* Either bacon, pancetta, or guanciale, is heated in oil with cracked black pepper
* Pasta is boiled to al dente.
* Egg and Pecorino Romano are mixed together and then held in reserve to combine at the end with the pasta and the pork to form a gently cooked sauce.
Bacon fat and pasta is gross by itself. Only few teaspoons, if even that, of bacon fat is reserved but combined with a greater amount of olive oil, up to a few tablespoons full.
In a fit of insanity I included chopped onion and jalapeño. I am not using any garlic because I do not feel like messing with it and I do not care for the taste of it today. You will not see onion and jalapeño in any reasonable recipe, but I am suiting myself and not shooting for any Michelin stars here.
The eggs were brought out of refrigeration and rapidly brought up to room temperature by soaking them in hot tap water. In this way the whole eggs still in their shells are tempered to room temperature. That way, the heated pasta will not meet with cold egg. The egg is expected to partially cook and to form a sauce without scrambling or fully cooking. See, eggs do not go:
uncooked --> uncooked --> uncooked --> ding! completely cooked.
Rather, it's a process that occurs along a curve. They go:
uncooked --> nearly cooked --> thickened --> cooked --> overcooked.
The aim is to use the heated pasta itself to provide the heat necessary to partially cook the egg to a thickened state, so it helps to have the eggs already warmed up.
This room temperature egg and cheese mixture awaits the heated pasta and ham with pepper.
I read on internet pages that British, French, American, Canadian, Australian, Japanese, and Russian cooks tend to include cream. I have cream but chose not to use it. I did not want to dilute the eggs, and that seemed a little too close to Alfredo.
I read further that some include peas or broccoli for color, and sometimes even mushrooms. But that is getting into primavera territory. But I am glad that I noticed that people add peas. I would not have thought of that myself, and it seemed like a very good idea. It turns out they are great. I have never been a big fan of peas, and I cannot explain this anti-pea bias. How did I become an antipeaite? I do not know. Maybe it is the way they roll around all over the place. Or the way they must be individually stabbed to line up on the tines of a fork. Maybe I was force-fed Gerber's Pea Baby Food as an infant and formed a recalcitrant mental block early on. Whatever the case, they sure are delicious now.
The trick, and it is a bit of a trick to combine the hot pasta combination into the egg and cheese mixture without scrambling the eggs or conversely end up with raw eggs, is to gauge the two temperatures being combined. The eggs are already at room temperature and not cold. The pasta is hotter than boiling water as it has just been turned in heated oil. The cook can test with a sample of pasta and observe the effect when dropped into the egg and cheese mixture. Should the egg that touches the pasta immediately scramble, then the cook can stir the sample into the egg which then tempers the egg/cheese slightly. The next portion transferred can be lifted higher allowing a few seconds to cool by the airlift transfer, the cook can pause, do a little twirl, dance the lambada there in the kitchen for a few seconds while holding the pasta aloft. The point is to judge the heat of the pasta and the effect it has on the egg before dumping the entire mass one into the other.
Behold the magic and wonder of faintly cooked egg.
Cilantro and parsley
Cilantro and parsley are not ingredients of carbonara. Nevertheless, today I feel like using both of them, since I have them both and because I would like to have the chlorophyl freshness they impart. This forfeits the authenticity of my carbonara but I do not care.
There are a couple of ways to store bunches of fresh herbs like this that help extend their useful life. One way is to wrap the entire bunch in damp paper kitchen towels then wrap that wet bundle in plastic. Another way is to treat the bunch like a floral bouquet and provide them a little vase with water, here a plastic drinking cup. The bundle in its cup is covered with the plastic bag in which the bunches were brought home so that the dehumidifier within the refrigerator does not dry them out. In the refrigerator the bunches abide in darkness and this makes me feel sorry for them. To satisfy myself, and to possibly help the plants try to live a little in light instead of dying slowly in darkness, I bring them out into the light for a few hours during the day. It makes me feel better. But I keep them covered because it is so dry where I live, they hopelessly wilt otherwise without a retentive plastic covering.
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