How to Make Perfect Cacio e Pepe

Cacio e pepe is pasta magic: just three ingredients—pasta, black pepper, and Pecorino Romano—combine to create a dish that is way more than the sum of its parts. Creamy, rich, and salty, with a little peppery bite from the pepper and tang from the sheep’s milk cheese, it might seem impossible that these humble ingredients can come together in such a spectacular way.

But that’s part of the wonder of Roman pasta. Cacio e pepe is one of the “core four” Roman pasta; the other three are gricia, amatriciana, and carbonara. And all four employ similar ingredients and techniques to produce noodles that are napped in glossy sauces.

In this video, editorial director Sasha Marx, who grew up in Rome and has worked in Italian fine-dining restaurants, demonstrates how to make this iconic Roman dish, with no tricks, hacks, or gimmicks. Sasha covers everything from toasting the peppercorns to bring out their aroma to plating it like you would in a restaurant.

If you’re ready to elevate your pasta game, visit ChefSteps.com for more recipes, tips, and guides.

Recipes:
Perfect Cacio e Pepe: https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pasta-cacio-e-pepe

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It’s salty, funky, in your face. It’s mac and cheese for adults. It’ll put you down for the count. Cheese, pepper, pasta, ketchup bit. I love pasta. It’s so good. Today, I’m going to show you how to make a perfectly emulsified ketchup pepe. No hacks, no secret ingredients, just good technique, temperature control, and you’ve got the best kachcha baby out there. The ingredient list is the title, katcho, cheese, pecorino, romano, pepe, pepper. It’s the simplest one of the core four Roman pastas. All of the other pastas sort of fall off of that family tree in the sense that they all have peorino romano. They all have black pepper. You add guanchal, you’ve got gishca. You add guanchal and tomato. You’ve got a matricana. You add guanchal. Egg, you have carbonado. For keship, you want to coax out the aroma of your black pepper. So, what I like to do is start off with whole pepperc corns and toast them. These are tel cherry peppercorns, which are sort of the creme de creme of black pepper. You could certainly use other black pepperc corns. It’s kind of like a thing now in Rome that you go to a restaurant and it will tout the pepper that they’re using in their ketchup pipe. It’s kind of like going down the road of barbecue rubs. Like everyone will say they have their secret ingredient or whatever. As long as you’ve got decent quality peppercorns, you’re totally fine. It’s It’s going to be great. I can smell that aroma coming up, which means we’re in a good spot. This is more than you would need for four people, but I like to just toast a little more so that you, you know, you can add as you’re finishing and then people can add it to taste at the table. So once it’s toasted and just kill the heat, go onto a little tray. Just let this cool to room temperature. The main thing here is that you’re looking to grind the pepperc corns where you’ve got a nice mix of almost just cracked pepper and then some finer particulate matter. I forget what that’s called. We’ve got some coffee nerds here. Particle distribution. Thank you. I don’t even really mind if there’s like one whole surprise pepperc corn in there. This is what you’re looking for. You’ve got the finely ground stuff. You’ve got some very very coarsely ground stuff. Pepper done. Now we can get to the pasta part. Pasta water’s up at a boil. For ketchup pipe, you want less water than you’re probably used to because you want to create a very concentrated starchy water to build the sauce. The sauce is really just pasta water, black pepper, and then you emulsify cheese off heat. So the starchier the pasta water, the creamier the emulsion will be. For this, I’ve got, you know, 2 and 1/2 lers of water or so. Lightly salt the pasta water because the Torino Romano is salty and you don’t want to overseason your pasta. 340 g spaghettoni. You obviously want a pot that can fit your spaghetti. And we’re looking to cook this 75 80% of the way. Spaetoni, our thicker spaghettto. This is a really nice high quality dried pasta from Graniano, which is sort of the the capital of dried pasta of Italy. This pasta is very slowly dried at low temperatures and you get this really rough surface which creates a more porous pasta which absorbs sauce absorbs water better. It allows sauce to cling to it more. We ran a test where we cooked two of the same pasta shape and the same amount of water between an artisan pasta like this and a industrial pasta. took the water, loaded it into our centriuge, spun it, and you really see a big difference in starch. A thing in Italian cuisine is the pasta is sort of the main character. You want to taste that first and foremost. And so, you know, the better quality ingredient that you’re starting with, the better tasting it will be. Think about it, you know, again, like treating yourself to a dry age steak. Pasta is, you know, same thing. Got yourself a nice bag of pasta and you’re in business. Pasta is almost ready to finish cooking in the pan with some pasta water. I’ll do two cups of starchy water, coarsely ground toasted pepper, six g. And so you’re kind of making this like pepper broth of sorts. And then you’re getting your pasta that is very well shy of al dente. The spaghetton take, you know, around like 14 minutes or something. And we’re going to finish cooking it in this concentrated pepper broth, if you will. I don’t really like, you know, getting a colander out, draining pasta water, having to remember how much pasta water to save. Oh my god, I didn’t save enough. If you just take these, get some tongs and then you can save this water which will come in super handy for finishing the pasta because it’s always a little dance of adjusting, loosening, tightening, loosening, tightening. And now all I’m doing is gently stirring and moving it around. What’s critical for this step here when you’re working with a long pasta is that you need to have gotten the pasta to this stage where it’s got enough flop to it that in the transfer from the water it won’t break. Before al dente you have what’s called aliado which means to the nail al dentes to the tooth. It’s got some bite to it that I like but you could still want to take it a little farther. take it to the al dente stage. You can do this tossing step the monte caturura which is the the sort of emulsifying stage. To do a monteatur you need some form of fat which in this dish is coming from the cheese. So you’re not going to create this you know emulsion now because there’s no fat in here but you will have that starchy cloudy broth. It’s going to glaze the spaghettoni that will become super creamy once we toss in the cheese off heat. At this stage, you know, the pasta is not seasoned seasoned like you would serve it because you’ve got the super salty picorina that you’re going to finish with. I love pasta. It’s so good. I never got sick of it. We’re in a good spot. We’ve taken this down to this glossy stage and we are ready to come off and add the cheese. As for the cheese itself, picorino Romano, a dried sheep’s milk cheese like parmyo reano, it’s one of those DOP cheeses meaning that like it has to follow certain production protocols. can only be produced in certain areas unlike permigano which has to be made in the Romania the region that Bologan and Parma are in. Picorino Romano can be made in three areas. So Latio the region that Rome is in Sardinia and GTO. So what you’re looking for a hard cheese like this I really would recommend an imported Italian pecorino Romano. I really like the box grater. You use the smallest hose. To me, it creates this nice powdery texture that you’re looking for rather than something like a microplane, which is going to get you a ton of volume and it’s super easy to do. But it creates these sort of like shards that I don’t really like how they eat. They sort of melt too quickly, coat your palette versus this. It’s more like biting into small little pieces of picoras. And I find that this emulsifies better into a sauce. Pecorino, it’s a hard cheese. Hard cheeses don’t like melting. You have to come off heat and integrate it slowly. And as it comes together, you’ll see that really dark peppery broth will lighten in color. This is a modern restaurant style kacha pipe. Growing up, the kacha pipe that you would get is a little drier. This style has really come into vogue in the past, I don’t know, 10, 15 years. What would have probably been the OG ketchup pip, it looks very different from this as a dish that was, you know, purported to be one from shepherds and stuff who were tending their flocks and needed a snack to take with them to work. You’re not going to take this and a knapsack with you. You’re probably going to have a sloppy bad time. You see all the time these recipes of like, ah, I made bulletproof ketchup pipe or they’ve cracked the code with a cornstarch slurry or they add some sodium citrate. All those tricks are fine. If you want to do that, go for it. But learning how to make it this way helps you then know how to treat the ingredients in a way that they’re willing to be used. Coming in with a little extra pasta water. I’ll add one last little sprinkle of cheese here. Why not? And then we’re ready to plate. This is a pasta that you don’t want to serve it tepid, but you can help yourself by having, you know, warm plate. How you plate really up to you. You can use your ladle. Get your little twirl on. It doesn’t have to be perfect. And then you’re always going to finish with more pecorino. and pepper. And there is ketchup paper. That’s That’s a very big serving. That’s an American serving of ketchup paper. I couldn’t eat that much. I’ll make myself a portion that I could handle. There we go. That’s a better one. You know, if you want to gild the lily porino, that to me is the portion that I would want to eat. Ketchup done. Uh Tim, you want to try this or no? Sure. Sure. I took my lactade. That’s important. I’m ready. You want the big bowl or little bowl? I think this is all I can handle right now. It tastes like really good hot buttered noodles. But like in the best possible way. Like I really love the simplicity. I can taste each component. Like the cheese is hidden. It’s salty. I love the pepper flavor. I like spicy things. And it it’s delicate but balanced at the same time. I can see why this is a really popular dish. Butter noodles. Get them. That’s gota pepe. So we have this the core for Roman pastas. Satricana gisha carbonara. We’ve got even Rome’s dirty little secret pasta on chef steps. Lots of pasta cooking tips. The tools that you’ll need for success in cooking pasta at home. And yeah. Na. It’s a little bit of manual labor, but hey, if you want to get the thick forearms of Tim Chin, you got to do something. So, grate your cheese manually. Subscribe to our channel and visit chefsteps.com for more tips, recipes, guides, and tools to help you level up in the kitchen. [Music]