Carbonara is an Italian pasta dish from Rome made with egg, hard cheese, guanciale (or pancetta), and pepper.
The recipe is not fixed by a specific type of hard cheese or pasta.
The cheese is usually Pecorino Romano.
Spaghetti is the usual pasta, however, fettuccine, rigatoni, linguine, or bucatini are also used.
Either guanciale or pancetta can be used.
Another common substitute outside Italy is lardons of smoked bacon.
The dish was created in the middle of the 20th century.
How to Prepare Italian Carbonara Dish:
The pasta is cooked in moderately-salted boiling water.
The guanciale is briefly fried in olive oil so that it does not become too crispy and instead remains soft.
A mixture of raw eggs, grated pecorino (or a mixture of pecorino and Parmesan), and lots of ground black pepper is combined with the hot pasta away from additional direct heat to avoid curdling the egg, either in the pasta pot or in a serving dish.
The fried guanciale is added, and the mixture is tossed, creating a creamy sauce.
Although various pasta shapes can be used, the raw egg can only cook properly with a shape that has a sufficiently large ratio of surface area to volume, such as spaghetti, linguine or fettuccine.
Guanciale is the most commonly used meat for the dish in Italy, but pancetta is also used and in English speaking countries bacon is often used as a substitute.
The usual cheese is Pecorino Romano or occasionally Parmesan.
Recipes differ in the use of egg: some use the whole egg, others only the yolk, some a mixture.
As for olive oil, you can use butter instead and another addition is garlic but its rarely used.
Here are the Main Ingredients of Carbonara Italian Dish:
Historical Facts About Italian Carbonara Dish:
- There are many theories for the origin of the name, which may be more recent than the dish itself. Since the name is derived from carbonaro (the Italian word for charcoal burner), some believe the dish was first made as a hearty meal for Italian charcoal workers.
- Pasta alla carbonara is unrecorded before the Second World War; notably, it is absent from Ada Boni's 1930 La Cucina Romana.
- The dish is first attested in 1950, when it was described in the Italian newspaper La Stampa as a dish sought by the American officers after the allied liberation of Rome in 1944.
- It was described as a Roman dish, when many Italians were eating eggs and bacon supplied by troops from the United States.
- It was included in Elizabeth David's Italian Food, an English-language cookbook published in Great Britain in 1954.
Information Source: Wikipedia