- 4
Ingredients
- 1 Lb Linguine Pasta
- 4 Eggs
- 1 Pound Bacon or Pancetta
- 1 1/2 Cups Parmesan Cheese
- 8 Cloves Garlic (8 to 12)
- 1 Large Onion
- 1 Cup Chicken Stock
- 1 Cup White Wine (or Substitute Another Cup of Stock)
- 1/2 Stick Butter
- 1 Handful Parsley
- 1 Tablespoon Black Pepper (1 to 2)
Preparation
Step 1
First, slice up 1 pound of bacon into pieces about one inch wide. Once they’re sliced, just toss your bacon pieces into a stainless steel pan. While the bacon’s cooking, set a pot of salted water (I use about 2 tbsp. salt for a gallon of water) on the stove for our pasta. Next, we need to chop our onion. Remove the bacon from the pan and set aside. Okay, now that we’ve spooned out all of our bacon, we can throw the diced onions into the bacon grease. Give the onions a quick stir and let them cook down over a medium-high heat for a couple of minutes. In the meantime, we can slice up our garlic. I like to slice the garlic in thin sheets for this recipe instead of mincing it. After the onions have cooked for a couple of minutes, throw in the garlic. Yes, all of it! Adding it after the onions have cooked a little will prevent the garlic from burning. Garlic burns up a little faster than the onions. If your water is boiling by now, go ahead and add in your pasta. I’m using linguine. It should take about 9-10 minutes. After the onion and garlic have cooked for another couple of minutes, they should be removed from the pan with our slotted spoon, leaving the grease…um…renderings behind. I think I like the word “grease” better. How ’bout you? Okay: NOW’S THE TIME TO DISCARD THE BACON GREASE. Place the pan back on high heat until it starts to smoke a little. As soon as the pan begins to smoke, pour in your white wine (or chicken stock if you’re not into the whole wine scene.) Using a whisk, fork, spatula, or wooden spoon, you’ll want to scrape the bottom of the pan vigorously until the little bits of flavor have released themselves into the liquid. After scraping, I’ll add in my 1 cup of chicken stock. Then I’ll return my bacon, onion, and garlic to the sauce I’ve just created. Now we’ll stir it all together and let it simmer over medium heat. Allowing the hot part of our sauce to simmer, we’re now going to crack those four eggs into a large bowl. The bowl needs to be large enough to hold all the pasta and other ingredients, and still leave room to stir together. Add most of the Parmesan (leave out a little bit for a topper) and rough chop the parsley, adding it to the eggs as well. Leave out a little extra parsley for garnishing. Mix it all up. Now drain off the water from your steaming hot pasta. And add the hot pasta to the egg/parmesan/parsley mixture. It’s important that the pasta be very hot, because this is what cause the eggs to thicken. The final “layer” of the sauce goes on top of the pasta. And I’m sorry, but right before we mix the pasta, we need to add…gulp…1/2 stick butter. Now MIX! Tongs work great for this. And be sure to add in lots of black pepper. Toss on a little bit more cheese and parsley and you’ve got a beautiful Italian classic.