The Stories Are All True!

I love this sentiment:
Ma nooooo !!! L'uovo lo devi far cuocere almeno un pochetto... :(
Peccato perchè sarebbe stata veramente ottima...
Manca poco dai :)

And this one:


These pages are brilliant:

http://www.thepauperedchef.com/2007/03/pasta_carbonara.html
http://www.gennarino.org/carbonaraen.html


My take on carbonara:
There's not much to debate about carbonara having something to do with coal in Italy around the world wars in the 20th century. It was either a dish that became popular within coal-miner communities and/or a dish that reminded the Italians of coal miners. The word's root is definitely "coal," and "alla carbonara" means "in the style of the coal miners."

Some say that the black specks of pepper look like coal, thus the name. Others say coal miners got bacon from the Allied troops as they rolled up the Italian peninsula in WWII. Others conflate the two theories, and I'm down with that too.

I appreciate the spirit of the dish on many levels. First of all, it's one of those great peasant concoctions that carries with it all kinds of dignity and innocence and simplicity, and I eat that stuff right up. It's also quite challenging to get just right. For a pasta recipe with only four ingredients, this is a really tough one to pull off. Plus, my formative years in carbonara-making include late-night weekends in college and that's always a pleasant nostalgia.

I've made it for as many as ten people and I've made it a ton on my own. I've made it with bacon and pancetta and guanciale. I've made it with all different types of onions. I've made it with sweet sausage, with deep-fried zucchini, with peas, with scallions, with chives, with arugula, with asparagus, etc.

Anyone who serves you pasta, pork, and egg with cream is not serving you carbonara (this sentiment is repeated all over the Internet, as it should be). Carbonara is pink, yellow, and black.

Steve's Spaghetti Carbonara
Properly serves 4
Serves 3 if you're a close friend of mine

1 lb. bacon, diced a thumb's width at a time
2/3 lb. spaghetti
1 egg per serving

salt
black pepper
grated pecorino romano
extra-virgin olive oil

1. Fill pot with water, salt aggressively, transfer to stove on high heat.
2. Bring water to a boil, drop in the pasta, stir immediately.

3. Over medium heat, place bacon in a large pan with a little olive oil, stir occasionally.
4. Once the bacon looks a little crispy on the edges, turn the heat to its lowest.

5. Meanwhile, separate the eggs, keeping the yolks whole in one small mixing bowl, and letting the whites fall to the bottom of each serving bowl. Season the whites with coarse salt, black pepper, and pecorino.

6. Once the pasta has cooked about 2 minutes less than the package instructions, crank the heat in the bacon pan to high. Begin transferring the spaghetti to the bacon pan using tongs. Stir briskly, flip it around, stir some more. Distribute the spaghetti and bacon to the serving bowls, create a small nest in the center of the spaghetti in each bowl, and drop a yolk in it.

7. Quickly top with a shower of black pepper, a little grated cheese, and a splash of olive oil.
8. Instruct your guests to stir the yolk into their bowls, and enjoy!

Some words on my recipe (from original post):
I use bacon because it's the easiest to get and because it's delicious. It's much better with thick chunks of pancetta, and it's absolutely majestic, and truest to the original dish, with guanciale (pig's jowl/cheek meat).

The egg will cook, I promise. The water is boiling at 200+ degrees, and the pasta is well above 160 degrees (the federally recommended temperature for cooking "egg dishes"). You're taking a single yolk, breaking it up, and mixing it with boiling water and strands of piping hot noodles, it's going to cook! Also, this is why you use tongs to take the spaghetti out of the water - so you reserve some of that delicious boiling water.

You need a big saute pan/skillet for this operation. If the pan with the bacon is heaped up in more than one layer, it will just steam cooked and you'll lose the layer of flavor that comes from slightly browned meat. Consider cooking the bacon in batches if necessary.

I got the egg yolk nest idea from Mario Batali, and it really works the best. I always used to whip up some eggs and then pour it on top of everyone's dish at the end, but this often left egg yolk soup at the bottom of the dish and it's really easy to overcook the eggs this way. The egg yolk nest is really impressive and captures the spirit of the dish wonderfully.

This ratio of pasta-to-pork involves the absolute smallest acceptable quantity of pork. Any less pork (or any more pasta) will yield a dry-heaving mass of carbs and cheese - not ideal.

More words about the recipe (updated 4/8/09):
I had the great fortune of preparing this recipe in Italy, with ingredients from an Italian market. I bought great eggs, spaghetti, olive oil, fresh black peppercorns and beautiful, thick slices of pancetta. The results were a bit earth-shattering: the porkiness of this dish is much more pronounced when using real pancetta instead of bacon or the cured pancetta you get in American markets. I like it, and I believe this explains why grated cheese is in the original Carbonara recipes and seems a tad overkill when using bacon - because real pancetta/guanciale is not as naturally salty.

Accordion Breath

"Oh! You startled me!" said the woman with perfect skin to the man who couldn't feel his arms. He zig-zagged closer to the front of the queue at the bus stop. A relatively big guy with child-bearing hips felt like a little baby in his body, and he walked into a corner deli. The skinny-sideburned skinny guy behind the counter had the same name as the guy in the adult shell, and he was standing on a platform behind the counter. (This is a simple and effective tool to deter any kind of funny business in a corner store. Heh.) The shell moved quickly out of sight into an aisle with diapers and pet food. The guy behind the counter was exchanging pleasantries with an associate wearing a Chicago Bulls jumper.

The shell grew sad. The kind of deep sadness that doesn't have an equivalent because it's not really that bad. The kind of sadness that stems from indecision - not bad decisions. The sadness of sitting all alone and accepting that the inside of the shell is made of worthless, pathetic composite.

"I feel like a bug, a useless firefly, a pointless insect (which is a remarkable word)," oh come on you're being too hard on yourself! Remember when you used to fly high? Yeah, remember all that flying you did, remember all of it? "No, it was worthless, look at my shell." Stop it, everything going to be ok! Everything is delicious, everything is inexpensive. Everything is a breeze.

Sinister

The itch came early in the evening, and even earlier in the day now that the summer was behind us. You see, we enjoy these kinds of things now that the sun goes in so much earlier. The temperature and the seasons and whatnot. So I decided to traverse from my naked state to my clothed state: I picked up some gray socks. One of them was balled up in the other so I had to undo it with my dominant hand. Then I put the socks on, first my right foot then my left foot. I was naked except my light gray socks. Then I walked over to get my boxer-briefs. I thought about how annoying this election was.

Does anyone really know what's going on? I mean does anyone, ANYONE, claim to know what 56% of 300,000,000 people are thinking. It's kind of misleading. Heh. You can't research this stuff as with Consumer Reports. No one is "informed." No one has any idea what goes on behind closed doors or what politics is really all about or has a remotely "expert" understanding of the "demographics." I don't think ANYONE actually knows what's best or what will work out better or anything. Despite this, the outcome is actually really important. It's like when you pull out a board game and can't find the dice. You either have the right dice or you pull some dice from another game and it just doesn't work the same. At the end of the day though, you're picking dice.

I picked out my favorite boxers because I thought someone might see them today, why else do you wear your favorite underwear? You either do it deliberately, or you do it when you go out with no prospects. So they're light blue. Light blue boxers and gray socks. I started thinking about food again: $17 for a po'boy in NYC in August? Actually, if it's any good that's probably a decent price. Starting now.

I want to be crisp but I want to be real. I want to be slick but I want to be understated. I'm going for professional and blue-collar. I want to stand out among the conformers I hang out with enough that I'm lavished with attention but still subdued enough to come across earnest and humble.

There's this sign on Houston Street, it's a fun little sign, hehe, hoohoo ha ha. I rolled around and autumn leaves fell on top of me and it was amazing. It. was. surreal. I found America. After these two minutes of daydreaming, I lost myself. I lost myself. When I go outside, WAY outside, the risk is still so small. It's like turning your headlights off in the Pennsylvania backwoods for a second with every intention of turning them on a second after. I mean, what would I do if the lights didn't click back on? I'd slow down quickly and stop, right? And then a giant moose would be in front of my car like Jumanji.

I put on my white undershirt and that was fine. It was crispish. I was stretching my knees out and dancing a little while seated.

Red Vodka Room

"What would you like?"

After placing the plastic glass down, a young woman with bright blonde hair and a Redskins cap sat over the top of her glass and watched the Shiraz vibrate until it stopped. So that's when this incredible turn of events happened in the basement: Two guys had to replace one of the kegs, it was a two-man job after all. They had gone to remove the spent keg but the contents were under pressure or the pipe had some compressed air or something like that. Anyway one of them held the tense object and the other had to roll the spent keg out and roll the fresh keg in. I'm not really familiar with these processes so my description is lacking. So the smaller guy who held the tense object — with two hands — wasn't particularly strong, or tall, or confident, or experienced. As he unfastened the yolk...

"Gingersnap wheatgrass avocado Maldon pan-braised sepia." A man with a guitar stood looking at the rest of us and he picked the guy standing next to me out: "Oh god that guy needs to get laid." I was watching the sound equipment in that moment so I missed the look. Usually I can read that kind of thing. I am ashamed, he thought I thought, but I wasn't thinking that. In that moment I was only thinking about the audio stack. I mean I may have been thinking, "it would be cool to be the lighting guy or a stage hand or the guitar-tuner."

"A steady." So I looked at my 8-bit color reflection in the window and wasn't that pleased. In God We Trust. A little girl was exposed to brutal physical treatment at home and brutal emotional treatment at school. It was a tragedy.

"The kids were so bad this week, may I have a vodka tonic?" Slam and slam and slam and slam it must be Friday. Two kids knew the deal and they prepared for the event. They had this friend who promised one of them something and they had quietly competed for the lead. They were friends and they didn't need this complication. This is life. "Stoli."

And then it happened...he told her what he'd not wanted to say and what she didn't really want to hear.