Creamy Chicken Carbonara Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is chicken carbonara sauce made of? ›

The creamy sauce is made by tossing eggs and Parmesan with cooked pasta and its still piping hot cooking water. It's so simple but can be intimidating.

The golden rule to silky carbonara is to whisk your egg whites so that they're completely incorporated with the egg yolks. This will create a smooth, velvety sauce. As like any pasta dish, including carbonara, cook the pasta perfectly al dente so that it's soft but still firm, with some bite.

The difference between alfredo and carbonara is that carbonara contains an egg while alfredo sauce does not. Carbonara is usually thinner in consistency than alfredo sauce, using the egg to coat the noodles instead of relying on the cream.

Carbonara is made with guanciale (cured pork), eggs, Pecorino Romano cheese, spaghetti pasta, and lots of black pepper. Italians don't add extra ingredients like cream, milk, garlic, or onions.

What not to put in Spaghetti Carbonara? Don't put garlic, cream, milk or butter. It is not needed. It is fine if you want to make a dish with those ingredients, but if you want to learn how to make this dish correctly, use only pecorino, eggs/egg yolks, black pepper, guanciale, and pasta water.

Whisking your eggs so that the whites are completely incorporated into the yolks will give your sauce a more uniform texture. For an extra creamy sauce, it's best to use mostly egg yolks. The egg whites tend to make carbonara watery, but too many egg yolks can make the sauce too custardy.

And indeed, there's plenty of recipes that cheat by adding in cream. But today, we're making spaghetti carbonara properly, the authentic, traditional way. No cream. Just egg, cheese and a splash of starchy pasta cooking water.

Must-have ingredients

that there are only five ingredients: pasta, pork cheek, eggs, cheese and pepper. That's it. A real carbonara does not contain onion, garlic, or cream.

Like recipes for Sunday sauce, recipes and methods for making carbonara vary *wildly* in terms of the number of whole eggs, whites, and yolks used—ranging from as few as two eggs to as many as eight. There is only one thing on which they can all agree: the ratio of pasta to pork and cheese.

How to stop egg scrambling in carbonara? ›

Using a large mixing bowl and setting it over the boiling pasta water to create a makeshift double boiler helps prevent you from accidentally scrambling the eggs.

So that's how a carbonara sauce is made. It's an emulsion between pasta water and the fat from the egg, held together by the egg's natural emulsifiers and thickened by the pasta starch.

The taste is rich, salty and addictive! There is absolutely no heavy cream in traditional carbonara sauce. The thing is, carbonara is really easy to mess up. Ingredient quality is often overlooked, and execution is typically frantic and rushed (scrambled eggs anyone?).

What is the sauce in carbonara made from? Classic Italian carbonara sauce is typically made with just 4 ingredients: eggs, black pepper, pecorino Romano (or parmesan), and guanciale (or pancetta).

Carbonara: History

Because the name comes from the word carbonaro, “coal burner,” some believe the dish was created as a hearty easy-to-make meal by men working outdoors for long periods.

Another kind of heavy white sauce is carbonara. The carbonara sauce incorporates eggs beaten with parmesan and tossed with freshly boiled, hot pasta.