Cacio e Pepe

Posted on by Michiel and Jeen

It takes only four ingredients to create an international culinary incident: a classic Italian recipe, a well-known British food website, Parmesan cheese and butter. What happened? BBC Good Food published a recipe for a quick and easy lunch meal, called Cacio e Pepe, with Spaghetti, Butter, Black Pepper and Parmesan Cheese. Claudio Pica, president of the Fiepet Confesercenti Roma (an association representing restaurants in Italy) couldn’t disagree more and expressed his astonishment in several letters, including one to the UK Ambassador.

Cacio e Pepe is a traditional, Italian classic, typical for the Lazio region, made with Tonnarelli or Spaghetti, Water, Salt, Pecorino Romano and Black Pepper. No cream, no butter, no olive oil, no Parmesan cheese. And it may seem simple to prepare, but serving Cacio e Pepe requires skills, passion and experience, according to Claudio Pica.

The incident made us think of Sophia Loren adding cream to her Spaghetti Carbonara and Jamie Oliver putting chorizo on his Pizza. Don’t mess with Italian traditions!

Now that we agree on the ingredients, we need to understand how to prepare the dish. The heart of the dish is a sauce made with pasta water and pecorino. We found various ways of making this sauce, ranging from adding pepper and grated cheese to the pasta just before serving (no sauce, just sticky pasta) to a scientific one whereby the sauce is made au bain marie (complicated).

We think the main points of the recipe are:

  • Use less water than usual, because you need starchy water to create the sauce
  • Use less salt in the pasta water because the Pecorino cheese is rather salty
  • The Pecorino must be relatively young, older cheese may make the sauce lumpy
  • The Pecorino must be very finely grated

We humbly present our version of this delicious Italian classic dish.

Wine Pairing

We enjoyed a glass of Pima Luna Frascati with our Cacio e Pepe. This is a white wine from the Lazio region, or to be more precise: from the hills overlooking Rome. The wine is made by wine maker Mauro Merz with malvasia bianca di candia and trebbiano grapes. It’s a light and refreshing wine with hints of green apple and citrus. Notes of slightly bitter almond on the finish. Its freshness matched very well with the creamy Cacio e Pepe. The aroma of the wine comes with a hint of butter, which is a nice connection to the Pecorino.

What You Need
  • 130 grams of Spaghetti
  • 70 grams of Pecorino cheese
  • 2 grams of Black Pepper
  • 1 litre of Water
What You Do
  1. Heat the water in a large pan and add the spaghetti
  2. Warm your plates (50 °C or 120 °F)
  3. Cook the spaghetti for a few minutes. Our spaghetti needed 11 minutes in total; we cooked it for 7 minutes in the pan.
  4. Crush the peppercorns
  5. Roast them in a pan over medium heat until they become very aromatic
  6. Reduce heat and wait for the spaghetti to be somewhat cooked
  7. Add some pasta water to the pan with the toasted pepper
  8. Increase the heat
  9. Transfer the pasta to the pan and combine
  10. Add a large spoon of pasta water to the pan
  11. Leave to cook
  12. Repeat steps 10 and 11 until the pasta is al dente. At this moment the pan should be nearly dry
  13. In parallel add some pasta water to the finely grated pecorino and make a smooth paste
  14. When the pasta is al dente remove the pan from the heat
  15. Allow to cool for perhaps one minute
  16. Quickly add the paste and combine everything in the pan
  17. Add pasta water to reach the right consistency
  18. Serve immediately on warm plates
  19. No need to add pepper or cheese
PS

The Good Food website mentioned they would be happy to post the original recipe. We looked for it, but couldn’t find it. We did however find a recipe for Cacio e Pepe with Gnocchi (and butter and Parmesan cheese, obviously).
Perhaps another letter to the Ambassador? Or one to the Prime Minister?

Cacio e Pepe ©cadwu

13 thoughts on “Cacio e Pepe”

  2. Love the story and love the recipe. I am going to share your story on my blog – not give it away at all but send people to your site for the recipe and story…I understand the concern here about naming a dish a bit cavalierly by that website – and am also sharing some links to stories I have done in the past where this has happened regarding Paella and even the humble “chop cheese” sandwich here in New York…great work as always Chefs!

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    1. Thanks John! The search for the ‘original’ recipe for Paella is intriguing. When we stayed in Valencia we did our shopping at the Mercado Central. We could buy all the right ingredients, including garrofó beans, but preparing our own Paella when in Valencia seemed a bit odd.

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  3. Pingback: A Controversial Cacio e Pepe Recipe! Chefs Michiel And Jeen Have The “International Culinary Incident!” – Bite! Eat! Repeat!

  6. Hello there! I had to stifle a giggle when reading your post – not because what you wrote was silly or obnoxious but because the story of ‘original’ pasta recipes keeps cropping up and causing heated debate on social media. I have to confess that I too get peeved when non-Italian chefs and bloggers start adding all kinds of ‘other’ ingredients to a recipe that ought to be left well alone. So I can’t disagree too much with Mr Claudio Pica. Let’s not go to the trouble of invoking cultural appropriation but a name is a name is a name – and should meaning something, and not be an interpretation. Thus cacio e pepe should include only: the pasta, the pecorino cheese, the pepper (and the water and salt to cook it in of course). The way I see it: people can of course cook whatever they like and add or remove whatever they choose from a recipe, just give it another name that’s all.

    Fyi I give Italian cooking classes to visiting tourists in and around Rome (i.e. Frascati), and my knees always get wobbly whenever I am requested to teach the cacio e pepe recipe – because it is truly not at all an easy recipe to get right! Not these days anyway! Back in the day, there was no claim to get the pecorino and cooking water to turn into a ‘cream’ (la cremina) – my grandmother Giuseppina (dob 1903) made it often and basically just threw all the ingredients together – as did most people until relatively recently (say the last 20 years). Simplicity was the name of the game. The cooked pasta would be placed inside a big bowl and the cheese and pepper strewn over it and mixed together – i.e. not combined in a cooking pan.

    These days the ‘cheffy’ technique introduced to elevate the dish … i.e. creating the ‘cremina’ or even curbing the ‘strength’ of the cheese by making it part parmigiano part pecorino (I suppose to appease the palates that can’t ‘take’ the grit of pure pecorino) have transformed this former ‘easy’ recipe into an iconic dish which Romans can’t get enough of. There is one admissable and very tasty ‘cheat’ that rarely gets mentioned and that is … in most restaurants the pasta used to make cacio e pepe will be ‘tonnarelli’ – never mind the name of this pasta, what’s important to note is that this is a fresh pasta, not a dry one. And hence … much easier to cook and get right (wink wink say no more).

    And yes – the best tip I can give is the one you wrote of: make sure the pecorino is relatively fresh (i.e. not aged) and grate at the very last minute and very finely. An aged cheese takes forever to melt, no?

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    1. Thanks for the additional information and the story how your grandmother made cacio e pepe. We sort of assumed that making ‘cremina’ was a ‘cheffy’ thing. We can’t buy (fresh) tonnarelli where we live, so that leaves only one option for use: make our own!

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  7. Great post! Cacio Pepe is simple and very difficult to execute correctly at the same time. I really like your technique and haven’t made it exactly like that yet — will definitely try. In the recipe I have on my blog I skip over some important details, because of which there is a pretty high risk of ending up with clumpy cheese. I love that you specify to warm up the plates first. I was already planning to do an extensive post on Cacio Pepe with a comparison between several methods, and I will be sure to include yours.

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