Sometimes it doesn’t work

One of the dishes we keep seeing in Rome (and ordered a couple of times) was caci e pepe, basically a spaghetti (or bucatini) in a cheese and black pepper sauce.  It’s simplicity is only slight less amazing than it’s taste, but there you go.

So I thought of all the dishes we devoured on our holiday, this is one that should be pretty simple to duplicate.  I was totally, utterly, wrong and it was all because I made two critical mistakes.

The first was the pasta.  When we had this dish in Rome, it was invariably served with spaghetti (medium thickness) or bucatini (very thick) and both of these are round pastas.  When I visited the Italian Market for some fresh pasta to imitate this dish, my favorite pasta places only had fresh flat pastas.  Apparently, round pasta needs some kind of fancy extruder while flat pasta only needs to be cut by a fairly standard countertop machine.  This means that pasta shops can advertise any number of flat fresh pastas, but round fresh pastas are pretty difficult, if not impossible to find, at least here in Philadelphia.  Not knowing the impending disaster ahead, I ordered a pound of fettuccine and figured that it wouldn’t make that much difference.

The second mistake is embedded in that phrase “a pound of fettuccine” because the restaurants in Rome are clearly making each plate to order. A great caci e pepe is made one plate at a time and is definitely not a dish to be served family style.  Aaah, had I known that at the time.

So I assembled all my ingredients (1 cup grated parmesan, 1/3 cup grated pecorino, 3 tbl of grated black pepper, and set aside some water for boiling.  Cooked the pasta for about 90 seconds, mixed it with the cheese and pepper and about 1/2 cup of pasta water letting the hot pasta melt the cheeses.  Served the result and it was a gloppy mess.  It tasted more like something my mother would have made years ago with Mueller’s egg noodle.  The pasta had no taste, the cheeses lost their bite and the pepper was invisible.  I was devastated.

So my true love flies back to the UK for her job.  Usually, when she’s on her own for feeding herself, she buys pre-packaged takeout from Marks and Spencer but on this one occasion, she buys a packet of fresh (and round) spaghetti and a container of grated mixed Italian cheeses.  She cooks a portion of the spaghetti, tosses it with the container of cheese and as much pepper as she can grind before it starts cooling and gets a version of caci e pepe that is much better than the one I made.  It’s shown in the picture above.

She did two things differently from me and they both make  a difference.  The round spaghetti works much better in this case than the flat fettuccine.  You wouldn’t think that the shape of the pasta would make that much of a difference, but it really does.  Somehow, the sharpness of the cheese and pepper gets lost with flat pasta while it bursts with the round pasta.

The other problem is that she made one dish and I made a big family style presentation and this particular dish doesn’t scale up very well.  When there’s too much pasta and too much cheese, every individual component loses its presence.  In the restaurant kitchens, they are making it one dish at a time and I should have known better.

This explains why her “fresh” pasta (made in M&S’s factories) with a generic blend of grated Italian cheeses tasted better than my genuine fresh pasta and freshly grated pecorino and parmesan.  She made one dish to order with the right shape pasta and I didn’t.

I’ll try again with the right shape and let you know how I make out.

Recipe

Ingredients

6 oz spaghetti or bucatini

1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese

1/3 cup grated pecorino cheese

2 tbl roughly ground black pepper

2 tbl olive oil (or butter)

Directions

Bring a big pot of salted water to a boil.

Heat the oil to medium high in a skillet.  Add the pepper and sauce for a minute or so.  Just before you are ready to take the pasta out of the water, add almost all of the cheese (save about 2 tbl for dusting).

Add the pasta to the water and cook for 90 seconds or so (until al dente).  If you are using dried pasta, this make take a few more minutes, but the important thing is to remove the pasta a few seconds before it is really done. It’s really important to juggle these steps so that the cheese isn’t sitting in the oil/pepper mixture for much more than a a few seconds and the pasta isn’t over/under done.

Add the pasta to the skillet with about 1/3 cup (more or less) of pasta water and vigorously mix with tongs or a couple of spoons.

Plate, dust with the remaining cheese, and serve.   The cheese should have melted on the pepper-specked pasta.