Carbonara With Poached Egg

Tonight was a carbonara with a sous vide poached egg on top, and some parsley for garnish. It was amazing. Holy cow, the egg came out perfectly, exactly as I wanted it. It all came together very well, with some minor issues.

I had to make a couple of substitutions, typically carbonara has pancetta for meat, and pecorino for cheese. The grocery stores in the middle of nowhere don’t carry such fancy items, so I had to make due with bacon and romano cheese. The bacon was a little overcooked, which was the only real issue that I had with this dish.

I used the egg calculator to choose my ideal egg texture and consistency: http://www.chefsteps.com/activities/the-egg-calculator . It gave me 69 °C for 20 minutes. Again, this came out perfectly.

Carbonara is a very quick and simple pasta dish. Typically, ingredients include the following:

• wide noodles (linguine, fehttuchini)
• pancetta
• garlic
• pecorino cheese
• parsley
• olive oil
• raw egg

You cook the noodles until they are done, as normal. Cook the garlic and pancetta together until they’re done. Remove everything from heat. Drain the noodles, combine with the garlic and pancetta, add the olive oil, and optionally some pasta water. Then combine with half of the shredded pecorino and half of the chopped parsley. Crack a raw egg or two, and mix that in. Serve with the remaining cheese and parsley on top.

For mine, I chose to leave out the egg, and serve with that on top. It made for a nice presentation, and something quite different than we’re used to. I’m going to be doing this one again.