Rules for making an Italian carbonara (hint: there's no bacon) (2024)

FAQs

What can you substitute for bacon in carbonara? ›

However, if you can't find guanciale, pancetta is the next best substitute – not bacon. When you're frying the guanciale, avoid using olive oil. Start the pan from cold and let it render. The idea is to fry the meat in its own fat.

The golden rule of cooking carbonara is to never cook the sauce over direct heat once the eggs are added.

What not to put in Spaghetti Carbonara? Don't put garlic, cream, milk or butter. It is not needed. It is fine if you want to make a dish with those ingredients, but if you want to learn how to make this dish correctly, use only pecorino, eggs/egg yolks, black pepper, guanciale, and pasta water.

If you want your carbonara to be as authentic as possible, you should be using guanciale, not bacon or pancetta. Guanciale is cured pork cheek. It looks a little like bacon, but isn't smoked, so its flavor leans more towards pancetta. Rich, unctuous and packed with umami, guanciale is what real carbonara is made from.

Sometimes called “Italian bacon”, pancetta is a pork belly side, salted and cured with pepper, spices and rolled into a casing. It is then potentially dried/cured for several months. It is not smoked like bacon.

While a simple spaghetti carbonara recipe uses pancetta as the meat and a traditional Italian recipe may use guanciale, a cured pork, De Laurentiis combines bacon and pancetta to give her dish a unique salty kick. But she ups the ante even more with a secret ingredient — cinnamon.

Why It Works. A sauce of mostly yolks has a richer, silkier, tighter texture than one made with only whole eggs. A mixture of Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano-Reggiano delivers that essential Roman flavor without making the pasta taste excessively salty or sharp.

Why shouldn't you put cream in carbonara? ›

Why do restaurants make Carbonara sauce with cream? It should be just eggs, cheese, black pepper and pancetta. But then some people think that won't hit the palette of people from elsewhere. So it gets “adjusted” to local taste and the cream gets added.

To avoid the dreaded scramble, the goal is to not let your eggs get too hot too quickly. Rather than add your eggs straight into your carbonara pan, crack them into a different bowl with the Pecorino. From there, you have a few options for how to combine the mixture with your pasta.

What can I use instead of pancetta? Bacon is the best substitute for adding flavour to soups, stews, pasta and salads. For charcuterie or wrapping meats or poultry, prosciutto is your next best option.

The Italian version doesn't use cream or ham. It is made with pancetta (pork belly meat that is salt cured, also referred to as Italian bacon), Parmigiano Reggiano or pecorino romano cheese, eggs, and black pepper—called the basics. The pork is fried in fat, usually olive oil.

Pasta cacio e uova, or cas' e ova in Neapolitan dialect, is a simple Campanian dish that can be most easily summarized as "meatless carbonara." Like carbonara, cas' e ova features a silky, temperature-sensitive sauce made with eggs and a mixture of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino Romano that coats al dente ...

If you want the best option for a cheap alternative to pancetta that doesn't change the flavor much, I'd suggest salt pork. Bacon is a great sub, but traditional carbonara actually uses guanciale, which is cured hog jowl.

Outside Italy, variations on carbonara may include green peas, broccoli, tenderstem broccoli, leeks, onions, other vegetables or mushrooms, and may substitute a meat such as ham or coppa for the fattier guanciale or pancetta.

Turkey bacon can be used as a substitute for bacon where religious restrictions forbid the consumption of pork. Also known as "fakon", it is marketed as a bacon alternative and available in supermarkets. It is generally high in protein and fiber, yet low in fat, and typically has no cholesterol.