A classic carbonara is hard to beat, especially when it’s miserable outside and all you want to do is curl up with a bowl of comfort food.
The combination of silky cheese sauce with crisp pancetta and black pepper is enough to get anyone’s mouth-watering, and despite its complex flavours, it’s actually very easy to make.
It’s also fast, coming together in less than 20 minutes – making it perfect for when you don’t have a lot of time to cook.
That’s according to top chef Nigella Lawson, whose “favourite” carbonara recipe is one you should be adding to your repertoire immediately.
She says she always has the ingredients in the house just in case she’s ever craving this simple yet delicious pasta dish.
Speaking about the dish on her website, Nigella said: “This is my favourite — along with all my other favourites. I love the buttery, eggy creaminess of the sauce, saltily-spiked with hot-cubed bacon: it’s comforting, but not in a sofa-bound kind of way.
“It feels like proper dinner, only it takes hardly any time to cook. This is my most regular dinner for two: I keep, at all times, the wherewithal to make it in the house.”
Here’s everything that you need to make this recipe, which serves one or two people depending on how hungry you are.
Nigella Lawson’s ‘favourite’ carbonara
Ingredients
- 200 grams spaghetti
- Two teaspoons olive oil
- 100 grams guanciale or pancetta in one piece
- 4 x 15ml tablespoons dry white vermouth or wine
- One egg yolk
- One whole egg
- Four tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
- a grind of black pepper
- a grating of fresh nutmeg
- approx. 20 grams unsalted butter
Method
Put water on for the pasta and when it’s boiling add a decent amount of salt and then, when it’s boiling again, the spaghetti.
Cut the rind off the pancetta (or guanciale if you’ve been able to get it) and put the rind in the pan with the oil on medium to high while you dice the rest of the pancetta. Then add it and fry for about five minutes, until it is beginning to crisp, and remove the rind.
Throw in the vermouth and let it bubble away for about three minutes until you have about two teaspoons or so of syrupy wine-infused bacon fat. Remove from the heat.
For the egg mixture, simply beat the yolk, the whole egg, the cheese, the pepper and the nutmeg together with a fork. When the pasta’s ready, quickly put the bacon pan back on the heat, adding the butter as you do so.
Remove a cupful of pasta-cooking water and then drain the spaghetti and tip it into the pancetta pan. Mix it well together, then turn off the heat.
Pour the egg mixture over the bacony pasta and quickly and thoroughly turn the pasta so that it’s all covered in the sauce. Don’t turn the heat back on or you’ll have scrambled eggs; in time, the hot pasta along with the residual heat of the pan will set the eggs to form a thickly creamy sauce that binds and clings lightly to each strand of pasta.
Add a tablespoon or so, going gently, of the pasta cooking water as you toss it all together. This will help make the sauce creamier.
