Corfiot cuisine is more Italian than Greek. I use Corfu´ s pride, nubulo, for a different Carbonara proposal
ingredienti per 4 porzioni (costo circa 3 € ap)
- Sale
- 320 g di spaghetti
- 5 medium egg yolks + 1 medium egg, organic of course
- 8 slices of pancetta
- 40 gr nubulo cut in dice
- 120g pecorino romano
- Pepe nero
I think that pasta alla Carbonara is one of the most famous dishes in the world. Thousands of restaurants in Greece, UK, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium etc offer this classic Italian dish. In the majority they are awful, that´s why I never order Carbonara outside Italy. Only once the last ten years, I decided to order a Carbonara away from the Italian territory and I ended up looking a dish with fresh pasta, cream and ……….. a slice of bread. The specific Dutch cook should finish under a guillotine.
Somebody may think: “Hey cook, what the hell other cooks do and they cannot prepare a descent Carbonara?”
I answer my friends.
a) Most of them they overboil pasta. There are some other pasta dishes that overboiled spaghettis could hide in the rest of ingredients. But Carbonara is a minimal dish, it contains just a few ingredients, so everything must be perfectly made.
b) Some others use peculiar pasta shapes, as our friend the Dutch Robespierre did. Carbonara cannot be made with tortellini, farfalle or fresh pasta.
c) Many of them use cream instead of eggs. FUCK. I am not purist, I don´t think we have to strictly follow protocols, I like some fusion changes, even today´ s dish has something different, but there is a limit. Egg yolks are silky meanwhile cream is vulgar. I hate cream in cooking, I NEVER NEVER use it. Cream is an easy “solution” for some restaurants who cannot spend “hands” for the sensitive egg mix.
d) Τhey add onion!!!! What the fuck can onion offer to a sauce like this? It will totally destroy egg mix silkiness, which must be interrupted only by a piece of top quality cold cut.
e) They garnish with parsley!!!!! Hey, Van Robespierre, do you want some company?
These are the 5 things you have always to avoid. OK, your carbonara will not be perfect if you use rigatoni instead of paccheri or linguine instead of spaghetti but it could be descent. Don´t worry if you cannot find guanciale or pecorino romano, ingredients not easy to find outside Italy, use pancetta and parmigiano, the dish will also be descent if you don´t make other mistakes.
Nubulo is top quality cold cut from Corfu, my homeland. It has a unique not too smoky aroma as speck and a very balanced saltiness. I wanted to use it, for a different but respectful to the above rules Carbonara, there are thousands of recipes with classic Carbonara dishes on the web, I have nothing more to offer. But I had to overpass a problem. Nubulo is lean, so I had to use a fatty cold cut as pancetta. Nubulo is also difficult to find away from Greece, so I think it is obvious that you will cook this dish with pancetta or even better with the first choice ingredient, the guanciale.
First of all we bring eggs to room temperature. We can steel some time if we break them instead of keeping them whole. We remove the white part of 5 eggs (we keep them in fridge for other uses).
Meanwhile, beginning from cold pan, we gently fry pancetta slices aiming to melt their fat and to extract it from the solid part. We remove the fried pancetta (which must have no fat at all) and we keep it for a different use.
We bring to boil a big pot of very salted water. When the water is ready we add the spaghetti. Meanwhile we start stirring the egg mixture and also add a small portion of cheese with a whisk.
When the pasta is ready, we drain it and we put it in a big mixing bowl. We add half a small ladle of hot water in the egg mixture and we put it into the bowl with the spaghetti. We start mantecare the spaghetti, moving the bowl up and down aiming to provoke a mix of pasta and sauce. We add the pancetta fat and the rest of cheese and we continue mixing.
We put in plates and we add some nubulo dice (raw) and ground black pepper.
If you cannot find nubulo I suggest you to use guanciale, to remove its fat as shown above and to use its solid part instead of nubulo.
