Go to Rome with my Cacio e Pepe recipe. One of the easiest recipes; the key tricks to the perfect dish are:
- Use the spaghetti as a whisk while stirring to emulsify the sauce
- Sprinkle in the cheese very slowly in lots of batches so it doesn’t stick together and split the sauce
- Add a little more pasta water than you think you need (the pasta will continue to soak it up and the sauce will thicken on your plate).
I love it with a simple salad - some butter lettuce leaves tossed with extra virgin olive oil, good balsamic vinegar and salt flakes. Throw some sliced shallots in if you have them!
Cacio e Pepe
Ingredients
- 200g pasta (bucatini or spaghetti)
- 100g unsalted butter, cut into cubes
- 1 tsp cracked black pepper
- 10g finely grated Parmesan
- 20g finely grated Pecorino
- Extra Parmesan or Pecorino, to serve
Serves 2
Method
- Bring to boil a pot of salted water.
- Add pasta and cook until al dente.
- Melt ½ of the butter (50g) in a large pan over medium heat.
- Add pepper and cook (‘bloom’), until fragrant and toasted.
- Use tongs to pull pasta into the pan (this way you are reserving all the pasta water), then add ½ cup pasta water.
- Using a wooden spoon, stir the pasta, using the pasta as a whisk to emulsify the butter and pasta water into a sauce.
- Turn off the heat and add remaining butter, tossing it through the sauce.
- Very gradually add grated cheese, tossing bit by bit, until butter and cheese melts into the sauce. The key is adding the cheese gradually so it emulsifies instead of clumping together - this will ruin the sauce.
- Taste and season, adding more pasta water to thin it out nicely (as the sauce cools it will thicken, so I usually add slightly more pasta water than it appears to need in the hot pan).
- Serve, Molto buono!