Cacio e pepe

Cacio e pepe is pecorino, pepper, pasta and the water the pasta cooked in. There is nowhere to hide. It is also the Roman dish that most reliably defeats people the first few times, because the cheese wants to clump and the only thing stopping it is technique.

Ingredients

Serves 2.

	Metric	Imperial
Tonnarelli or spaghetti	200 g	7 oz
Pecorino romano, very finely grated	120 g	4 oz
Black peppercorns	2 tsp	2 tsp

Grate the pecorino as finely as you can. Coarse gratings melt unevenly and that unevenness is what becomes a lump.

Method

1. Toast the peppercorns whole in a dry pan until they smell of pepper rather than of dust, then crush them coarsely.
2. Cook the pasta in less water than usual and salt it lightly. Less water means more starch, and the pecorino is already salty.
3. While it cooks, work the grated pecorino with a few spoonfuls of the cooking water into a smooth paste, about the thickness of double cream. Do this in a bowl, off the heat.
4. Drain the pasta two minutes early, keeping plenty of water. Put it in the pepper pan over low heat with a ladle of water and finish cooking it there, tossing, until the water is nearly gone.
5. Take the pan off the heat and let it cool for half a minute. Add the cheese paste and toss hard, loosening with more water until the sauce clings to the pasta and there is no free liquid in the pan.

What goes wrong

The cheese seizes into strings. The pan was too hot. Pecorino breaks above roughly 65C and once it has broken it will not come back. Off the heat, always.

The sauce is thin and pools at the bottom. Too much water or not enough cheese. It should coat the pasta and leave the pan almost clean.

It tastes flat. The pepper was not toasted. Most of what people think is the taste of pepper only appears with heat.

Why it works

The starch in the cooking water lets the cheese emulsify into a sauce rather than melting into a separate pool of fat and protein. Cooking the pasta in less water concentrates that starch. This is why a recipe that tells you to use a large pot of water makes the dish harder without saying so.

At the table

One of the four Roman pastas, alongside carbonara, gricia and amatriciana, and the one that most reliably separates a trattoria that cooks from a trattoria that reheats. It is a primo, it is cheap, and it is eaten fast.

Tonnarelli is the Roman shape for it, thicker than spaghetti and slightly square in section, and it holds the sauce in a way thinner pasta does not. Spaghetti is common and correct enough; anything short and ridged is a different dish wearing the name.

There is no cheese offered at the table, because the cheese is the sauce. There is no oil and no butter either, and a version arriving glossy with fat has been made the easy way.

It is a dish people order at lunch, often alone, often standing up somewhere afterwards with a coffee. In summer it turns up less: it is heavy, it is hot, and Rome in August has other ideas.

The pepper is not a garnish and should be coarse enough to find.

What an Italian would say

That it is pecorino romano and not parmigiano, and that mixing them is a compromise made for foreign palates. That the pasta should be tonnarelli if you can get it, because the rough square edge holds the sauce. And that if you are adding butter, you have wandered off to something else.