A carbonara dish is perfect for a dinner party and quite an indulgent meal. Pasta carbonara is a carb-heavy meal, and so you don’t need large portions to get rid of your hunger. Instead, opt for smaller servings, which are full of flavour, as doing this is healthier for you. Cheese-lovers and pasta-lovers adore this combination meal. You may have thought that making a carbonara was difficult. But in fact it is one of the easiest dishes to make, and you can make it in large batches.
Warning: as there are so many carbohydrates in this meal, you should use a level of appetite management. Only serve a small bowl for each guest; if they would like a second helping then give them some more.
Ingredients
6 large eggs
100 ml of fresh double cream
130g of grated parmesan cheese
A splash of virgin olive oil
700g of fresh spaghetti pasta
1 pack of bacon (not smoky bacon)
1 Spanish Onion
Method
1. Cut the bacon into thin strips. Leave the fat on the bacon as this will add more flavour to the dish. (If you are a vegetarian, you can always substitute bacon for mushroom – this will create a different yet tasty dish.) Chop a Spanish onion into small cubes. Fry the bacon and the onion in a pan on low heat. The low heat will allow more flavour to come from the onion and bacon.
2. Beat the eggs until they are smooth. Add the cream and the parmesan and mix until you have one cream coloured sauce. This sauce will be the base of your carbonara. You will need to add this sauce to the pan, in which you are cooking the bacon. Ensure that the pan is not too hot, or you will risk curdling the cream in the sauce. If the cream curdles, then the entire meal will be inedible.
3. Begin to boil the pasta. As the spaghetti is fresh it will cook faster than dried pasta, so be aware that it only needs a few minutes in boiling water to cook. Fresh pasta is not only faster to cook; it also tastes better in a dish. If you can, you should try and buy more fresh pasta than dried pasta.
4. Once the pasta has had a few minutes in boiling water, it is time to drain it. You can drain your pasta over the sink into a sieve. It is vital that you let the pasta rest now for a matter of four or five minutes. These minutes are the time the pasta will need to soften. If you put the pasta into the pan immediately, it might break as it will still be hot from the boiling water.
5. Add the cooked pasta to your sauce. By this time, your sauce should have cooked and will be ready to serve. Mix the spaghetti through the carbonara. You will need to do this by turning the sauce in on the pasta. Don’t be too vigorous with this as you may end up making a mess.
Top tip: Serve with authentic style garlic bread. You don’t need a garlic butter to do this. All you need is some ciabatta and some fresh garlic cloves. Cut the ciabatta into slices (usually cutting the loaf in half works). Toast these slices under your grill. The bread will become rough as it toasts. Peel the garlic cloves and cut-off the hard end. Rub each slice of bread with garlic. It may look as though no garlic is going into the bread, but when you taste it, you will see that it has. This method is how Italians make garlic bread and goes well with a carbonara dish.