By Living Room Realty, August 26, 2022
This summer, I was able to get away to Tuscany and enjoy some time with friends. While there, I enjoyed steak, shopping for leather goods, and of course, pasta. One of my favorite Italian dishes, cacio e pepe, became a new favorite.
Coming home to Portland, I took it upon myself to master this dish. At it’s core, cacio e pepe has only three ingredients: a spaghetti-like noodle, pepper, and pecorino romano. I like using bucatini or linguini, but plain old spaghetti works, too. Some recipes include butter, oil, or cream, but I wanted to nail this dish without any additional ingredients.
When I first tried, I found it to be delicious, but I had added too much water to the cheese and ended up with clumps of cheese and water at the bottom of my bowl. After watching many videos on how to make it, with lots of flipping pasta into the sauce and feeling like I may never master this dish, I found smittenkitchen’s foolproof recipe to truly be just that:
https://smittenkitchen.com/2018/09/foolproof-cacio-e-pepe/
With the first try of Deb’s technique from Smitten Kitchen, I ended up with creamy deliciousness and a sauce that didn’t fall off of the pasta. Mangia!
