Pasta Carbonara (egg free version)

Serves 3-4

quantities below can vary a little – depending what you’ve got. If you’re short of pancetta/bacon then you may need a pinch of salt to season.

Pancetta, diced (100g tub max)
Mascarpone cheese (1 small tub)
parmesan chesse (1/4 cup, grated)
Pecorino cheese (1/4 cup grated)
1/4 pt double cream
1 clove garlic
1 tbl course ground black pepper
Dash of dry white wine
pasta of your choice – fusilli or fettuccine work well.

Get the pasta cooking. However long that takes to cook is how long you have left to cook the sauce. 6 mins maybe? you need to be prepared and ready! Fry the pancetta in oil, add the crushed whole garlic clove to the pan to flavour it all towards the end. Don’t let the garlic brown, but make sure it infuses the pancetta and oil. add a good dash of wine to the pan to deglaze, and remove the garlic (bin it). Once reduced to a syrup, add the mascarpone and melt gently. Once fluid, add the double cream. you should add enough cream to make the sauce the right consistency. add the cheeses and black pepper and mix till melted but not boiling. Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce.

The pasta will go in hot, so it will continue cooking for a few minutes – which means your sauce will go from perfect to thick and claggy really quickly. To combat this, you can either make the sauce a little runnier than you want it, or let the sauce cool for a couple of minutes before adding pasta, or (my favourite) retain a little of the starchy water when you drain the pasta, and add this back in to the sauce to loosen it off just before serving. (Remember a real carbonara uses eggs not cream/mascarpone, and uses the heat of the pasta to cook the eggs – so this is a workaround if you’re avoiding eggs)

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