My Carbonara

Hi, my name is Andrea. I am from Italy, but I live in Guernsey (UK). I am not a chef, but due to distance from home, nonna and mamma, I had to learn how to cook. For 2 years, I ate ready meal carbonara from stores in here, I was disappointed and tired, so I have learned how to do my own. In this article I will show you how I do it, in details, step by step and common mistakes.

Photos are taken with a professional camera , @flapiz helped me.

Ingredients for 2 servings:

• 77 gr pancetta or guanciale

• Parmigiano cheese

• Pecorino cheese

• 2 eggs yolks

• Water

• Salt

• Extra virgin oil

• Spaghetti

Let 's start with putting pancetta on a pan fry! In the uk it is hard to find guanciale, but pancetta can be used as well. Guanciale is softer and fattier than pancetta, but

pancetta can be crispier.

You can cook guanciale until it turns almost gold, while pancetta can stay over the fire for a bit longer. If you cook guanciale the fat will remain on the pan fry and you can remove it after cooking, you can do the same with pancetta. Do not add oil on the pan fry before you start cooking.

At the same time you can start adding water inside a pot and put it over a fire with some salt, we will need to wait until it boils.

While we wait for the water to boil, we can prepare the "carbocream". I use a mug for this step. Get 2 eggs yolk (mainly yolk) and put them into a mug

Then add a little bit of grated Pecorino, Parmigiano cheese and mix them.

As you can see in the picture above, we do not need to add a lot of cheese at this point. Make sure that the mix is liquid but dense. It should not be hard to mix, you can even use a fork.

At this point the water must be boiling and you can add spaghetti to it. Do not break spaghetti and make sure they do not touch the hottest part of the pot (walls). We do not want to burn them. They will bend in few seconds thanks to the hot temperature.

The normal spaghetti cooking time is 11 minutes, but in this case I have cooked them only for 8 minutes and 30 seconds. This because I will add them into a hot pan fry with the other ingredients for few minutes; In this way they will have time to mix and cook until a perfect result.

Pancetta can cook while spaghetti are swimming happily in hot water. When they are ready you can remove the fat oil. Keep stirring spaghetti so they do not get too close to each other (they tend to hug each other too much otherwise)

Let's remove water and add pasta to the pan fry where we cooked the diced pancetta, we can do this and add some extra virgin olive oil to it.

At this point we are also ready to add the "carbocream".

Our carbonara is almost ready, we only need to mix everything and add tomatoes and a little bit of cheese to our plates.

It is time to put our final result into our plates!! Thanks for following me until now.

Let's add tomatoes and a final touch of Pecorino to it.

The total preparation time is around 15 minutes, we both enjoyed our meal tonight. It is not expensive to cook this at home and you can get great results as well.

Let me know if you want to try this and if you like this kind of article.

Do you cook carbonara in different ways?

I am looking forward to hearing from you all soon.

Ciao for now.