Cacio e pepe is basically antique mac n cheese, invented by the Romans. As the name (“cheese and pepper”) might suggest, the beauty of this dish lies in its simplicity – there are traditionally only 4 ingredients, which are cheese, pepper, pasta and water. However, beneath the simplicity, there is a tricky emulsifying operation (a fancy way of saying that you need to mix pasta water with cheese to create the sauce) that can make this dish a challenge to execute. Many recipes online try to reduce this difficulty by adding things like butter, olive oil, and cream to assist with the emulsifying, which would make Italian grandmothers unhappy to say the least. But I’ll tell you how I get a delicious cacio without anything but the original 4 items.
Getting good quality ingredients, particularly the cheese, is essential for the traditional method of this dish because it is much harder or even impossible to make with low-quality cheese – it will not emulsify properly. Also, there are only 4 total ingredients so if anything is off in this dish, there is nowhere for it to hide. I’ve found that Whole Foods has the necessary ingredients, so when I want to make this dish, I go there and get any of the below that I don’t already have:
- a block of Pecorino Romano cheese (imported from Italy, has a rind that has black wrapping on the outside)
- a block of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (not 100% traditional but when included it takes some of the bite out of the somewhat salty pecorino – the Italian grandmothers wouldn’t blow a gasket over this)
- Black pepper (usually whole telicherry black peppercorns with a grinder lid. Freshly grinding the pepper makes a huge difference in taste over the pre-ground stuff)
- Salt
- Dry Spaghetti alla Chitarra / Tonnarelli pasta (basically extra thick spaghetti that has more starch. More starch = better emulsifying = better sauce)
Once I have my ingredients I get out my tools – a pot, a pan, a ladle, a set of tongs, a silicon spatula, a cheese grater, a cutting board and some bowls. For ingredient amounts if it’s just myself, I aim for about 200g of dried pasta, 1/3 of a cup of cheese (I usually go with half Pecorino half Parm – again full Pecorino is actually the most traditional, though it’s a bit more harsh) and 10-15 twists of pepper.
Now for the cooking. I get some water boiling for the pasta in the pot, then salt it thoroughly. While the water’s heating up, I grate the cheese on the finest setting possible and put it into a bowl. If I’m pulling the cheese from the fridge, I microwave it for about 20 seconds before grating and it can make it a bit easier. Then I put my pan on the stove and grind the pepper into it – this is where the magic will happen later on.
The next step is dropping the pasta in, which starts the cooking process. From here on out timing becomes important so I start a running timer on my phone. Tonarelli has a cook time of about 14 minutes, but to start I cook it for about 7 minutes. Once I hit minute 7 I start toasting the pepper in the pan on medium heat for about a minute. After I turn the heat on for the pan, I immediately take a small ladle of pasta water from the pot and add it to the bowl with the cheese. I mix the water and cheese together with the silicon spatula until I have a paste with a mashed-potato-like consistency – this is a trick to make the emulsion process later on easier. I set this aside.
Now my phone says I’ve been cooking the pasta for about 8 minutes. At this point, I kill the heat on the pan for about 15 seconds, then slowly add about 3 ladle-fulls of pasta water to the pan with the toasting pepper in it. Once all the water is added to the pan, I turn the heat back on high.
Now my phone says I’ve been cooking the pasta for about 9 minutes. I transfer the pasta from the pot to the pan with tongs to finish the pasta in the pan with the pepper and starchy pasta water. After a minute or two, I grab a noodle and taste the pasta to get a sense of how close it is to done. If I’ve done this well, there will be about 1.5 ladles of water still in the pan when the pasta is done (if there’s less I just add more from the pot). The point of having this water is to mix with the cheese later on, which will form the sauce.
As soon as the pasta tastes done, I kill the heat. I stir the pasta and water around in the pan for about 30-40 seconds to cool it down. This is crucial because if the pasta and pan are too hot, the next step of adding the cheese doesn’t work – the cheese will clump up. Adding the cheese too soon was the most common mistake I made the first few times I tried making this.
And now, the moment of truth, the emulsifying. Once the 30-40 seconds is up, I take the cheese mixture and lump it into the pan with the pasta, quickly setting aside the bowl. Then with the tongs, I break up the cheese lump and start mixing it in with the pasta and water with speed and intensity. Shaking the pan back and forth with one hand and mixing with the tongs with the other hand is a method I’ve found effective. If all has gone well, I’ll start to see the cheese emulsifying with the pasta water, and hear sauce-y sounds the more I mix the pasta and cheese. If it doesn’t go well, I’ll see the cheese clump together and be left with a bunch of white cheese chunks and not much sauce, if any. After I mix for about 20-30 seconds, I should have a sauce that is thick and creamy and completely coats the pasta. If so, I plate it immediately, grind some more fresh pepper on top of it and serve – I find it tastes best straight out of the pan.
There’s a lot happening here, and it’s certainly a process that I messed up a number of times. The best resource that I’ve found for making cacio is this video – it includes all the steps I mention, because I heavily borrowed from it :). The video is in Italian with no subs, but the chef goes through all the steps I listed. I would highly recommend checking it out and learning how to make this dish – once you have the technique down, it works well for a quick weeknight meal and would certainly impress a first date. Let me know how this goes for you if you make it!
P.S. the channel that created that video from the last paragraph also has an awesome video for Carbonara – it turns out the technique is pretty similar to cacio, with the additions of egg and guanciale.