fancy carbonara

A traditional carbonara is made with spaghetti, eggs, pecorino romano cheese, guanciale and cracked black pepper. Of course, you are probably used to a carbonara with bacon or pancetta, since guanciale, or cured pork cheek, is hard to find outside of Italy, except at specialty stores. You also might expect to find some garlic or parsley or maybe even onions thrown in there, and you're probably used to a carbonara sauce thickened with cream or half and half. You might not even think twice about using parmesan in lieu of romano (although having recently attempted such a substitution for the first time, I urge you not to). Although your conception of carbonara might deviate from the original dish first served in Rome, you'd expect most people to agree that both feature the same flavors and textures, and that such variations or adaptations are true to the spirit, if not the letter of the culinary law.

I'd be right there with you, had I not recently discovered that there is a small but vocal community of carbonara purists out there, trolling the web in order to find and attack the authors of so-called "bastardized" carbonara recipes. Edward Schneider of The New York Times became one such victim when he blogged about his attempt to recreate at home the carbonara dish he had been served by Joël Robuchon at his restaurant in Monte Carlo.

This carbonara uses small bite-sized pasta such as acini di pepe, although we settled for orzo. The pasta is served with crispy strips of bacon, cracked black pepper and a rich creamy sauce of caramelized shallots, parmesan cheese and heavy cream. Schneider suggests slow cooking an egg for 45 minutes at 145 degrees and cracking one into each serving, but when we tried to fudge this, we wound up with hardboiled eggs. So we had egg salad for the next day's lunch and just put a raw egg into each bowl of hot pasta and then stirred it all together and ate our soupy carbonara with a spoon.


orzo carbonara

As amazing as that dish sounds, folks immediately went to town in the comments, belittling Schneider for calling such a dish a carbonara, and going so far as to demand a correction from the Times and less sloppy and careless global reporting. It was all pretty ridiculous. (Bonus points if you can pick out Boyfriend's inflammatory comment aimed at putting uppity carbonara purists in their rightful place.)

Robuchon is a masterful French chef. He was actually voted the chef of the CENTURY, so he's got nothing to prove, and I'm sure he's well aware of the "true" recipe for carbonara. That being said, the chef of the century is not going to serve the traditional carbonara as perfected by Roman peasants. He's going to take that tried and true recipe and play around with it, tweaking the ingredients and methods in order to create something new and high end that both pays homage to and is evocative of the original dish. Great chefs don't replicate, they create.

Now, I am sure that "real" carbonara is fucking fantastic. I'd love to make it some day. Perhaps I'll see the error of my ways and never again add cream or garlic or parsley or bacon. However, I'm pretty sure I'm always going to think the carbonara I grew up with is delicious— because it is, bastardization or not! And so was Schneider/Robuchon's!

Basically, the way I feel is that if someone thinks that carbonara has cream in it, that doesn't make them an idiot and that doesn't even make them wrong. Their understanding of the dish is simply filtered through an American lens. For better or for worse, cream and bacon have become part of the dish's identity, and people can and should call pasta with bacon and a cream/egg/cheese sauce carbonara. That's cultural evolution for you.

Our enjoyment of food is deeply tied to memory and nostalgia, so I can understand being attached to a particular recipe. For instance, I doubt you'd be able to convince me there's a better way to make pesto. However, I'm hardly about to attack someone if they have a different idea about how to prepare it. What is the kitchen, if not a place to experiment with taste and smell and flavor? And as Schneider points out, the flavors of carbonara "seem to lend themselves to being taken apart and put back together again." Why not change things up up a bit?

Recipes aren't written in stone, and each person is going to have their own tastes and opinions. It's subjective. In any dish there is always room for change, and dare I say it, maybe even for improvement? To be too attached to any one recipe is just close-minded and irrational. Don't let your culinary creativity be stifled, and don't worry if stodgy purists think you're calling your dish the wrong thing! Cook and eat what you love, whatever you call it.

If, by any chance, you'd like to read more about the real carbonara, one particularly obnoxious fellow has written a minor epic detailing the reasons why you must never, under any circumstances, deviate from the tried and true Roman original. There's also this less pompous and self important piece on traditional carbonara technique and an accompanying recipe from Saveur, although it uses parmesan rather than romano. I'm fascinated by the thought of a silkily creamy sauce made only from eggs and cheese, so don't be surprised if I blog a more traditional version of this dish sometime soon.

Finally, let me just say that however you may change, adapt or "bastardize" any of the meals we describe here on garlicus maximus, I wish you the best of luck in your kitchen. May all that you eat be delicious!

cooking 2010

Nathan and Jess both independently have suggested I keep note of everything that I cook, so I figured it could be somewhat of a project for the new year.

I didn't cook anything the week after Christmas, but I think I quite made up for it this week.

Nathan recently got me this great book, The Flavor Bible, and I happened to flip open to the monkfish page on Monday. For every ingredient, they have complied a list of other ingredients that accomplished chefs consider to be complementary, as well as brief descriptions of their go-to dishes for that ingredient. Serendipitously, monkfish was described as a great match with cabbage, garlic and potatoes, (all of which I had recently gotten from my CSA food co-op), and bacon, (which I pretty much always have on hand). Since I wasn't sure of what to do from there, I typed in those ingredients into google, and came up with this recipe, which included a couple of other things I had lying around: shallots, red wine, fresh thyme, bay leaves, orange juice, and chicken stock, which I had made and froze myself. All I had to buy was the parsley and monkfish, which cost $10 a pound.

I quartered the shallot and also a small onion and I think a couple of smashed garlic cloves, and sauteed them with the bay leaves, parsley and thyme in some butter and olive oil. I added a cup of wine, some stock, the juice of two small oranges, some salt and pepper and cooked the cabbage in the mixture for 40 minutes. There was a lot of liquid involved, but in the end it all cooked off, leaving a deliciously flavored vegetable behind. I think that the homemade stock really gave it an added richness and depth of flavor, but even without it this cabbage would have been a winner.

Meanwhile, I had marinaded the fish in olive oil with salt and pepper for about a half an hour. Before we started cooking it Nathan had to bone the thing, because I was not paying attention and didn't ask the fish guy to do it for me. My boyfriend is incredible, so he did this perfectly. So impressive. By the way, if you don't know, monkfish is incredibly hideous. We quickly pan seared it in the cast iron skillet, and then wrapped it in two slices of bacon and threw it in the oven for about 15 minutes. I stuck it under the broiler in the end so that the bacon would get nice and crisp. Amazingly, the fish was moist and delicious, but not undercooked. A triumph.

My recipe suggested preparing mashed potatoes, but I wanted something a little more toothsome. The potatoes I sliced thinly and pan fried with garlic in a little bacon fat, (sorry mom and dad). There were way too many of them in the pan, but I kept shifting them around to get as many as possible crispy. I finished them off in the oven with the lid on, and they were great. The crispy ones were great, but even the ones that weren't got cooked through nicely, and there were tasty garlic nuggets every so often.

Together, this made for an amazing meal. The Flavor Bible wasn't playing around when it suggested combining all these different things. Separately, each component of the meal was delicious, but together, the ingredients really sang. Wow. A symphony of taste!

Wednesday night we went a more traditional route and fried up some crispy onions with a couple of small blue seared shoulder round steaks from Whole Foods. These were pretty much raw in the middle, which was really rich and meaty tasting, but probably not a way I'd chose to eat my steak in the future, especially if it was a normal supermarket steak. As our side dishes, we made up some rice, a roasted red pepper, and creamed spinach with a poached egg. We used frozen spinach upon Nathan's insistence, but I'll grudgingly concede that it wasn't even half bad. The other ingredients were pretty basic, just half and half, flour, onions, garlic, butter and nutmeg. It was easy and delicious. Do not fear egg poaching-- just heat a couple of inches of water until bubbles are forming on the sides and then crack in your eggs for four minutes. Remove carefully with a slotted spoon, (Nathan managed to break my yolk, which was so sad and left me way less runny goodness) and this WILL be perfect.

Thursday I was home alone and made one of my standard issue dinners: panfried pork chops, orrechiette with sauteed mushrooms in a homemade tomato sauce with fresh rosemary, parsley and basil, and some steamed broccoli rabe with garlic and oil which I kind of burned because I am bad at cooking alone. I also overcooked the pork, which was a thinner cut than I am used to having. This dinner was not all that well executed, I'm sorry to say. I think I was missing my boy in the kitchen! However, I will say that the pasta was great with some grated Romano cheese. Still have some of that in the fridge to look forward to!

Saturday, Nathan and I had Bart over for dinner and made lamb chops with a radish salad and a potato leek gratin. We boiled the potatoes in the left over half and half from the creamed spinach, and sauted the leeks with butter and a little bit of bouillon because I didn't have a chance to bring my stock over to his house. We actually forgot to cream the leeks, and just poured the extra half and half over the whole thing, which ended up having an extra layer of potatoes on the bottom. This wound up being a little watery, but delicious.

Thinly sliced radishes with plenty of olive oil, garlic and salt and pepper are tasty enough on their own, but try tossing in some leek tops and the crunchy, slightly bitter leaves. Drizzle on the balsamic, and you have an amazing salad.

The third component of the meal offers this cautionary tale: Never cook with jerk seasoning on the stove top unless you have a super effective fume hood, (I suspect the oven would be better, but not a perfect solution). Nathan and Bart made this crucial mistake with their lamb, and we all paid the price. Our lovely chops had been on the griddle for only a few minutes when the jerk spices started burning, and the fumes became unbearable. It was like pepper spray, and Bart and I beat a quick retreat back to Pete's room to take refuge from the smoke. I could barely breathe and could not stop coughing. Nathan somehow managed to continue manning the stove, although he was forced to undercook the lamb a bit to stop the meat from releasing toxins into the air. That stuff is lethally hot, as my lamb managed to take on a considerable amount of heat just from being cooked in close proximity to their stupid jerk sauce. My lips were on fire. Despite that major hiccup, it was a tasty meal, with plenty of good wine courtesy of Bartosz.

All of these meals were great, (or would have been without hellish jerk seasoning), and were actually gluten free, save for the pasta and creamed spinach, which easily could be if you used the right flour and gluten free nutmeg. And that's my week in the kitchen in review, for posterity's sake!