So I tried your recipe tonight. It was more successful than last week’s trial, although last week’s was not bad. Last week I did not have any clumping of cheese with the pasta, but an enormous amount of cheese remained stuck to the pan. My wife was not pleased.
Tonight’s cacio e pepe was much more successful in that there was very little cheese stuck to the pan. The olive oli probably played a role, but what was probably much more important were the proportions that Cioletti gives. Last week I used too much cheese in relation to the pasta. Elizabeth Minchilli’s video does not give any amounts, so I took amounts from another Italian website. Tonight’s version was a bit too salty, but that was probably because some idiot put too much salt in the pasta water.
By the way, although I grant that Jeff Cioletti knows a thing or two about pasta cacio e pepe, I still have to object to something he wrote:
And please, never use cream. It’s not authentic, and all it does is dilute the flavor of the Pecorino. If you want to use cream, you might as well go make fettucine alfredo.
He may know cacio e pepe, but he knows nothing about fettucine Alfredo!
