Spaghetti Carbonara

Spaghetti Carbonara an easy midweek dinner, ready in less than 15 minutes!  Everyone needs a great Spaghetti Carbonara recipe, and this is mine!

Spaghetti Carbonara

My kids are the happiest when I serve them simple flavours like plain pasta with just butter or rice and crispy bacon (and pork crackling).  So this dish is not only super delicious, it is a favourite for my two.  It’s a great recipe to pull out; in the school holidays when your local pub has a bouncy castle and petting zoo, and you meet friends there for lunch and the sun is shining even though it’s Winter, so they come back to yours for a play on the monkey bars and the kids are playing so well together they decide to stay for dinner…….  Can easily feed a crowd at last minute!

This is also a great recipe for adding fermented creams, such as filmjölk or kefir.  I am currently fermenting filmjölk after being given a starter from Holly Davis at an intimate cooking class with her and Jude Blereau up in the Swan Valley.  Filmjölk is a cultured Swedish cream that has a similar flavour to crème fraîche.  The good bacteria turns the cream into a yoghurt like thickness, but is done without having to heat and incubate the cream like when making yoghurt.  Filmjölk is possibly the easiest culture to maintain.  Once a week, I add a tablespoon of my current batch to a clean jar with cream, cover with muslin for 12 hours then add a lid and store back in the fridge and consume within a week.

This recipe is great for adding a ferment as the egg and cream are just stirred through at the end and not raised to any high temperatures.  The flavour is also a perfect match for speck and parmesan.

My three key steps for a great carbonara are;

1. Good quality speck, prosciutto or bacon.  Whatever you choose to use, make sure you get the best quality you can, from an ethical supplier.
2. Good quality pasta.  Making your own would be the best option, but for those of us that are time poor, find a good quality brand and stick to it.
3. Freshly grated parmesan.  Take the time to grate your own cheese, it really does only take a couple of minutes.  Pre grated cheeses are treated so they don’t clump together in the packaging, especially with parmesan, you can really taste the difference when it is freshly grated.

This carbonara is quite dry, without a heavy creamy sauce, possibly making it quite light and moorish.  Perfect served with a simple green salad (or sliced cucumber as my kids will have it).

I like to use speck for my carbonara, you can usually get this from any good butcher.  Speck is very similar to prosciutto, cured in the same way, with the addition of smoking at the end of the process.  I usually get mine unsliced, as a piece around 300g.  You could easily use prosciutto or a good quality bacon for this recipe.

Possibly one of the simplest pasta sauce recipes ever.  You just stir through the egg, cream and cheese and the heat of the pasta cooks the egg lightly as it coats each strand of spaghetti.  The result is a light, yet creamy sauce.

What I use…..

The plates in these photos are from Kim Wallace Ceramics

and I love my Le Creuset 30cm Shallow Casserole dish (this is an affiliate link)

The cutlery and napkins I sourced from my local kitchenwares store in Dunsborough, The Lemontree

and my ethically sourced speck from Robbie, my local butcher, Beef by the Reef