen towel and put my machine over that in hopes that maybe it doesn’t slide around so much when I roll. You might be wondering, Nick, why are you going through so much effort making your pasta when carbonara should be so quick and easy? And the answer is actually quite simple. When there’s a recipe like carbonara that doesn’t have very many steps or ingredients, it’s more important than ever to focus on the details. Like I said, I’ve never done this before. So, if you have some Roman grandmother who’s watching right now and getting really frustrated, you should feel free to go ahead and comment down below whatever she might be yelling at me. And that way, at least I’ll know for next time. Although, I will say so far this is turning out beautifully. And yes, this is just as much fun as it looks to roll out. As I go here, I’m figuring out more and more how this works. You can even loosen and tighten this here as well. All I can say is it’s really satisfying watching the spaghetti fall through the strands here. I think I’m going to be using this tool here more often. Let’s do one last little dusting of semolina over our spaghetti here. Shake off that excess and our spaghetti is done. Now that we’ve made our beautiful pasta, we’re going to make what’s called a pan grittado. Basically just crispy breadcrumbs that’ll make our carbonara a bit more exciting and add some texture. All you need is olive oil and breadcrumbs. While this crisps up over low heat, I’m going to jump over to my other work surface and grate my pecorino. As always, we’ll grate the cheese oursel. We never want to use pre-grated cheese. Fun fact, pecorino is made from sheep’s milk, whereas parmesan is made from cows milk. But what wouldn’t be fun is if this burned. So, make sure to continue stirring it. And what we’re looking for here is golden brown and crispy. Once it looks something like this, your pung grat is done and it’ll be the perfect topping later for your carbonara. Go ahead and shift it off the heat and then add in a nice sprinkle of your pecorino cheese. Adding in the cheese here will give our pang grittado a nice deeper, richer flavor that’ll tie in better with our carbonara. If you’ve tasted pecorino plane, you know that it has that sort of sharp flavor, so it’s going to give really nice balance to the final dish. Once it’s done, I’m going to go ahead and toss it onto a paper towel lined baking sheet just to soak up any of that excess olive oil. Again, this is such a simple way to make your pasta that much more exciting, and it only takes a few seconds to throw together. That’s why I love pangerta so much. It feels like you put in so much more effort when in reality, you only spend a few more seconds making this. And now it’s time to cook our pasta. The foundation of the flavor in our carbonara comes from this right here. This is called guanchal. It’s kind of the Italian version of bacon. Many people would argue this is a must in this recipe because its rich silky fat and unique flavor are part of what makes carbonara carbonara. I’m going to cut it into these nice strips called lardons. Traditionally, if you see any kind of thick bacon looking ingredient in lots of recipes, this is about what it will look like. As you can see, my hands are already glistening with the fat from this guanchchal. And the smell is peppery, a little bit smoky. It’s a hard flavor to replicate, which again is why we really want to use this. We’re going to start it off here in a cold pan, which will help all that fat that you see to melt down slowly into the liquid gold that we’re looking for here. If you really want to make carbonara and you can’t find guanchal or it’s too expensive, you can always try using penetta. And if you can’t find that, then yes, you could use bacon. And I’m allowed to say that because I’m Italian and I don’t want to see anyone getting mad about it in the comments. Yes, it’s not going to taste the exact same, but it will still make you something delicious. I promise. What I think is really cool when guanchchali starts melting down is the fat becomes almost translucent, which is actually really nice because it makes it very obvious which parts you need to melt down into the pan. You can see that I’m really taking this process here quite slow. We want to give this fat time to slowly melt away as opposed to quickly crisping up the outside and locking that fat in. Be patient. I promise it’s worth it. You want to do this for about 10 minutes. And as you go, you’ll gradually see that fat melting out of the guanchal. and you’ll see more and more fat left in the bottom of your pan, which will help to build that sauce, while these nice crispy morsels of guanchal will be left behind. If you’ve cooked it long and carefully enough, your pan should ultimately look something like this. At which point, we’ll turn off the heat and jump over here where we’ll add in two whole eggs as well as two additional egg yolks. Right now, we’re building the rest of that carbonara sauce. To this, I’m also going to add my grated pecorino cheese as well as a lot of fresh cracked black pepper. I know it looks like a ridiculous amount, but this is what it takes to make a proper carbonara. And now we whisk. It may look a little chunky now, but this is all going to melt down into a beautiful silky sauce if we do these next steps right now. I’m going to jump back here and make room for my pasta water. Right away, I’ll add plenty of salt. And once that fully dissolves, in goes our pasta for just 60 seconds. Fresh pasta cooks quick. I’ll give it a quick stir to make sure nothing is sticking. And then get ready to finish things up. Once that pasta is cooked, I’ll drop it into my guanchale pan. But remember, we’re not cooking with a flame anymore. The rest of our cooking will be done with the heat of this pasta water here. In addition to any of the pasta water that splashes over into our pan as I transfer the pasta, I also want to grab some extra reserved pasta water since we’ll need this to cook our carbonara. Now, in we go with our egg mixture. We’re working quickly here. And then we begin to mix bit by bit. I’m going to add in that hot pasta water now. Mixing constantly to cook the egg and melt down that cheese. The goal here is to get a beautifully creamy sauce without using any cream. Or you can think of this process like making creamy scrambled eggs that’ll never actually get scrambled. If you’ve been stirring it around long and it doesn’t thicken up, you can go ahead and add just a little bit of heat. But be careful. If you’re going to do this, I’d suggest going on and then off the heat because the worst thing that can happen here is you make a weird looking scrambled eggs. And nobody wants that. As you can see now, our sauce here is already looking glossier and more velvety. I’ll add in one more little splash of water just to slow things down for a moment now. And it looks now like everything’s become this silky, consistent, thick sauce, which means we’ve done it. That is a beautiful thing. I don’t usually think for too long about plating when it comes to carbonara, cuz I usually just want to eat it right away. But after all that hard work, I might as well take a few seconds to make it look nice. I’m going to top it off with some of that crispy pung grittado. Takes so little effort, but gives so much texture. Just a tiny dusting of parsley right over the top. And if you’d like, just the smallest dusting of fresh cracked black pepper. I won’t do much cuz I think there’s already plenty in here. And that is how you make spaghetti carbonara. I think my non no would be so proud. [Music]