For a quick meal with a comfort food feel, you can't beat most pasta dishes. But Cacio e Pepe is not just any pasta dish. While it's one of the most basic, traditionally made with just four ingredients, it's one to master.
Cacio e Pepe is a Roman pasta dish and the name translates to cheese and pepper _ two of its key ingredients. The black pepper should be freshly ground and there should be a good amount of it. Use at least a tablespoonful of pepper. Typically, the cheese used is grated Pecorino Romano, a hard sheep's milk cheese. The cheese becomes the sauce for the pasta with the help of a good ladleful of hot pasta cooking water to melt it. Adding butter or cream is considered taboo, but many recipes, including today's adaption of Cacio e Pepe, use it.
Another beauty of this dish is that it's made in one bowl. Once the cheese is grated into the bowl, you whisk in the hot pasta water along with the pepper until creamy sauce is achieved. Next the hot pasta is mixed in. It's that simple. Both the hot pasta and hot pasta cooking water help melt the cheese and develop its creamy consistency. You can thank the starchiness and seasoning of the water that helps bring the sauce together and coat it and the pepper to the pasta.
When cooking pasta, always, always salt the water. I used to add just a small amount. But over my cooking years and after hearing so many chefs say "the water should taste like the sea," I always use a generous amount. And by generous, use at least 2 tablespoons. Using a good amount of salt seasons the pasta while it cooks, but it's amazing that the pasta doesn't taste overly salty.
Another thing I always do with pasta dishes is reserve some of the pasta cooking water. It's always good to have on hand to thin a sauce if you need to or to stretch it.
In today's dish, as mentioned above, the pasta cooking water is part of the sauce. The recipe is one I saw Tim Love demonstrate recently on the "Today" show. Love is a chef and restaurateur with restaurants in several states. His flagship restaurant is Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in Fort Worth, Texas.
The segment was showcasing this recipe because it comes together quickly and for its ease. Love touted this dish as vegetarian, too. But we'll just call it meatless.
Love upped the ante of a traditional Cacio e Pepe with the addition of roasted maitake (also called hen of the woods) mushrooms. Maitake is a specialty mushroom, and I couldn't find any in my neck of the woods. For today's dish, I quartered and roasted cremini mushrooms. Roasting the mushrooms deepens their heartier flavor. The key with roasting them is not to overcrowd them on the baking sheet, as Love suggested, or they will become soggy.
For more of a spicy peppery bite, crushed red pepper is added to the mushrooms. In the end, it adds a kick to the dish that sort of sneaks up on you. But all is balanced out with the creaminess of the cheese in the sauce.
What I like about the dish is its simplicity. It also shows how using good quality ingredients and knowing a few techniques can make any dish fabulous.
