Foolproof Cacio e Pepe

Here’s the magic of this technique: The recipe sticks to the 3-ingredient-only premise, but it begins the sauce with cold water, forming the cheese and pepper into a thick, paste-like sauce, without any of the separated, gloppy cheese risk that can happen with pasta cooking water. No heat touches the sauce until it hits the piping hot pasta, so it melts only onto the noodles. At this point, you use spoonfuls of cooking water as needed to loosen it to a thick but lightly creamy consistency. And it works every time, which will I bet will a lot more often after today. The traditional pasta used for cacio e pepe is tonnarelli, sometimes sold as spaghetti alla chittara, a squared-off, slightly thicker spaghetti, but you use what you can get. I’m using standard thickness spaghetti here. The traditional cheese used for cacio e pepe is pecorino romano, a sharp, salty aged sheep’s milk cheese. If you can only get parmesan, it works too, but you’ll probably need to add salt to the sauce. While the recipe below works as written, you’ll probably want to make adjustments to taste, and to the intensity, age, and saltiness of your cheese. How much is “a lot” of freshly ground black pepper? It’s impossible to measure — too low in grams to register steadily on a scale, too varied in coarseness to measure in consistent measuring spoons, plus peppercorns vary in intensity, and your preference may not be someone else’s. Taste the cheese-pepper mixture. The pepper should be prominent and give it a sparkly kick. If you want more, add more. Remember that this sauce base will stretch over a lot of pasta, so if it tastes too intense, that’s probably correct. For what it’s worth, I counted 46 peppermill grinds on one batch, but I keep mine pretty tight/at a fine grind.

Good

% Daily Values based on a 2,000 calorie diet