Spring Carbonara

Today is Carbonara Day! Join us then in a scrumptious and creamy Italian-style embrace and let’s fire up the hobs! This year we would like to celebrate with a different carbonara, slightly more “egalitarian” than the original, which obviously is still the undisputed national monument. Why is that? Because it features two variants that make this special dish also suitable for those among you who are lactose-intolerant or who cannot, or do not wish to, eat raw egg yolks. Instead of pecorino cheese, in fact, we add flavour with the sweet-scented tips of green asparagus, to celebrate the blossoming spring in our fields. And the raw egg yolk will be cooked then worked into a cream, as delicious as the original, to appease pregnant women and small children, who can savour it without any worries!

Ingredients for two people

Sgambaro Yellow Label Spaghetti No. 5

A thick slice of guanciale (cured pork jowl)

A sprig of green asparagus

Three egg yolks

Half a small onion

A few marjoram leaves

Half a glass of aromatic white wine

Extra virgin olive oil

Salt

Pepper

Method

First of all, clean the asparagus under running water and remove the hardest part of the stalks. Then separate the tips from the softer part of the stalks that you have kept. Make a cream with the stalks: first stew them in a pan with a bit of oil, minced onion and a few leaves of fresh marjoram; when nice and done, add salt and pepper and blend into a creamy velouté, then set aside.

AS for the tips, toss them with a bit of oil, leaving them nice and crunchy, add a drop of aromatic white wine, simmer, add salt and pepper and set them aside as well.

Boil the eggs and remove the whites; set aside the hard yolks. Cut the jowl into strips and put it in a non-stick pan without any oil. Turn up the heat, and remove any grease from the pan, setting it aside, until the strips become nice and crunchy and dry.

In the meantime, put on plenty of water for Sgambaro Yellow Label Spaghetti No. 5; when it boils, add salt and bung the pasta. As soon as the pasta water has absorbed a bit of pasta starch, take a few tablespoons and use it to emulsify the egg yolks with a whip; whip up well until you have obtained a similar cream to that of the original carbonara.

At this stage, when the spaghetti is still al dente, put a pasta pan on the hob and heat one tablespoon of the jowl fat with a bit of asparagus stalk velouté, heat and add the pasta. After that, add all the ingredients: all the asparagus stalk cream, the crunchy jowl, the asparagus tips and finally the egg yolk cream.

Plate and finish off with a good grating of fresh pepper.

And have yourselves a very merry Carbonara Day!

Recipe by Plus Kitchen Lab

(Plus Communications Trento)

plusco.it