Pasta alla gricia

Guanciale, pecorino romano, black pepper, pasta water. Four things, no tomato and no egg, and the shortest ingredient list of the four Roman pastas.

It is also the oldest of them, which is the useful way to understand the whole family. Gricia is the base. Add tomato and you have amatriciana. Add egg instead and you have carbonara. Take the guanciale away and you are at cacio e pepe.

Ingredients

Serves 4.

	Metric	Imperial
Rigatoni or mezze maniche	400 g	14 oz
Guanciale, in short thick batons	180 g	6.5 oz
Pecorino romano, grated fine	100 g	3.5 oz
Black peppercorns, coarsely cracked	2 tsp	2 tsp
Salt	for the pasta water	for the pasta water

Guanciale is cured pig cheek. It is fattier and sweeter than pancetta and it renders to a different texture entirely. With only four ingredients there is nowhere for a substitute to hide.

Grate the pecorino as finely as you can. Coarse cheese melts unevenly and is the usual reason a gricia turns stringy.

No oil, no butter, no garlic, no onion. The guanciale gives up everything the sauce needs.

Method

1. Put the pasta on in water salted lightly. The guanciale and the pecorino are both salty and the water is the only salt you can still take back.
2. Render the guanciale in a cold dry pan over medium heat until the fat runs clear and the batons are crisp at the edges and soft in the middle, about 8 minutes. Lift them out and set them aside.
3. Toast the cracked pepper in the rendered fat for thirty seconds, off the heat if it is fierce.
4. Mix the pecorino with a few spoonfuls of hot pasta water into a smooth cream in a bowl. Work out the lumps now, while nothing is at stake.
5. Drain the pasta two minutes short, keeping a mugful of water, and finish it in the pan of fat with a splash of that water. Toss hard.
6. Take the pan off the heat. Add the pecorino cream and toss until it turns glossy, loosening with more pasta water as needed.
7. Return the guanciale, give it one more toss, and serve immediately.

What goes wrong

The cheese seized into strings. The pan was still on the flame. Pecorino is acidic and low in moisture and it grabs at direct heat. Off the hob, always.

It is dry and claggy. Not enough pasta water. The sauce should look slightly too loose in the pan, because it tightens on the way to the table.

It is greasy and separated. Too much rendered fat for the amount of cheese and water, or it was tossed too gently. The emulsion needs agitation.

The guanciale is chewy. It sat in the pan through the finishing. Take it out after rendering and put it back at the end.

It is too salty. The pasta water. Salt it lightly here; this is the one Roman pasta where that matters most.

Why it works

The sauce is an emulsion, and there is no cream and no egg to help it hold. Fat from the guanciale, water from the pasta and starch dissolved in that water are the only things in it, and the starch is what lets fat and water stay mixed.

That is why the pasta water is an ingredient rather than a tool, and why water from a fresh kettle will not do the same job. It is also why the pan comes off the heat: above roughly 70C the proteins in the pecorino tighten and squeeze out the fat they were holding, and the emulsion breaks into strings and grease.

At the table

A primo, and the one Romans will tell you to order if they are testing a new trattoria, because there is nothing in it to hide behind.

Outside Rome it is genuinely obscure. Carbonara is on every menu in the world and gricia is on almost none, which is a good part of its appeal to the people who eat it. If you see it listed in a Roman trattoria the kitchen is usually worth trusting.

The name is argued about and nobody has settled it. One account traces it to Grisciano, a hamlet near Amatrice; another to the gricio, the old Roman word for the itinerant bread and grocery sellers who came down from the Alps. Neither has won.

It is sometimes called the amatriciana bianca, which annoys people from Amatrice in the same way that calling gricia a carbonara without egg annoys everybody.

Rigatoni and mezze maniche are the usual shapes, because the ridges and the wide mouth hold an emulsion that would slide off a strand. Spaghetti appears and is not wrong, just less good at the job.

More pecorino at the table, and coarse pepper. The wine is a light red or a Frascati, and nobody thinks hard about it.

What an Italian would say

That it is the mother of the other three, and that the tomato and the egg both came later. That the pecorino goes in off the heat and this is not a suggestion. And that a gricia made with pancetta is a nice plate of pasta belonging to somebody else's cuisine.