Cacio e Pepe with Bacon Grease

Hi, I'm Josh Ozersky and you're watching eHow.com. I am boiling some water here. And the reason for that is because I am making one of the manliest of all pasta dishes. Cacio e pepe-bacon. Now this is a kind of a hybrid spaghetti between cacio e pepe, which is just black pepper and pecerino cheese. And carbonara which has bacon and eggs and whatever. And I have another spaghetti that I make called due-grazi that is just oil and bacon fat and there's another one that's tre-grazi with oil and bacon fat and butter. That's a good one. But this is a straight up, this is a straight up cacio e pepe with bacon added. So essentially I'm going to take some spaghetti out. Not especially great spaghetti. I'm going to break it in half. Worse thing you can do right? I don't believe it. I don't care and I don't care. The pasta purists will tell you that this is an abomination. But the fact is that I feel like it fits in a small pan better. And I don't want to fill a whole big pot. So I've got 8 minutes before this is done. As you can tell, there's a giant construction crew next door, this being New York. Maybe I'll go upstairs and say hello to those guys. And I'll see you back here when this is ready. Let's see if my spaghetti is done. It was firm before. Now it's sort of in this resistance is futile state. I put a little butter in here. I always like an excuse to eat spaghetti with butter. This spaghetti is officially done. The spaghetti is not just the spaghetti. The spaghetti is in the water. In fact the water is even more important than the spaghetti is right now because the water is what binds everything together. Under so circumstances should you ever drain the spaghetti and then wash it. That is the most abominable thing. I mean people say you shouldn't break it. Forget that. Better to break it a thousand times into a million pieces. Better to pulverize it than to pour off the important pasta water. The pasta water is so important that I even reserve a little bit in a glass. Then later on I forget that it's pasta water and I drink it giving everybody a good laugh. Okay, so here's my spaghetti. This is some kind of weirdly inappropriate tongs that I took out, but like, it doesn't matter. All you've got to do is get it out of the bowl. And if some water comes with it that's good too. You want the water to come with it like I said. Alright, so, there's my spaghetti. Now, I guess that the original Italian cacio e pepe, the put a little bit of olive oil or whatever. I don't know what they put in it. Maybe they just, literally it's just nothing but the water and the pepe and the cacio. I think we should have some bacon fat in there. Add a little bit of this. Emulsify this all together good. I can smell bacon fumes coming up as it binds. One bacon to bind them all. Alright, now I've got to put in a lot of pecerino cheese. I know that super Mario says that the parmesano regiano is the undisputed king of cheeses. But I'm like, forget that. I'm a pecerino man. I've got lots of salt in it. And to me the whole point of eating food is for it to be salty. Oh yeah, oh baby, look at that, a veritable torrent. A Niagra of pecerino. And now, you don't want it to just flavor. It's like the spaghetti water and the grease. You want it all to work together. You'll notice that the black pepper that I'm using is not ground by hands from a mill. I am convinced that only a sap uses a pepper mill, except when he's maybe serving something at the very last minute that is incredibly difficult and precious. The pepper that you use in something like this, you're using so much of it that you would get carpal-tunnel syndrome if you tried to twist it all from a pepper mill. If you get the high quality coarse tele-cherry black pepper and you mix it, I think you would have to be some kind of a spice guru to be able to tell the difference between it and the ground part. Alright, so now a little bit more cheese. And you know what? Let's get a little bit of heat here, a little peperoncino. This is a profoundly unhealthy dish that is totally satisfying in every way. I see some, there was some pecerino left behind, so I'll put a little bit more on the top. And that is cacio e pepe with bacon. I'm Josh Ozersky. Thank you for watching and check me out again on eHow.com.