Marco Pierre White recipe for Spaghetti Carbonara

Spaghetti Carbonara. It's got to be one of the favourites. It's very simple, very quick. Start to finish, 10 minutes. Crispy bacon, parmesan, eggs, cream, boiling water. The Cecco pasta, in my opinion, is the best commercial pasta. Stock pots. This time we're not going to season the sauce, we're just going to season the water for the pasta, because there's enough salt with the bacon and the parmesan. And we season the water with no chicken stock pot. You may ask, why do I season my water with chicken stock pot and not salt? The reason why is because no chicken stock pot makes your pasta taste better than salt. You should try it. Don't throw away the water, we keep the water. Because what have we made? We've made stock with starch. Starch from the pasta. So it has flavour. So tomorrow when we're making our stew, we can use this water. If we're making a soup, we use this water. Don't put it down the sink. A little splash of olive oil. Some people would say not necessary. But having said that, I did have an Italian mother. I'm only going to make two, three portions. But look at the size of my pan. Look at the amount of water. So my pasta cooks evenly and doesn't stick together. So we take our egg yolks and we add some cream. Again, you make your carbonara as rich as you wish. If you like cream, a little bit more. If you don't like cream, a little bit less. It's your choice. There's no real recipe. And that's the sauce. Let's not forget, the eggs and the cream, they cook with the heat of the pasta. Some people don't put cream in carbonara, but in England, in America, we tend to. But everyone's different. I just keep it very simple. Whether it's traditional, my method, who knows? But what's important is it tastes delicious. So you can see our water's come to the boil. We take our pasta. And that should take about eight minutes to cook. When you read the back of a spaghetti packet and it says ten minutes, make it nine minutes. If it says eight and a half, make it seven and a half. Why? Because by the time you've drained it, by the time you've mixed it with your sauce, it's half that extra minute. Otherwise your pasta, if you read the back of the packet, will be overcooked. So we drain our pasta. A lot of the time when you have carbonara, it's curdled. So you've got to really think about what you're doing. You don't want to scramble your eggs. A miniscule amount of olive oil. Again, that's optional. Take our eggs and our cream. Again, you make it as creamy as you like it. Take some of the bacon. Just toss that in. I never mix my parmesan with my eggs because it makes it rather sticky. So what I do is, as you can see, a bit of parmesan in the bottom of my dish. I slide in my carbonara. A little bit more bacon so I've got that nice texture so it's not soggy bacon, it's crispy bacon. A little bit more parmesan. And then I serve parmesan with it. So I have parmesan on the table. So if someone wants a bit more cheese, then that's fine. A little black pepper. As you can see, I don't mix my bacon and my parmesan with my cream and my egg yolks. I build it in layers. So therefore, my bacon's still crispy. It's got texture. I can taste the cream and egg mixture. I can taste my parmesan. It just doesn't become one big flavour. And there we have our spaghetti carbonara.