You only need seven ingredients to make a tasty carbonara, as well as salt and black pepper seasoning.
Most of the food items needed to make a carbonara are likely to be in your kitchen already, such as eggs, garlic cloves and spaghetti.
While pancetta is the key ingredient, this can be substituted for bacon lardons for this recipe.
Having made this recipe beforehand (and loving it), I was disappointed when I couldn’t find pancetta in my local Waitrose or Asda, so I opted for bacon lardons.
While bacon lardons still make it a tasty dish, if you can get pancetta, it will taste even better.
Bacon lardons tend to taste fattier than pancetta and lacks the spiciness of pancetta.
Spaghetti carbonara recipe
Serves: four people
Ingredients:
100g pancetta
50g pecorino cheese
50g parmesan
3 large eggs
350g spaghetti
Two plump garlic cloves, peeled and left whole
50g unsalted butter
Sea salt and black pepper
Method
Put a large saucepan of water on to boil then add in the spaghetti with a little bit of salt, then cook at a constant simmer for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, mix the packet of pecorino cheese and 50g of the grated parmesan together in a bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and season with black pepper, then set aside. Now squash two peeled garlic cloves (to bruise them).
Using a wok, fry butter then add in the bruised garlic cloves and the pancetta (or bacon lardons) and cook on a medium heat for about five to seven minutes.
Discard the garlics, then use tongs to lift the al dente pasta into the wok and mix together. Now mix most of the cheese in with the beaten egg, reserving some cheese to sprinkle onto the dish later.
Take the wok off the heat, then pour the eggy cheese mixture into the pasta mix and use tongs to coat all of the pasta.
BBC Good Food, where the original recipe came from, clarified: “Using the tongs or a long fork, lift up the spaghetti so it mixes easily with the egg mixture, which thickens but doesn’t scramble, and everything is coated.”
Only add a little bit of pasta cooking water if the dish looks dry; when ready, twirl the pasta into serving bowls, sprinkle on cheese and add black pepper.
