New Invention: Carlabonara
When only bacon will do
New here? Hi! If you want to get right down to business, scroll down for the video link and allllllll the way to the bottom for the recipe.
This is a story about recipe development and what my process looks like. Sometimes, the most simple concepts end up being the most elusive, and this Carbonara-inspired pasta took me through all four stages of the creative arc, from “genius idea!” to “do I even know how to cook????”
I love making pasta and my audience loves when I make pasta: I’m not bragging, it’s a data-driven fact. So I’ve done a lot of pastas, but I haven’t done a Carbonara in either of my books or on my channel. As we approached the colder and cozier months in planning, I thought maybe it was time to fix that, and Carbonara was officially on our planning lineup.
I was not expecting this to be a challenge. In fact, I was a tiny bit bored by the idea, even though I love Carbonara. It’s just that I had done a couple deep dives on this dish already and wasn’t sure how much new perspective I could bring to it. When I worked at Bon Appétit, I reported a classic Carbonara from chef Barbara Lynch in Boston, whose recipe was developed after eating her way through dozens of Roman versions. Very traditional, very egg-yolk forward, very good. From her I learned that rigatoni is as common as spaghetti when it comes to the pasta choices, and that a blend of pecorino and Parmigiano is typical, as well (before that, I thought it always had to be Parm).
A few years later, I took on a traditional version for a video at BA, and leaned on a lot of what I had learned from chef Lynch. There are technical aspects to making Carbonara, mostly related to the proper cook-time for the pasta (al dente in Rome is what most American palates would consider to be underdone), and to the emulsification of the eggs. They’ll scramble if added directly to the hot pan over heat, so it’s important to temper them by whisking in hot pasta water, and to create the emulsification off heat. More about that later. As far as ingredients go, Carbonara is quite prescriptive because it’s one of the four anointed pasta dishes of Rome (along with cacio e pepe, alla Gricia, and all’Amatriciana). To be considered a true Carbonara, the only ingredients should be guanciale or pancetta, dried pasta, eggs, black pepper, plus Parm and/or Pecorino). As a recipe developer, this can be a great thing (half the work is done for you), but as someone who has always included Spin Its in my recipes and is committed to removing road blocks to cooking, I reallllly want to offer flexibility.
Almost everyone can reliably get pasta, Parm, eggs, and pepper (although I did recently hear from a subscriber who lives in a remote area of the U.S. where finding Parm is tough!). The issue is with the pork product. Guanciale and pancetta are more available than when I made my first Carbonara in college, but even in NYC would require a stop at a butcher or an Italian specialty shop. Supermarket packaged pancetta is usually sold in bitty pieces, and for Carbonara you want them big enough to create generous chewy lardons. The “acceptable” sub for recipe developers is to give slab bacon as an alt. I myself have been one of those recipe developers. But on the day I decided to add Carbonara to the lineup, that felt like a cop-out or at least misleading advice. (Bacon is cured and smoked; pancetta and guanciale are cured but not smoked, and that’s the main difference.) If I suggest that you use slab bacon, I’m basically telling you to make not-Carbonara and call it Carbonara. Enabling inauthenticity!
If everyone can get bacon, and lots of people will immediately make that substitution, I pivoted: I’ll simply start with bacon and call the dish something else. Did that decision make my life way harder? Yes! I was at stage one, Inspiration, but had to come up with a whole new pasta rather than leaning on the many versions I could draw ratios from.
Because Carbonara relies on the chew of the pasta against the creaminess of the sauce for all of the textural interest, I thought it would add something to introduce more elements. My first vision for not-Carbonara started with bacon that was thinly sliced crosswise and cooked past chewy to super crisp and brown. I also added crunchy walnuts, which were such a game-changer in my Cacio e Walnut recipe from That Sounds So Good. Aside from that, I wanted to add something to the egg mixture to make the emulsification step more foolproof, so I added ricotta in addition to Parm. I envisioned a nice fat noodle and thought bucatini would work great.
So, I made that. And I didn’t like it. The bacon was brittle and because so much of the fat had been rendered, it had a dry kind of crunch that sticks in your molars. Also there wasn’t enough of it, like that old vaudeville joke—the food here is terrible! Yes, and such small portions! Additionally, I forgot to temper the egg mixture with hot water and just dumped it straight into the pasta, where it immediately scrambled and created dry little clumps. Uncool! I was halfway to Step Two: Confusion, but still confident. For the next pass, I’d cut the bacon larger and cook it less, double the walnuts and the bacon, and for the love that all that is good, remember the freakin’ pasta water next time. I didn’t love how the long noodle made it tricky to capture the pieces of bacon and walnuts, and switched to fusilli, which has lovely texture where things can get stuck.
Second pass was great from an emulsification standpoint; the ricotta helps a lot to stretch the egg and was giving a lot of creaminess without requiring 5 or 6 egg yolks, like other versions of Carbonara. The chew of the bacon was way more pleasing, and I left the walnut pieces bigger too. It was good. It was, fine? It wasn’t making me crazy with delight. It would have been hard for me to rave about it, and if I can’t rave, I can’t sell you on it, and if you’re not sold, what are we even doing here??? Here is where the feelings of being adrift at sea start to emerge. Stage Three: Anger. Heartache. Doubt. Why doesn’t this taste good? What does it need? Amping up the salt and pepper helped, but still—the dish felt ordinary. That’s fine if I’m cooking at home, but again, you deserve more!
My dish was lacking flavor. I never said that about Carbonara. It was time for some research, and the main variable was the guanciale/pancetta piece. I looked them both up and read about the spices and herbs that are typically used in the curing process. There were several additions that could be used in recipes for pancetta and guanciale that bacon normally doesn’t have: red chile flakes, thyme, sage, bay leaf, juniper, black pepper, to name a few. Additionally, pancetta and guanciale have a bit of funk to them, the slight sourness that comes from their curing process, which you don’t really detect with bacon. To mimic that, I grated a garlic clove into the egg mixture, and added some chile flakes to the walnuts. (Adding a woody herb like thyme or sage could be overwhelming, so I started conservatively.) Then, I served it to Cosmo.
We tasted. It was better, definitely. But still. No one was doing a happy food dance. I told him about my trials so far. We both added a bunch of pepper and more cheese. Tasted again. It was good. It was better than fine but it wasn’t amazing.
“Am I crazy for wanting to grate some lemon into this,” I asked him.
“I wouldn’t be mad at that.” He replied.
Luckily, I actually had a lemon in the house. I used a microplane to grate some directly onto each of our dishes. We tasted. It was noticeably, undeniably better. And it made sense: the lemon had both the bright aroma from essential oils that woody herbs have (different aroma, but aromas that are released in oils) and it had a little sourness that complimented the garlic.
Stage Four: Breakthrough and bliss. I made the final changes on paper and it wasn’t until the day we shot the video that I cooked through the entire recipe start to finish again. It was the best yet: a creamy, egg-based sauce that had a little lightness and roundness from the addition of ricotta; layers of texture from the al dente twisted noodles, the chewy bacon, the crunchy walnuts, and the emulsified sauce. But it were the accent flavors that made it special: the garlic that opened up when the hot water hit it, the chiles that warmed up the palate, the lemon that was giving. My on-screen reaction is legitimate and I felt good enough about this to wiggle and shimmy in place. Some things you can measure, other things are visceral. I hope you do happy food dance too.
xoCLM