Spaghetti with Carbonara Sauce

Photo of Spaghetti with Carbonara Sauce

A simple and fast recipe for spaghetti with carbonara sauce: Onion, bacon, garlic, sour cream, egg, white wine and Parmesan cheese are the main ingredients of this sauce. This is one of my favorite pasta recipes.

Ingredients

  • 4 oz / 125g bacon, diced
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 1 clove garlic, chopped
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • ½ cup / 125ml dry white wine
  • ½ cup / 125ml chicken stock (or water)
  • 2 eggs
  • ½ cup / 120ml sour cream
  • ½ cup / 120ml milk
  • 1 oz / 30g Parmesan cheese, finely grated
  • ¼ tsp freshly ground pepper
  • ¼ tsp salt or to taste
  • pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • 2 tbsp chopped parsley
  • 1 lb / 500g spaghetti

Preparation

  1. Render bacon in a large saute pan over medium-high heat until it starts to brown.
  2. Remove excess fat from pan. Add olive oil and chopped onion. Cook until onion is soft and translucent.
  3. Add garlic, cook for another 2-3 minutes.
  4. Add stock or water and white wine. Reduce heat and simmer until most of the liquid has evaporated
  5. Whisk together eggs, sour cream, milk, Parmesan cheese, nutmeg, salt and pepper.
  6. In the meanwhile, cook spaghetti according to instructions. Drain.
  7. Add pasta to pan. Pour egg-and-cream mixture over the pasta. Add parsley.
  8. Keep tossing over low-medium heat until the sauce starts to thicken.
  9. Adjust seasoning with salt and freshly ground pepper.

Notes

  • Traditionally, the sauce is just minimally cooked by tossing the hot pasta with the egg. I'm not a big fan of undercooked eggs so I always toss the pasta over heat until the sauce thickens.

Preparation time: 30-45 minutes.

Yields ca. 4 servings.

I got the recipe a long time ago from a friend back in Europe.

Comments

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Spaghetti Carbonara

Steffen, what a beautiful website!! I came across it while Googling for a zwiebelkuchen recipe. Looking around (your site attracts "looking around") I saw your receipe for spaghetti carbonara. I've been living in Verona, Italy, for 25-years now (except for 7-years when I lived and worked in Heidelberg) and I've never heard of using garlic and/or nutmeg in carbonara. That said, it sounds interesting and I might try it sometime. Thanks again for your nice website--I'm going to "look around" it some more.

Thanks a lot for the nice

Thanks a lot for the nice feedback! I just did a little research: Marcella Hazan – Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking uses garlic to flavor the cooking oil. Nutmeg is certainly not part of the standard ingredients for carbonara sauce! Maybe I shouldn't have called the dish "carbonara", but it seemed close enough. Thanks again Steffen

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