Get your black peppercorns, salt, Pecorino Romano and Spaghettoni. It’s time to make Cacio e Pepe.
In a dry 12-inch sauteuse or sauté pan, toast peppercorns over medium-low heat, shaking pan occasionally, until fragrant, about 2 minutes.
Using a mortar and pestle, grind peppercorns to yield a mixture that ranges from very coarse to medium-fine ground pepper.
In a large pot with a wide enough base to fit spaghettoni, bring 2.5 liters water and salt to a boil over high heat.
Working quickly, transfer 480 ml (2 cups) starchy pasta water to pan with pepper, and bring mixture to a boil over high heat. Using tongs, transfer spaghettoni to pan; keep pot with remaining pasta water on stovetop next to pan.
Continue cooking pasta, swirling and tossing frequently and adding more reserved pasta water in 120 ml (1/2 cup) increments to ensure liquid doesn’t over-reduce before pasta has finished cooking, until pasta is very al dente and liquid is reduced slightly and begins to cling to pasta, 3 to 4 minutes longer. Remove from heat.
Off-heat, add half (100 g) of cheese to pasta and toss until fully emulsified into sauce. Add remaining cheese and toss to combine. Adjust consistency of sauce as needed by adding more reserved pasta water in 60 ml (1/4 cup) increments until it coats pasta like a glaze and pools around edges of pan.
Plate up and enjoy!
Head to the link in bio to start your 14-day free trial and use promo code STUDIOSOCIAL25 to get 25% off your first year of Studio Pass.
Pasta alla gricia is the most under-appreciated of the “core four” Roman pastas. But gricia is every bit the equal of the other three—a silky emulsion of starchy pasta water and rendered guanciale fat, speckled with black pepper, with morsels of crispy pork, and a showering of salty Pecorino Romano.
Guanciale is cured pork jowl, and it’s a key ingredient in Roman cuisine. It is salty, fatty, and pleasantly funky. Look for firm, skin-on guanciale, with a black pepper cure on the meat sides. Always purchase guanciale in a single piece rather than buying precut packages. If you can’t source guanciale, you can substitute with pancetta (cured pork belly), but you’ll be sacrificing the signature barnyard funk that guanciale brings to gricia. We do not recommend bacon, which is cured and smoked, as a substitute.
Gricia is typically prepared with either a short tubular shape like rigatoni or a long-strand dried pasta such as spaghetti. Mezze maniche (half-sleeves) are essentially shorter rigatoni.
Mantecatura is an essential technique for properly finishing pastas and risotto and creating emulsified sauces that cling to the noodles or rice. For dried pasta dishes, the mantecatura involves pulling the pasta from the pot of cooking water when it’s well shy of al dente and adding it to the sauce with a good amount of starchy cooking water. You then finish cooking the pasta in the sauce at a rapid boil so that the starch sloughing off the pasta, as well as the starch from the added pasta water, act as a thickener and emulsifier, turning the reducing sauce into a glossy glaze.
Head to the link in bio to start your 14-day free trial and use promo code STUDIOSOCIAL25 to get 25% off your first year of Studio Pass.
Walk into any trattoria in Rome, and you’ll probably see the four most famous “primi della tradizione romana” on the menu: cacio e pepe, gricia, amatriciana, and carbonara. They have a lot in common, but with slight tweaks to ratios, and the addition of complementary players like tomato or egg, they each have a unique identity and flavor profile.
Cacio e pepe: Pecorino Romano and black pepper (pepe), emulsified with starchy pasta water. The simplest of the group, cacio e pepe packs a sharp and salty punch from the cheese, with floral back-of-the-throat heat from the toasted black pepper. Typically paired with long-strand dried pasta such as spaghettoni; short, tubular shapes like rigatoni; and fresh egg dough tonnarelli (aka spaghetti alla chitarra).
Gricia: Guanciale, black pepper, and Pecorino Romano, emulsified with starchy pasta water. Sometimes referred to as “amatriciana in bianco” (white amatriciana), gricia is like cacio e pepe with an extra dimension of flavor, thanks to porky, funky, fatty guanciale. It is quite common to find variations of gricia with the addition of spring vegetables like favas, artichokes, peas, and asparagus (combining these vegetables with guanciale forms the backbone of vignarola, one of the prized spring vegetable dishes in Roman cuisine). Typically paired with long-strand dried pasta such as spaghettoni and short, tubular shapes like rigatoni.
Amatriciana: Guanciale, tomato, black pepper, and chiles, finished with Pecorino Romano. (White wine, onion, and garlic are a matter of debate and preference.) Amatriciana is the brightest of the four pastas, thanks to the acidity and sweetness from the tomatoes. Typically paired with short, tubular dried pasta shapes like rigatoni, or long strand bucatini.
Carbonara: Both the richest and least assertive of the four—the eggs temper the bite of the Pecorino Romano and pepper, as well as the barnyard funk of the guanciale. Typically paired with long-strand dried pasta such as spaghettoni or short, tubular shapes like rigatoni.
Cacio e pepe—is there a better example of a dish being greater than the sum of its parts? With just three ingredients—pasta, pepper, and cheese—bound together with starchy pasta water to produce a punchy plate of in-your-face grownup mac and cheese.
If you cook pasta on a regular basis, it’s worth investing in a pan fit for the job. Dutch ovens are great for cooking long-simmering sauces, but they’re terrible for finishing pastas—they’re too heavy and awkward for tossing and swirling. Regular skillets with flared walls generally don’t have a large enough cooking surface area for finishing four servings of pasta, and the low walls usually result in a lot of sauce splatter on your cooktop.
With just two ingredients in the “sauce” (not counting pasta water), the quality of the cheese is key. Use DOP Pecorino Romano, a hard, aged sheep’s milk cheese with a sharp, salty bite. Fulvi and Locatelli are the two main Pecorino Romano producers that are widely available in the States, and both are very good. Don’t bother with domestic “Romano” cheeses, which are made with cow’s milk, and lack the age and umami punch of the real stuff.
The main problem cooks run into when making cacio e pepe is incorporating the cheese into the sauce so that it forms a creamy emulsion rather than a broken, stringy, and greasy mess. But with good technique and high-quality dried pasta, you can easily mitigate this issue. The simplest variables to work with are starch and temperature. Starch works as both an emulsifier and thickener—when introduced to the emulsion of water and Pecorino Romano in cacio e pepe, it helps prevent the proteins in the cheese from clumping together and forming the stretchy, grainy texture known as “filatura” in Italian.
Comment ANNIV to try Studio Pass free for 14-days and receive our Anniversary Sale code for 25% off your first year! Unlock access to 1000s of recipes developed by expert chefs & 100s of guides, tips and classes to help you become the smartest cook you know!
In Montreal for the weekend celebrating @caterosem birthday. Absolutely killer meal @leviolonmontreal , one of the best we’ve had in a long time. Dialed, confident, and delicious cooking top to bottom. Thank you so much to @chefdannysmiles and team for having us.
1. Grilled calamari with mussels, fennel, confit tomatoes, and aioli.
2. Tuna and tomato served with grilled bread for an outrageous bruschetta.
3. Lobster with braised leeks and hollandaise.
4. Melon, almonds, tropea onions, and sheep’s milk cheese.
5. Corn, zucchini, mint, squash blossoms, and a wildly good pine nut dressing with a ton of black pepper. Sleeper dish of the night.
6. Gnocchi di ricotta alla boscaiola. Top.
7. Stone fruit Eton mess. Super refreshing with the granita.
8. Choux with raspberries, diplomat cream, and marzipan.
9. Birthday girl.
10. Forza magica. Sempre.
11. La carte.
A rougher surface means a more porous pasta, as well as starchier water, all adding to that mantecatura perfection. @sfmarx explains what bronze-died or brass-died extruded means when it comes to pasta 🍝.
Ever wonder why sometimes you open that bag of pasta, only to find a candy cane shaped one? It comes down to how it’s dried. Dreaming of pasta streets! More tips, tricks, knowledge drops from Roman pasta aficionado @sfmarx when his pasta recipes go live this fall.
@sfmarx walks us through cooking doneness for dried pasta. 9 min is his perfect time for the ideal al dente, for this type of pasta (half sleeves). Cook times change based on pasta type.
5-6 min for “al dentist (too hard)
6-8 min for al chiodo (good)
9-11 min for al dente (perfect)
12-14 min for “al dentures” (throw it away, garbage)
This week in the @chefsteps studio.
1. Hot and numbing lamb noodle soup from @tomthechon for family meal.
2. Final boss tiramisù from @nickyg_straight_flexing (we have three versions dropping soon, from easy to expert).
3. Spray station.
4. Dialing in Basque cheesecake serving temp options with @nickyg_straight_flexing and @grantleecrilly
5. Family spread. There were plenty of handmade dumplings from @tomthechon as well – recipes, videos, and guides for those dropping next week.
6. Hero squad. @nickyg_straight_flexing@ryanmckinney and @ovijohnson working their magic, with a chocolate shield assist from Tim.
7. Due diligence/punishing ourselves with a store-bought tiramisù taste test.
8. Always like starting Seattle weeks with early morning solo time in the studio.
