mrbarolo wrote:Antonius: So, when you use the pasta water - do you beat some water into the raw egg, and add that mixture to the noodles in the pan, or do you put raw egg and noodles in the pan, and add a bit of water to them then?
I have to confess that when I've tried it just mixing the eggs into the pasta off the heat, they don't cook enough for my taste. Perhaps one can use a very hot pre-heated bowl in which to do the mixing but the heat of the pasta alone isn't sufficient for me.
Tempering the beaten eggs with the hot cooking water (add a little hot water, beat vigorously, add a little more, beat vigorously, etc.) raises the temperature of the eggs and, as long as you keep stirring everything and don't use too high a heat and too hot a hot pan, you can bring the eggs and pasta together and get the eggs cooked enough to be creamy (not raw and slimy) but not curdled into clumps of scrambled eggs. I think mixing a good measure of pecorino (for me, not parmigiano in this dish but parmigiano would taste pretty good too) into the eggs is important for getting the texture right.
Again, it seems to me that the use of cream in the dish, insofar as it's not just a question of liking the flavour of cream, is a way to get the creamy texture of the sauce with less risk of clumping. But all in all, I'd rather have creamy sauce with a few clumps of scrambled egg than no clumps but uncooked or undercooked egg.
Greek avgolemono sauces (the same thing is also done in central Italy, especially Lazio and the Abruzzi, and so roughtly the same neck of the woods that likes carbonara) are cooked and kept from getting lumpy through tempering. In Italy, as in Greece, egg sauces are made with lamb.
My old Roman cookbook says (my paraphrase): throw the cooked spaghetti into the pan with the egg mixture and mix them around for a couple of minutes, and turn them over with a wooden spoon until the egg is cooked and has tightened; this last word is my rendering of
rapprese, from
rapprendere, literally 'to coagulate', but note that they go on to say
ar punto giusto, "to the right point"... Unambiguously 'cooked' but just what the right texture is, well, that's harder to describe. Of course, that pan should not be on high heat.
Cooked, as creamy as possible, certainly not lumpy, but certainly not raw. At least that's how I see it.
I hope that helps.
Antonius
Alle Nerven exzitiert von dem gewürzten Wein -- Anwandlung von Todesahndungen -- Doppeltgänger --
- aus dem Tagebuch E.T.A. Hoffmanns, 6. Januar 1804.
________
Na sir is na seachain an cath.