Gricia: simple but challenging -- pasta, guanciale, pecorino

Gricia is a rewarding Roman dish with just three ingredients; it's a challenge to develop the creamy sauce.

Rigatoni, guancial, pecorino -- that's all you need

Like cacio e pepe, it's a surprisingly simple Roman dish with minimalist ingredients -- just pasta, guancial (cured pork jowl with assertive piggy flavor), and pecorino (sheep) cheese.  (Cacio is even more austere, dispensing with the guanciale). The pasta is the star, and needs to provide enough starch to bind the fat from the guanciale into a creamy sauce, so use a good one pressed through bronze dies. Likewise, use good quality pecorino, since it brings the sharp sheep cheese edge.

We knew we needed the starch released by the pasta, so we used the minimum amount of water we could to boil the pasta, a technique espoused for any starch-thickened sauce by Serious Eats.  This pasta took about twice what commercial pasta requires, about 20 minutes, to get to al dente -- plenty of time to work on the guanciale and emulsion. Finish off heat or the cheese will separate or clump rather than form a creamy sauce.

You may not need to salt your pasta water if your guanciale is very salty; realize that any salt in the pasta water will be concentrated by boiling and a second reduction in the emulsion. 

In Barcelona, we get 100 g packages of guanciale at Bon Breu; it's got lots of fat. Aldi has "Mancini" brand Rigatoni in 500 g bags that is die-cut and has enough starch to to create a good emulsion with the fat. Proportions below are based convenient quantities of these.

For 2 dinner portions:

166 g / 6   ounce Rigatoni, extruded through brass dies
100 g / 3.5 ounce Guanciale, sliced thin
 60 g / 2   ounce Pecorino Cheese, grated very fine (half for sauce, half for serving)

Slice the Guanciale thin into strips or match sticks.
Add a bit of Olive Oil to a pan and sauté Guanciale to render fat; I find a skillet is easier to toss the emulsion than a high-sided pan used in these photos.

Guanciale, a bit of oil, and starchy pasta water forming emulsion

Cook the Rigatoni in a minimal amount of water so you can collect the starch that's thrown off; ours took 20 minutes.
As the pasta cooks, transfer some of the starchy water into the fat, oil and guanciale, and swirl to start creating the emulsion for the sauce.
Continue like this until the pasta is al dente; your emulsion should start looking like a credible but small sauce.

Minimal water (barely covering pasta) ensures plenty of starch

Add the pasta to the pan with the emulsion, I use a slotted spoon and know the extra water is just what I need.
Crank up the heat on the emulsion, you should hear some sizzling.
Swirl and flip the pan to agitate the emulsion, building the sauce.

Flip it, flip it good!

You may want to add more of the now-highly-starchy water to the pan to build more sauce.
Continue until the sauce is a little thick, coating the pasta.

Off heat, grind some black pepper and drizzle in half the grated cheese, a bit at a time, swirl, and drizzle, repeat until you've used all half the cheese; it should merging with the sauce, and you don't need much cheese.

Finish with pepper, cheese in multiple additions

Swirl and toss well with each addition of cheese to form sauce

Serve immediately, garnished with the remaining cheese.

Pears poached sous vide with ginger

I saw this quick post on Aki and Alex's blog, and it sounded easy and seasonal. Ginger and pear is a good combination. We served it with Point Reyes blue cheese, candied walnuts and port.

2 Bartlett Pears
1 thumb-sized piece of fresh Ginger

2 small slices intense Blue Cheese like Point Reyes
2 small handfuls candied Walnuts

Peel the pears then slice in half (extra points if you can retain a slice of stem in each half); add to sous vide bag.
Grate ginger to extract juice, retaining the fiber; add to bag.
Seal bag, cook sous vide at 83C/180F for 1 hour; chill and fridge until ready to serve.

Pull out the pear halves and put each on a plate.
Top with a bit of the Blue Cheese, garnish with candied Walnuts.
Serve with port.

Bacalao with Idiazábal cream sauce; spinach, pine nuts, prunes

We had this combination of bacalao and Idiazábal cheese -- a surprising combination -- at Restaurant Fonda in the opulent Hotel España in Barcelona; its stuck with me, so we tried to recreate it. Turned out well, but we have some work ahead of us if we're going to have the finesse their chef had.

I searched for this combination of ingredients and it turns out it's not uncommon; we based our dinner on these two recipes, both of which used the classic combination of spinach with pine nuts as a base. The substitution of prunes for typical white raisins was a welcome addition.

2 x 130 g Bacalao loins, without bones, desalted over night in water
    100 g Olive Oil, frozen
1 clove   Garlic, sliced thin
1         Chili pepper, sliced

 25 g Idiazábal cheese
 30 g Cream, heavy, 40% fat

100 g Olive Oil
      Salt
 20 g Pine Nuts
 50 g Prunes, sliced
300 g Spinach

Freeze the Olive Oil so it won't get sucked into the vacuum sealer, add it with the Bacalao loins,  Garlic and Chili in a sous vide bag and cook 20 minutes at 55C/135F. Hold until ready to plate.

Grate the Idiazábal cheese fine and add to Cream, heat very gently until melted together.

Toast the Nuts in Oil and Salt until starting to brown, add Prunes and sautee a little, then add Spinach and cook down. Hold until ready to Plate.

Open the bag and strain the liquid from the Bacalao.
Plate the Spinach mixture, lay on the Bacalao loins, then sauce with the cheese cream, and garnish with the cooked chili and garlic (warning: the garlic will be fierce, as it's not really cooked).
Serve.

This worked pretty well: the spinach base was a classic combination, the bacalao stood up to the cheese sauce. Next time, however, we might want to take more care of the cheese sauce as it had a grainy texture -- this might have been due to too-quick heating, or maybe I just need to strain it (although that will be difficult with such a thick intense sauce).

Cacio e Pepe with Ramps

Cacio e Pepe is a very simple Roman dish, but it's a bitch to get right. It's just pasta, water, pecorino romano cheese, and black pepper: no oil, no cream, no egg, nothing else. But the cheese wants to glop up or stick to the pot/skillet. This is our second take and we're adding ramps  which we get at the farmers market during their short season.

Not the best lighting for the finished dish :-(

One of the better discussions I've seen on cacio e pepe is on Serious Eats; he blooms the pepper in oil to bring out flavor and uses a bit of butter. Since I have to sauté the ramps anyway, I'll do both in butter; we'll try and stay pure by not adding oil. We also use Serious Eats technique of low-water boiling to increase starch; you really don't need a giant pot of water!

I've tried this before with homemade pasta and it was too soft to withstand the physical beating necessary to emulsify the cheese, so use commercial dry pasta.

225 g Spaghetti pasta (1/2 pound, 1/2 box)
80 g Pecorino Romano cheese (3 ounces)
lots of Black Pepper, freshly ground
Ramps
Butter, unsalted

Ramps are in season at the farmers market

Boil the pasta in as little water as needed to cover, with a bit of salt, stirring to ensure the strands don't stick. Cook until a couple minutes away from done, very al dente.

Grate the Pecorino very fine on a microplane or rotary grater.
Grind the pepper coarsely.
Slice the ramp stems into smallish pieces that'll fit on a fork, and the leaves into larger slices that will wilt down a bit; keep them separate.

Mise en place is essential, this comes together quickly

Heat the butter in a nonstick skillet.
Add Ramp stems and pepper, cook until fragrant.
Add Ramp leaves and cook to wilt a bit.
Remove from pan and reserve in a bowl to add later.

Turn off the heat on the skillet so the surface can cool down, to prevent cheese sticking.
When pasta is about 2 minutes from done,
ladle some of the now starch-rich water into the skillet.
Add most of the grated Pecorino and stir into the water.
Use tongs to transfer the Spaghetti to the skillet and stir into the water/cheese;
it's fine if you have water dripping from the pasta.
Stir vigorously to turn the water, starch and cheese into an emulsion coating the pasta;
add more pasta water if it's too thick, and test the pasta for doneness.
Add the Ramps and a bunch more ground Pepper, combine.

Serve and top with the rest of the grated Pecorino.

Confession: my cheese glopped together as I stirred, and I stirred quite vigorously, shaking the pan with one hand and stirring with tongs in the other. The crappy quality of the photo and the garnish of pecorino hides the glops. I had turned the heat back on low, figuring I needed enough heat to melt, but that may have been a mistake.

The TalesOfAmbrosia blog has a very simple recipe that heats the serving bowl over the pasta pot, but then combines everything off heat in that bowl.  I really do think heat is the issue.

On Republica's Scienza in Cucina blog, the article Le ricette scientifiche: la cacio e pepe is very helpful; use Google Translate :-)

Lucky Peach has 3 recipes in the print edition, but this one online is quite explicit about excessive heat causing lumps; interestingly, he makes fresh pasta.

After some experimentation, keeping temperature low solves the glopping problem.
Before adding the cheese, keep the water between 55-65C (130-150F) so the cheese won't coagulate due to excessive heat; maintain this range as you add the other ingredients. You'll probably need to let the starchy pasta water cool a bit as it will be coming off the boil.

Bottura's Risotto "Cacio e Pepe"

This outstanding risotto by chef Massimo Bottura is as indulgent as it is unconventional; it had me giggling it was so good.

It was developed to use a lot of Parmesan which might have gone to waste after the 2012 earthquake that devastated the Emilia-Romagna region of of Italy.  The "cacio e pepe" refers to Parmesan cheese and pepper from the classic Roman dish.  In this recipe, Parmesan is separated to form an enriched water which is used to cook the risotto rice. Unfortunately, when first published, various versions had obvious errors with crazy quantities of Parmesan so it was difficult to determine what was the correct ratio of cheese to water.

The first I tried was 1500g parmesan to 4L water = 1500g/4000g = 37.5% cheese and was mind-blowing but a rather expensive at that ratio. This one from NPR "corrected" 0.5 Lb and 4 Qt water is 6%, but I found it a bit unspirited. One published in 2015 by Bottura himself is 1Kg/2Kg (50%) which seems insane... insanely good I'm sure, but also insanely expensive. I'm hoping to circle in on a ratio which is richly rewarding while still affordable. Here are some other recipes, probably all derived from the original, with ratios between 37% and 60% cheese to water by weight:

• NPR Corrected: 0.5 Lb / 4 US Qt = 227g / 3785 g = 6%
• Saveur (converted to metric): 0.9Kg/1.5L = 60%
• Foodcookture: 992g/2.67L = 37%
• Dissapore: 1.5Kg/4L = 37%
• Menta & Rozmarin: 500g/1Kg = 50%

I make Risotto following Marcella Hazan's recipes, and it's pretty standard: about 2.5 cups liquid to 1 cup rice feeds two as a main course generously; I usually end up adding a bit more liquid, so going to bump this up to 3C liquid. I expect this dish will be a bit rich to have a heaping mound of cheesy risotto as the only thing on the menu, so I'll cut it in half, but preserve the 3:1C ratio, and convert to weight-based metric measurements for sanity.  1 C Arborio rice = 187g, 3 C water is 710 ml, so the ratio is 26%. Ratios of rice to water in the other recipes are all over the map, 12 to 40%; I suspect some horribly bad conversions from metric to imperial and then cups and different ounces:

• NPR: 12% rice:water
• Saveur: 1:3C rice:water = 187/710g = 26%
• Foodcookture: 12.5% rice:water
• Dissapore: 12.5%
• Menta: 40%

So we'll go with 26% rice:water then calculate the weight of the cheese at 37% based on the weight of the water to arrive at the final amounts. Reducing by half for 2 starter portions: 355g water, 37% = 131g cheese, and 26% = 92g rice. Whew!

355 g Water

131 g Parmesan cheese, grated fine

 92 g Risotto Rice: Arborio, Carnaroli, Vialone Nano, etc

 15 ml Olive Oil

  9 g Pepper mix: Black, Szechuan, etc, ground coarse (add in 3 batches)

Heat Water to 80-90C (do not go over 90C) and add grated Parmesan until threads form at the bottom; this took about 5 minutes with cheese grated very finely on a rotary grater. Remove pan and let cool to room temperature. Repeat. Cover and cool 8 hours or overnight in the fridge.

Separate the cream from the top and reserve; a scum skimmer works well.

Sieve the liquid Parmesan Water and reserve.

Pull out the solid part and let dry and reserve: you can grate and fry this in a teflon pan or cook in microwave a few seconds to make a frico garnish.

Heat the Parmesan Water in a pot; add 3g of the Pepper.

Sauté 3g of the Pepper mix in the Olive Oil until fragrant.

Add the Risotto and toast until warm.

Add some of the Parmesan Water, stir and cook until mostly reserved;

repeat until the liquid is used and the Rice is toothsome, with a slight bite.

Add the Parmesan Cream and stir in.
You may need to add more water to get the texture right: I had to add 180ml; just make sure you preheat it.

Plate and dust with the remaining 3g of Pepper.

Top with "sails" of a frico made with the Parmesan solids.