Dinner · 20 min · Amounts not specified
Pasta alla gricia
Carbonara's older sibling without the egg. Rendered pork, pasta water, cheese, a lot of pepper. Emulsify. Don't add tomato. Don't add cream.
The sheet · 2 bowls · 20 min
easyWhy tonight. Carbonara's older sibling without the egg. Rendered pork, pasta water, cheese, a lot of pepper. Emulsify. Don't add tomato. Don't add cream.
What it needs
Nothing confirmed on your shelf yet — this list is the whole ask.
- pasta
- bacon
- parmesan
- black pepper
Good if you have them, fine if you do not: olive oil.
Method
- The ancestor of carbonara and amatriciana with neither egg nor tomato — pork, cheese, pepper and water.
- Render the pork slowly from cold so the fat comes out and the pieces crisp.
- Take the pork out before the cheese goes in, and return it at the end so it stays crisp.
- Cheese worked into pasta water off the heat into a paste, then the pasta tossed hard through it.
Technique coach
What the method is trying to make happen
Sequence, correction, heat and texture, equipment workarounds, scaling, and component reuse are available with this cook sheet.
An educational plan from a curated corpus. Not a nutrition, allergen, or doneness guarantee.
Cook or pour it, then edit the shelf if you emptied a bottle or used the last of something.
The technique underneath this
- Pasta and its waterUsing starchy cooking water to bind fat and cheese into a sauce that coats, instead of a sauce that pools.watery · clumped cheese · scrambled egg · dry and claggy
- VinaigretteDispersing fat into acid so it stays dispersed for as long as dinner takes, which is all it has to do.separates immediately · greasy · too sharp · dull
Going wrong while you cook it? Say what it is doing and the triage will tell you what is happening, the smallest move, and the instinct to resist.
Watch the technique behind this one
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Reviewed video matched to this method, not to the cuisine. Opens in a new tab.
Why each of these is on the list
What the ingredients are actually doing
- pasta
- The sauce finishes on the pasta, not the other way around.
- bacon
- Fat, salt and smoke, and the rendered fat is the more valuable half.
- parmesan
- Salt, fat and savory depth in a form that keeps for months.
- black pepper
- A fresh grind is a different spice from the pre-ground tin — the aroma is volatile and it is gone within days.
Missing one of them? The substitutions are written against those jobs rather than against a chart, so they say what each replacement costs this dish in particular.
Cooks from the same box
If you bought for this, you can already make these
Shares pasta, parmesan, black pepper
Cacio e pepe
Three names. The water is the fourth. Pepper toasted, cheese off the heat, pasta water until it emulsifies. Don't scramble it.
Shares pasta, parmesan, black pepper
Cacio e uova
Neapolitan cousin of carbonara without the pork. Eggs, a heap of cheese, pepper, pasta water. Off the heat. Don't scramble it.
Shares pasta, parmesan, black pepper
Cacio e zucchini
Same emulsion, extra vegetable.
Shares pasta, parmesan, bacon
Carbonara
No cream. Render the bacon, toss hot pasta in the fat, eggs and parmesan off the heat with pasta water until it turns to sauce.
Next
Cook it, then tell the shelf what you used.
The ranking is only as honest as the shelf behind it. Empty the cream, and everything that leaned on cream should stop being offered.