Cooking & Baking

One of the lures of cacio e pepe is how quick and easy it is; using a blender or even building the sauce in the pan without the pasta goes against the ethos…drop the noodles in a sauté pan, toss it hard while adding cheese and water, and finish with a generous five or six twists of black pepper. One pan, under a minute from when the pasta comes out of the water to when it hits the plate.

Having made it 100s of times on the line, there's two tricks: the extra-concentrated pasta water is definitely one of them, but the real key is to have your cheese grated as fine as possible, almost to dust–the ideal way is with a microplane, even if it is a bit labor-intensive. If the cheese is virtually powdered, it melts in so quickly and evenly that it doesn't take much mechanical work. Also ideal for Alfredo, even if that's not quite so traditional.