Fettucine alla Carbonara

Fettucine alla Carbonara

8 oz fettucine
6 slices bacon
2 Tbsp butter
1 egg
1 cup half & half (or milk or heavy cream)
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
black pepper
finely chopped parsley for garnish (although it looks pretty, I usually skip this because I'm too cheap to keep fresh parsley around just for garnishing)

1. Cook pasta.
2. Cook bacon and crumble.
3. Combine lightly-beaten egg with butter and half & half and cook over medium heat until the mixture will just coat a metal spoon (approximately 6 minutes).
4. Toss pasta, bacon, parmesan, pepper and sauce together to coat and serve immediately.

This past week I made Fettucine alla Carbonara (per the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook). This is a recipe I've made many times before. It actually was one of the first recipes I tried out of this cookbook (Tyler loves alfredo and bacon so I thought this was a sure-fired winner) and was one I thought I had down. Step 3 is the tricky part in this meal (that and making sure to serve this immediately because it gets pasty the longer it sits). If you don't cook the sauce long enough, it doesn't coat the pasta. If you cook it too long and it starts to boil, the sauce isn't creamy but instead is kind of grainy and dry. When we were living up north, I could get it to just about the perfect consisency by simply following the recipe and cooking for 6 minutes. I don't know what but something has changed since we have moved to Houston. Here it takes sometimes 15 minutes or more to get it even close to coating the spoon. That has been very frustrating and has resulted in multiple runny or grainy versions of this meal. Friday I decided I would try to alter my methods to see if I could get that cooking time back down to 6 minutes.

My ingredients (minus some salt for the pasta water and some black pepper for garnish):

The switch up: Instead of simply lumping all of the ingredients together and cooking for the stated 6 minutes, I thought I'd try to speed things up a bit by melting the butter and preheating the pot before adding the rest.

I have always beaten the egg in the pot to avoid soiling another dish but since the pot was already warm this time it actually cooked the egg just a little before I could get the rest of the ingredients added (this didn't turn out to be a huge problem but Tyler did notice a small hunk of scrambled egg in his carbonara).


While melting the butter beforehand did speed up the process, it still took nearly 10 minutes to get the sauce to spoon-coating consistency. If anyone has any ideas why it takes longer in Houston rather than in Kansas and Missouri, please share. I'm still stumped.

Here is the finished product. It ended up tasting fine (Tyler seemed to enjoy his added scrambled egg) and being about the right consistency but I think that's more due to my experience with this dish than any of the tweaking I did.