Creamy sauce, good salty bacon, heaps of parmesan cheese and a healthy amount of fresh ground black pepper… Who doesn’t love a delicious Spaghetti alla Carbonara?
Now, the classic Carbonara recipe is a little bit different from ours. Instead of cream, they use the cooking water from the spaghetti to cream up the sauce, and they would not use garlic either. In addition, the original Carbonara recipe calls for guanciale, which is this super yummy Italian salted pork cheek, but it is almost impossible to find in a normal supermarket outside Italy, so if you can, use pancetta, and if you can’t get that either, bacon will do. We like to use thick cubes of extra salty bacon, because it has more flavour. Yuuum!
- Total Time: 25 minutes
- Yield: 2 portions 1x
Ingredients
- 200 g / 0,5 lbs spaghetti (or any type of pasta you prefer)
- 3 egg yolks
- 1 dl / 1/2 cup heavy cream
- 1 dl / 1/2 cup parmesan cheese, freshly grated
- 200 g / 0,5 lbs bacon, diced
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 1 handful fresh basil
- Freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
- Put on your pasta water, and salt it generously (at least one tbsp salt).
- Dice up your bacon, and fry it together with the garlic on medium heat. Make sure you don’t fry it too hard, you want the bacon to be soft and the garlic not burned. Set aside when done.
- Mix together the egg yolks, cream, parmesan. Lightly tear up the basil, and put it in the mix. Save a couple of leaves for garnish.
- When your pasta has one minute left on the clock, take it off and strain off the water.
- Put the pasta pot back on the stove, and reduce the heat to low. Quickly put in the bacon, garlic and egg mix.
- Mix the eggs and pasta well, making sure the mixture doesn’t burn.
- When the egg mix has turned into a creamy sauce that is coating all the spaghetti, take it off the stove, and serve immediately with more parmesan, fresh ground pepper and fresh basil!
Notes
This dish isn’t any good the next day, so we don’t make more than what we will eat the same day. In fact, the dish is at it’s very best right when it comes out of the pot, if it has been sitting on the bench for 15 minutes, it’s just not that good anymore. So eat it as soon as it is done!
This recipe is really versatile, and you can add so many different ingredients if you’d like. We like to sometimes put in red onion, cherry tomatoes or mushrooms.
- Prep Time: 10 minutes
- Cook Time: 15 minutes
- Cuisine: Italian