Cacio e Pepe
Cheese, pepper, and starchy pasta water, on fresh egg pasta. Scale it the way the pasta scales: per 100g flour + 1 egg, use 1 tbsp olive oil, ½ tbsp butter, ½ tsp pepper, and 40g cheese.
Ingredients
- Fresh pasta from 400g flour + 4 eggs (see Pasta)
- 4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 tbsp butter
- 2 tsp freshly cracked black pepper
- 160g hard cheese, finely grated: parmesan, asiago, or romano
- Salt, for the pasta water
Utensils
- Kitchen scale
- Cheese grater
- Large pot
- Large skillet
- Tongs
Instructions
- Make the Pasta dough, roll it, and cut it. Leave the noodles on a floured surface until the sauce is ready to go.
- Grate the cheese as fine as it'll go. Set aside 30g for serving.
- Bring the pot of water to a boil. Use less water than usual and go light on the salt. Less water keeps it starchier, and the cheese brings plenty of salt.
- Heat the oil in the skillet over medium. Add the pepper and toast it 1–2 minutes, until fragrant.
- Drop the pasta and cook about 2 minutes, just short of tender. It finishes in the skillet.
- While it cooks, ladle ¾ cup of pasta water into the skillet and bring it to a boil. Add the butter and stir until it melts.
- Move the pasta into the skillet with tongs, carrying some water with it. Toss about a minute, until the noodles are coated.
- Take the skillet off the heat. Add the remaining 130g of cheese a handful at a time, tossing between each and adding a splash of pasta water whenever it looks tight, until the sauce is creamy and clings to the noodles.
- Serve right away, topped with the reserved cheese and more pepper.
Notes
- Any one hard cheese works. Use whatever block is in the fridge:
- Romano is the traditional choice. It's the sharpest and saltiest, so salt the water the least.
- Parmesan is milder and nuttier, and the most forgiving to melt.
- Asiago should be the aged, hard kind. Young asiago is soft and goes stringy.
- Clumping means the cheese got too hot. The classic Roman method never puts cheese in a hot pan: the pasta and a little cooking water are poured onto the grated cheese and pepper. Taking the skillet off the heat does the same job. Add the cheese a handful at a time.
- Grate it fine, on the smallest holes or a rasp. Coarse shreds melt unevenly and clump.
- The source recipe is 1 LB dry spaghetti for 4. Four people's worth of fresh pasta replaces it one for one, so the sauce amounts carry over unchanged.
- The source uses 1 cup Pecorino Romano plus ½ cup Cacio de Roma, and says 1½ cups of pecorino alone is fine. One cheese at the same total is that substitution, generalized. 160g is an estimate for 1½ cups finely grated; adjust it after cooking.
- The flour the noodles were dusted with goes into the pot and thickens the pasta water, which helps the sauce come together.
- Traditional Roman cacio e pepe uses no oil or butter, just cheese, pepper, and water. The oil and butter here make it more forgiving.
- The traditional pastas are spaghetti and tonnarelli, a fresh pasta. Cut it like the spaghetti in Pasta, so the noodles come out about as thick as they are wide, close to tonnarelli's square cut.
Kitchen Scale
Digital scale that reads grams. Weighing beats measuring for anything dry — flour especially, where a packed cup and a loose one differ by a lot.
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