Food Lab Basics: POV Cacio e Pepe (Roman mac and cheese), in about 12 minutes.

hey everyone this is Kenji Lopez Ulta I'm here at home I hope y'all staying safe and healthy and washing your hands today I'm going to show you how to make probably the easiest pasta dish around cacio e pepe it's kind of like Italian Roman mac and cheese and if you're looking for the traditional version I'm probably gonna piss off your Italian grandmother so just warning you down here we go alright so the first thing we want to do so I got this pasta there's water boiling I'm gonna add some salt to it there's no reason to add salt at the end you can start it right when you put the water on I'm only doing it at the end to show you how much salt I put in there and now we need our pasta that's bucatini spaghetti would be the normal thing bucatini looks like I only got bucatini alright well do bucatini any really long skinny pasta will do bucatini is basically like spaghetti that has a hole down the middle it takes a little bit longer to cook but that's fine so you'll see I'm doing it in a skillet very very untraditional way to do it most people tell you that you need a giant pot of boiling water this is actually not the case I don't know where that rumor got started probably because with fresh pasta you certainly do need a lot of boiling water otherwise it sticks together also with like super old-school pasta that's done on brass sized actually let me show you so sorry this I know these 2 brands of Foster are different both of them are both of them are good brands of pasta but one of them is better than the other and it's because if you look at the surfaces so I don't know if you can see this but I'll try and be as still get as good lighting and be as still as possible so one of these is relatively smooth on the surface and that's because well I believe it's done on brass ties maybe this one's done on I'm sorry I believe it's not on Teflon dies well maybe this is that this one's done on a really smooth smooth brass tie this brand of posh you can see it it's a much rougher surface you can actually see sort of like nooks and crannies and cracks in the pasta and that's because it's extruded very slowly through brass ties as opposed to very modern pasta which is like the stuff you get in the supermarket the really cheap stuff that's extruded on teflon dyes which allows them to extrude it much much faster but the edges end up smoother the reason that's important is because when you have these rough edges what that translates is what that translates to is more starch coming off the surface of the pasta into your pasta water and that is important for reasons I'll show you why soon and yeah that's why different types of pasta are better or worse and you know if you have if you have like a super old-school pasta like that that's made really really traditional way oh the other big difference is that older pot old-school pasta is dried of a lower temperature whereas modern pastas dried at a higher temperature when you dry it at a higher temperature what you do is you kind of deactivate the starch so that it doesn't thicken your sauces and emulsify them in the same way I'll show you what I mean when we're finishing up this dish when you have really old-school pasta also with modern pasta you can actually put it in a pot with a cold water started boiling and it'll cook up just fine like in fact you won't be able to tell the difference between that and pasta that's been cooked in a big pot of boiling water with very old-school pasta it's possible that if you try doing that it'll stick together because there's so much loose starch on the surface but the real trick is just you know just make sure you stir well at the beginning and if you know I know there's got a lot of gonna be a lot of people in the comments telling me I'm wrong for doing this but I've done numerous tests on this as of other people but you can't tell the difference between pasta that's cooked in this much water and cost that's cooked in a giant pot of water and in fact a smaller volume of water is better because it ends up making the pasta water starchier there's more loose starts in the pasta water and that's important for when we finish our sauce I'll show you all right so over here I got a second kill it and what am I gonna do I'm gonna take some olive oil put it in there so with traditional cacio e pepe you add raw ground black pepper what I like to do is add it in a couple of phases so I got black pepper here I'm gonna put them in this mortar pestle you don't need to use a mortar pestle you can just use a pepper mill actually this is a multi-hit de the Mexican version of it and how about this because it gives you a kind of coarser a coarser texture all right that's what we got so I'm gonna take this pepper and put it in the olive oil so traditionally with cut you a Peppa you would add the raw pepper at the end I like to bloom it a little bit in the olive oil first of all it infuses the oil with the black pepper flavor oh I didn't tell you this but cacio e pepe means um pasta with ketchup hep is a cheese and pepper those are the only two only two real ingredients in it other than the pasta in the olive oil I'm gonna add some butter people are gonna crucify me for that but I don't really care cuz it tastes good so you toast the the pepper in the olive oil that sort of improves its flavor gives it a little bit of sweetness it also infuses the olive oil with black pepper flavor which gets to your pasta this pastas got a little bit to go let's see what else can we talk about in the meantime well let's talk about the cheeses the cheese I'm using and what this dish is traditionally made with is um pecorino romano I think actually because of this a whole quarantine thing the only one I could find was Boar's Head like an American an American brand but it it actually tastes pretty fine it's not it's not bad at all it's a sheep's milk cheese from oh shoot I'm gonna call it on the fly and I'm probably gonna be wrong and people are gonna yell at me but I believe it's from emilia romagna sheep's milk cheese I'm flavors similar to say like a sharper a little bit more acidic parmesan but you can use it in very much the same way it's great for for grading it's great for grading you can of course also make this dish with Parmesan all right so peppers toasting pastas boiling I don't know what to do now I got away from the pasta but maybe I'll tell a joke [Music] what do you call what you call bucatini that's dressed up as spaghetti you call it an impostor get it all right that's sizzling a little bit you don't want to let it burn so I'm gonna shut it off and let's see I guess I can grate a little now I'm not you're gonna grate a little cheese because we're just gonna grate a stirring the pot this is a super super simple dish not much else to do other than stand here and wait maybe I'll cut until the pastas done all right I'm gonna cut the video now and it will come back I promise it'll only be like a two minute cut okay cut okay we're back that was probably like a two minute cut um there you go all right so at this point our pasta is basically done what you're looking for is a little bit less than al dente which means it's still gonna have like a little bit of raw pasta flavor in the very center you don't want it definitely don't want to be mushy so the pastas gonna cook a little bit more in the other pan what I'm gonna do is I'm taking some butter adding it here people butter is not a traditional part of this dish so don't mistake that but I like the way I like the richness of that Sam it also makes it a little easier to emulsify the sauce so the key here is you don't need to drain your pasta at all in fact it's better not to drain it because what happens is the pasta water which has starch in it that's what's gonna sort of thicken up and emulsify the sauce and make sure that the cheese first of all doesn't clump up but it also kind of makes the sauce nice and creamy so I had a little bit of extra pasta water to it all right now what I'm going to do is a little bit more pasta water and take my cheese right in there now if you weren't to use pasta water let's say we just use plain water what would end up happening is that your cheese would kind of clump the proteins would clump together and what we're really looking for is a nice creamy sauce emulsifying a muscle vacation house we're looking for some toasted pepper and some fresh pepper a little bit of fresh olive oil too and we want this to kind of vigorously cook for just a minute just until the pastas done [Music] and with pasta like this if it ever starts to dry out or if you ever see this sauce breaking I don't know if you can see that wait let me get my yeah you can probably see that but if the sauce ever breaks so it looks like kind of oily that's an indication that you need a little bit more pasta water and that's the case with pasta sauces or with any kind of pan sauce like let's say you're making a pan sauce grated chicken I'm gonna make sure that it stays nice and creamy and emulsified with more pasta water all right I think it's been about how long has it been in the pan a couple minutes all right all the services see how nice and creamy that sauces that's really what you're looking for OOP hey this pastas a little too stiff to do with the little for capital just dump it in what else do need some more fresh cracked black pepper the top a little extra cheese on the top and that is cacio e pepe classic classic Roman pasta dish if you want to do this in front of your Italian friends use more water and don't use butter but I like to do it this way [Music] sit down girls wait trouble sit wait wait wait wait wait wait wait okay

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 602,721

Rating: 4.9147453 out of 5

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Id: P6QWoOQMvE8

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020