How to Nail Pasta Carbonara
Pasta carbonara is one of those dishes that seems to make everyone swoon. I remember dining out with friends at an Italian restaurant, and when the waiter mentioned a carbonara special, everybody ooohed and ahhhed—and half the table ended up ordering it. Totally justified, if you ask me. A good carbonara is creamy, saucy heaven.
I distinctly remember the first time I ever tried to make pasta carbonara, many years ago. I remember because I totally botched it and ended up making scrambled egg pasta. The reason? I tried to make it in a rush, and I didn’t have all the mise en place and correct equipment ready to go.
This is the kind of recipe where you need to be in control of all the moving parts, because you need to properly time just about every component: the cooking of the bacon, the pasta, and having the egg cheese mixture ready to go. They all have to be ready to come together at the right moment. The method below is how I line everything up so I can nail the execution every time instead of ending up with breakfast pasta.
Get the full step-by-step photos, instructions, and recipe on The Pioneer Woman’s site
Can you believe I have never made it before? This post makes it seem super accessible. Thank you!
This post inspired me to look into carbonara recipes. My husband and I really liked the one Knorr makes for their SideKicks. I really never knew what carbonara was. Going over lots of recipes I found some that used cream, others eggs, some that were scrambled eggs and bacon on spaghetti (like you mentioned) and others that were more like bacon alfredo.
I don’t like the idea of partially cooked eggs (I like mine overdone) and I was out of Parm, but I really wanted to give it a go. I went home and suggested to my hubby that we see what we can do with what we had. I ended up with a horridly fat-filled version that tastes like heaven, costs very little and was super easy to put together.
I took a can of cream of mushroom soup, 1 package of regular bacon chopped into 1/2″ pieces, spaghetti or spaghettini (1″ circle), 1 medium onion chopped, 2 tbsp of Worcestershire sauce and some garlic powder and pepper to taste.
We cooked up the bacon nice and crispy adding the garlic powder and pepper to taste. Do not drain the bacon this gives you so much flavour but also a lot of fat, so it is up to you but this is how I did it. Add the soup and a little water to dilute (about 1/4-1/2 can). Sprinkle in the Worcestershire sauce and let everything blend well. Cook your pasta to your taste (Al Dente), drain and add to sauce mix. stir the pasta into the creamy fattening sauce and leave on low heat for a minute or so to let everything blend well. Plate it up and enjoy. My hubby and I enjoyed this immensely but agree that because of the fat content it has to be a rare treat.
Hope you like my version too, thanks for the inspiration.