Bucatini all'amatriciana

Guanciale rendered slowly until its fat runs clear and its edges crisp, tomato cooked briefly in that fat, pecorino romano at the end. It takes about twenty minutes and it is one of the four Roman pastas, alongside carbonara, cacio e pepe and gricia.

Amatrice, the town in the mountains north east of Rome that gives the dish its name, is strict about it: no onion, no garlic. Rome is slightly less strict and you will find both. Nobody anywhere puts cream in it.

Ingredients

Serves 4.

	Metric	Imperial
Bucatini	400 g	14 oz
Guanciale, in short thick batons	150 g	5.5 oz
Peeled plum tomatoes, tinned	400 g	14 oz
Pecorino romano, grated	80 g	3 oz
Dry white wine	50 ml	1.7 fl oz
Dried chilli	1 small	1 small
Salt	for the pasta water	for the pasta water

Guanciale is cured pig cheek and it is the dish. It is fattier than pancetta, sweeter, and it renders to a completely different texture. A version made with pancetta is a good tomato and bacon pasta and it is not this.

No oil goes in the pan. The guanciale provides all of it.

Method

1. Put the pasta on in well-salted water.
2. Render the guanciale in a cold dry pan over medium heat with the chilli. Cold, so the fat comes out slowly. It is ready when the fat runs clear and the batons are crisp at the edges and still soft in the middle, about 8 minutes.
3. Lift the guanciale out with a slotted spoon and set it aside. This is the step most recipes skip and it is why their guanciale ends up leathery.
4. Deglaze with the wine and let it evaporate.
5. Add the hand-crushed tomatoes to the fat and simmer 10 to 12 minutes, until the oil separates and pools red at the edges.
6. Drain the pasta short of al dente and finish it in the sauce for a minute with a spoonful of its water.
7. Off the heat, return the guanciale and stir in most of the pecorino. The rest goes on at the table.

What goes wrong

The guanciale is tough. It stayed in the tomato while it simmered. Take it out after rendering and put it back at the end.

It is greasy. Too much fat left in the pan for the amount of tomato. Pour some off before the tomatoes go in; how much a piece of guanciale gives up varies.

It is bright orange and thin. Not reduced enough. Wait for the oil to separate.

It tastes flat. Under-salted pasta water, or not enough pecorino. The cheese is a seasoning here as much as an ingredient.

Why it works

Guanciale fat is soft at room temperature and melts at a low temperature, which is why it renders cleanly and why the sauce stays glossy rather than splitting. The tomato cooks in that rendered fat rather than in oil, so the fat carries the pork flavour into every part of the sauce.

The pecorino goes in off the heat for the same reason it does in carbonara: sheep cheese is acidic and low in moisture, and direct heat makes it seize into strings instead of melting into the sauce.

At the table

A primo, and in Rome a common Saturday one. It arrives without anything on the side and nothing follows it automatically.

Bucatini is the shape people picture and it is also the one that fights back. It is a thick hollow spaghetti, it whips sauce at your shirt, and Romans eat it with a certain resignation about this. Rigatoni and mezze maniche are entirely normal alternatives and no one will comment.

More pecorino at the table is expected. Parmigiano would be noticed, because this is a sheep-cheese dish in a sheep-farming tradition, and the two cheeses are not interchangeable here.

There is a rivalry with Amatrice about whether Rome has ruined the recipe, and the town's own version is codified: guanciale, pecorino di Amatrice, tomato, white wine, chilli, and nothing else. After the 2016 earthquake destroyed much of the town, restaurants across Italy and abroad put the dish on their menus and sent the proceeds there, which is why you occasionally still see it listed as amatriciana solidale.

The wine is a light red or whatever the house pours.

What an Italian would say

That guanciale is not pancetta and that the difference is the whole dish. That the tomato is a relatively recent arrival, because the older dish is the gricia, which is this without it. And that if you are putting onion in, you are cooking the Roman version rather than the Amatrice one, which is a choice you should at least make on purpose.