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loretta lynn's pasta?
for dinner tonight we made pasta à la carbonara, which roughly translates to coal miner’s pasta. no, that’s “the coal miner’s daughter”! this dish is actually a very simple dish to make, very tasty, but definitely not something carbophobes would enjoy since it’s pasta. it’s also not very kosher since it’s got dairy and meats and a form of pork.
the recipe is quite simple. boil enough water to cook a pound of pasta, with a pinch of salt. you then finely grate two ounces, by weight, of romano cheese and 3/4 ounce, again by weight, of parmesano regianno cheese. you mix these two cheeses and set them aside.
you then take half a pound of bacon and cut it into strips and then into little squares, but i’ve accidently used prosciutto which worked well. the first variation we make is we strip most of the excess fat, render it in a frying pan, and use it instead of the olive oil that the recipe calls for.. besides, it’s baconier this way. we also chop up a few cloves of garlick for our second variation, which is that we fry the garlick in with the bacon. the recipe we found says to add it at the end, but we’ve found that the garlick is a bit too overpowering for the rest of the pasta, so we fry it with the bacon. the bacon and the garlick are fried until they’re nice and brown.
once the bacon and garlick are nice and browned, add half a cup of dry white wine. basically you want enough wine to deglaze the pan. this is where variation number three comes in, we have used other forms of wine like portuguese vihno verde or madeira or italian marsala wines. we haven’t really used other cooking wines, but feel free to try any other white wine if you wish. you then let this reduce down by half the volume. after it has reduced, go ahead and strain the bacon and garlicky bits, leaving only the oil and wine deglaze for use on the pasta.
once the pasta is cooked, drain it and set it aside.
in a medium sized bowl, mix in three eggs into the cheeses and get the mixture to a nice consistency. since this egg/cheese mixture is going to be added into the pasta, you want to get the pasta and bacony/garlick mixture very hot so it can cook thoroughly. if you feel that the pasta and bacony/garlick mixture isn’t enough to coat the pasta, feel free to add some extra virgin olive oil, just to coat it evenly. once you add the egg/cheese mixture, toss until the egg is cooked thoroughly, add the fried bacon and garlick. add some fresh ground pepper and salt to taste. mangia!
enjoy!
(oh yeah, since i’m too lazy to go look for the cookbook we used to make this, i’m only retracing the steps in my head. if there are any comments, questions, concerns, please leave me a comment here so i can address it here)
