I feel I should state right up-front, that this is not a particularly healthy dish. But it is really, really good…
My husband recently decided that his enjoyment of this meal wasn’t great enough to compensate for the carb wallop from the pasta, but my 12-old-daughter & I feel very differently. 😋
So with the hubby no longer eating it, we were free to experiment with the recipe a bit. I had based my carbonara on Lidia Bastianich’s “Linguine with Bacon and Onions”. Because my husband is vegetarian, I had always replaced the bacon with fake bacon (and I’ll also note that with such a substitution, this dish can be made to be kosher or halal, as well). The product that I found worked particularly well, is Yves’s Canadian-style fake bacon, shown on the cutting board in the photo below…
…above the strips of the real bacon, that my daughter & I had used instead when we made our version (it is still truly, thoroughly delicious with the fake bacon- but we couldn’t help being curious as to how it would be with real bacon).
A second substitution, was inspired by an insightful comment that my daughter had made one day while we were making this leek & bacon quiche (which is also stupendously scrumptious- and happens to be stunningly easy to make, as well). She had speculated that the ingredients for the quiche filling, might perhaps make a good pasta sauce… and then it occurred to me, that these quiche ingredients- i.e. eggs, cream (more on this later), cheese, bacon, and leeks- do happen to be practically the same as those for the carbonara sauce- the main difference being the use of leeks, versus onions… and that’s what gave me the idea to replace the onions in the carbonara sauce, with leeks. Bastianich’s cookbook, “Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen” (where I had originally obtained the “Linguine with Bacon and Onions” recipe from) has a page entirely devoted to leeks, in which she says:
Leeks, a member of the onion family with a flavor sweeter and mellower than yellow or Spanish onions, are at the base of many good soups, pasta sauces, meat and fish preparations. They are available in just about every supermarket and are quite delicious. If you have never cooked with leeks, I make this suggestion: take a favorite recipe that calls for onions and try the same recipe substituting a more or less equal amount of leeks.
So this was plenty convincing enough for me, to give this a try. ☺
And we also opted for fresh pasta, since this of course improves any pasta dish. I am fortunate to have a place not too far from my home in Berkeley, that makes and sells a wide variety of fresh pasta- Phoenix Pasta (I’ve mentioned this shop before, in a comment where I had given another pasta recipe- one which also happens to have originated from the “Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen” cookbook). And we chose to get angel hair, since that’s our favorite shape. And, in case you were wondering- the “al dente” cooking time for fresh, angel hair pasta is measured in seconds, not minutes (45, to be exact). ⏰ 😄
The following photo shows all of the ingredients (minus the kitty, of course…) 😺
From left to right-
Leeks
Garlic: You may notice that the carbonara recipe I linked to, didn’t have this as one of the ingredients… so this is another substitution, but it’s one I’ve always made- which is to replace the black pepper with garlic. I’ve just never been a big fan of black pepper... a little is OK, but (to me, anyway) it’s so strong that it doesn’t take very much of it to totally dominate the flavor. But I do understand why this is commonly used in this sauce… cream-based pasta sauces run the risk of turning out too bland, without some added potent seasoning. So I happen to prefer using garlic instead (and I save myself a little work by using jarred garlic that’s already minced... and also since it’s less pungent than fresh garlic, I feel it accomplishes its purpose of enhancing the sauce, without being too overwhelming).
Cheese: The recipe specifies freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano, but you can see that I have two hunks of hard cheeses on the cutting board… so one is the parmigiano-reggiano, and the other is romano- which happens to be another one of my substitutions. The standard recipe calls for some salt, but (especially with Italian dishes) I usually swap plain salt for some salty hard cheese (like romano).
Cream: This isn’t among the ingredients in the online recipe, but there are these additional notes in the recipe that’s in my paper copy of Lidia’s cookbook:
Often you will see this dish prepared with cream. It’s not the traditional style, but that’s not to say it doesn’t taste good. But I prefer my carbonara made this way, the sauce thickened lightly with egg yolk. The heat of the pasta is enough to cook the egg yolks, but if you like, you may bring a small saucepan of boiling water to a simmer and, for about a minute before draining the pasta, slip the yolk into a small sieve placed in the simmering water, to coddle them for a minute. Carefully lift the sieve from the water and add the coddled yolks to the pasta as described below.
So I added a few tablespoons of cream, along with the egg yolks (which I do coddle- the sieve I use for this is lying on the upper left corner of the left cutting board, in the above photo). And one last note, regarding the cream: the quiche recipe I mentioned earlier, has half-and-half as one of the ingredients, but I usually replace the half-and-half with cream when I make this quiche, to make it a little richer (because that’s just how I roll...) 😉
Bullion: Another substitution, but I think this is a fairly minor one. The recipe calls for chicken stock, but I have veggie bullion cubes in the house (since my husband is vegetarian), and I felt that veggie broth made from this bullion would be plenty adequate.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Pasta
Egg Yolks
Bacon
So the first step is to cook the bacon in the olive oil over medium heat, for 6 minutes.
Then add the leeks and the garlic, and cook them together with the bacon for 5 minutes (and at this point, my daughter and I were both swooning over the smell…) 😊
Next add the veggie broth, and then stir in the pasta. Lastly remove the pot from the stove and stir in the cream, grated cheese, and coddled egg yolks.
And coupled with a green salad, this gets the “thumbs-up” approval from my daughter. 👍😃
Buon Appetito!