Serious Eats: Recipes
Cook the Book: Chorizo Carbonara
[Photographs: Simon Wheeler]
Bacon and eggy carbonara has long been one of my "I don't know what to make for dinner" dinners. No matter how barren the fridge looks, chances are there's at least an egg or two, a chunk of some form of pork, and pasta in the pantry. And it's always satisfying in a hearty, pasta-meets-breakfast sort of way.
This Chorizo Carbonara from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Every Day combines Italian dinner with Mexican breakfast by subbing in spicy crumbled chorizo for bacon or guanciale.
While you can absolutely make this pasta using storebought chorizo, mixing up a batch of Fearnley-Whittingstall's Tupperware Chorizo is totally worth it. Ground pork mixed with smoked paprika, cayenne, and fennel seeds goes in Tupperware and is left for a few hours so the flavors can really meld. It's an awesome home approximation of chorizo, deeply spiced and full of lots of smokey fat.
Once the chorizo is mixed and rested, the carbonara comes together in just a few minutes. Chorizo is crumbled and browned and cooked pasta is added to the pan, mixed with the sausage nuggets, and dressed with beaten eggs and heavy cream. The cream, eggs, and juices from the chorizo cook in the heat from the pasta making, tightening up a bit and making a sauce that coats each strand of spaghetti with sauce that has great dairy richness and an insanely porky smokiness.
You can top it with a bit of cheese (Parmesan, cotija, or even a hard Spanish cheese) but all you really need is a few grinds of black pepper.
As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of River Cottage Every Day to give away this week.
Adapted from River Cottage Every Day by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Copyright © 2009. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Random House, Inc. Available wherever books are sold. All Rights Reserved.
