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morsels45 said

Cacio e pepe

Cheese, pepper, pasta water. Three things and every one of them can go wrong.

Cacio e pepe
Photo: Popo le Chien, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. A photo of the dish, not of these exact recipes.

That was somebody else’s answer. Yours takes about twenty seconds: a handful of either-ors, then one dish.

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How to make cacio e pepe

2 genuinely different takes — a classic, and a faster or lighter route. The same ones the app hands you once you have decided.

Three ingredients, all of them tricky

15 minutes · serves 2 · Medium

What you need

  • 200g tonnarelli or spaghetti
  • 100g pecorino romano, grated very fine
  • 1 tbsp black peppercorns, coarsely cracked

What you do

  1. 1Toast the cracked pepper in a dry pan for 30 seconds until it smells sharp, then add a ladle of pasta water and let it bubble.
  2. 2Cook the pasta in less water than usual — you want it starchy.
  3. 3Make a paste with the pecorino and a little cool pasta water in a bowl. Cool, not hot. Hot water seizes the cheese into strings and there is no coming back.
  4. 4Drain the pasta, let the pan cool for 20 seconds, then toss the pasta with the pepper water and the cheese paste off the heat.
  5. 5Keep tossing and adding water until it goes from grainy to glossy. That moment is the dish.

The forgiving way

15 minutes · serves 2 · Easy

What you need

  • 200g spaghetti
  • 60g pecorino and 40g parmesan
  • Black pepper
  • 20g butter

What you do

  1. 1A knob of butter emulsified into the pepper water first makes the sauce far harder to break.
  2. 2Pasta in, cheese off the heat, tossed hard with splashes of water.