Lupo in Prestwich, Manchester, was crowned our Best Local Restaurant in the North West thanks to its authentic, honest and downright delicious Roman cooking. Owner Nico Pasquali wears many hats in his business: when he’s not tending to his home-grown tomatoes at his allotment, he’s busy spreading the word about Italian coffee, or donning chef whites in the kitchen. These are his top tips on how to make a proper carbonara.
The thing with carbonara is that it is simple when you know how. It comes down to a few key things: the right ingredients, heat and practice.
Ingredients
Stop overcomplicating things! A good carbonara only needs four or five ingredients. The first thing to get right is the pasta; good quality, dried pasta (we use La Molisana at Lupo) gives you the perfect base for your dish. Then you need Grana Padano or Pecorino Romano (we use a blend of both), black pepper and guanciale, not pancetta or bacon. Lastly, high quality eggs are important, in Italy we call the yolk the red of the egg ‘rosso d'uovo’, so you want your yolks to have that deep colour.
Heat
People sometimes get the heat wrong when making a carbonara and end up with something more like a frittata.
For a silky sauce, cook down your chunks of guanciale and then take it out of the pan, leaving the fat. When your pasta is al dente, add it into the pan, then add your egg and cheese mixture and take off the heat. The residual heat of the pasta will cook the mixture into a smooth silky sauce, just keep tossing and add a splash of pasta water if it needs loosening up in the pan.
Practice
Like most things, the only way to perfect a proper carbonara is with practice. When you have made as many carbonaras as I have you get the hang of it!
