Gnocchi Carbonara - Semi Homemade Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What should not be added to carbonara? ›

Must-have ingredients

A real carbonara does not contain onion, garlic, or cream.

You need just a few simple ingredients to prep a fantastic carbonara: pancetta, garlic, grated cheese, black pepper, and your pasta of choice. My favorite gnocchi comes from DeLallo. It's made in Italy with over 85% potato for traditional flavor and its texture is perfectly light and airy!

Using a large mixing bowl and setting it over the boiling pasta water to create a makeshift double boiler helps prevent you from accidentally scrambling the eggs.

The golden rule to silky carbonara is to whisk your egg whites so that they're completely incorporated with the egg yolks. This will create a smooth, velvety sauce.

What not to put in Spaghetti Carbonara? Don't put garlic, cream, milk or butter. It is not needed. It is fine if you want to make a dish with those ingredients, but if you want to learn how to make this dish correctly, use only pecorino, eggs/egg yolks, black pepper, guanciale, and pasta water.

Nutritional Value

Believe it or not, regular pasta is actually more carb-heavy than gnocchi, coming in at around 2 times the amount of carbs per serving. Gnocchi is also notorious for having a lot more sodium, with over 200 grams of it per serving. Regular pasta doesn't have nearly as high of a sodium content.

The Italian version doesn't use cream or ham. It is made with pancetta (pork belly meat that is salt cured, also referred to as Italian bacon), Parmigiano Reggiano or pecorino romano cheese, eggs, and black pepper—called the basics. The pork is fried in fat, usually olive oil.

Traditional Carbonara is a pasta sauce that gets its famously smooth, silky texture from the special way eggs (with extra egg yolks added) are cooked in the hot pasta itself. There is also the addition of hard Italian cheeses like Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano-Reggiano that add to the smoothness.

Is it better to make carbonara with whole egg or yolk? ›

Eggs is eggs

Whole eggs work well, but I'm going to add just the one extra yolk, just because this really isn't a dish you'd eat every day, and it does add a glorious eggy richness to it.

I like to use a ratio of 1 whole egg to 3 egg yolks because it balances the richness. If you are looking to avoid using raw eggs, I would recommend making my Cacio e Pepe recipe – this is another one of the four classic Roman pastas but requires only three ingredients (cheese, pepper, and pasta).

To avoid the dreaded scramble, the goal is to not let your eggs get too hot too quickly. Rather than add your eggs straight into your carbonara pan, crack them into a different bowl with the Pecorino. From there, you have a few options for how to combine the mixture with your pasta.

Just because there shouldn't be cream in pasta carbonara doesn't mean it's not creamy. The creaminess of classic carbonara comes from the emulsion of egg yolks, cheese, pasta water, and the rendered fat from the guanciale.

Well, the canonical answer would be: "No, we do not use cream in our dishes. Cream covers the flavors and makes the dishes heavy. It's better to use better quality ingredients, if a dish isn't creamy enough it means that you don't know how to cook it, not that there is a need of cream ".

Should carbonara have cream? Typically carbonara sauce is only made of eggs, bacon, parmesan, olive oil, seasoning, and sometimes, vegetables. As for cream, Italians will tell you that is a big no no.