Gnocchi Carbonara - Semi Homemade Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is gnocchi carbonara made of? ›

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!

1. Adding your eggs while the pasta is still on the heat. This is one of the most common mistakes when making carbonara. It is very easy to end up with pasta a la scrambled eggs instead.

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 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. As like any pasta dish, including carbonara, cook the pasta perfectly al dente so that it's soft but still firm, with some bite.

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.

Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano Reggiano – I like to use a combination of Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano Reggiano. While these two cheeses ARE similar, I strongly recommend you use BOTH (and not sub one for the other), as it adds a layer of complexity to the flavors.

Equally important is that the fat that melts out of the guanciale is required to thicken the carbonara sauce to make it creamy. Basically, what happens is that when the fat from the guanciale and in the egg yolks is mixed with starchy pasta cooking water, it thickens.

Roasted garlic cream sauce can be delicious with strong seafood or by itself on pasta. But you don't have to garlic everything. Humble ingredients—eggs, pasta, cheese, and pork—combine to create glossy, glorious spaghetti carbonara that's just as good at dinner as at 4 a.m.

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.

What distinguishes carbonara from other pasta dishes is its technique of combining eggs, hard cheese, cured pork, and black pepper into a rich, silky sauce. This recipe calls for raw eggs that are gently cooked by the hot sauce. If you prefer, you can use pasteurized eggs instead.

What does egg do to carbonara? ›

The whites of the egg combine with the starch in the pasta water to add viscosity to the sauce while the yolk adds richness and flavor. Because egg yolks are a powerful emulsifier, they also help bind the fat from the pork to the sauce, creating a smooth, velvety texture without any separation.

What is gnocchi? Gnocchi, pronounced 'n(y)oh-kee' (singular 'gnocco'), are a type of pasta consisting of soft, fat and chewy dumplings, typically paired with ragú, tomato or butter sauce. Traditionally, gnocchi dough is made of semolina or plain wheat flour, egg, and mashed potato.

Gnocchi are basically little dumplings made of mashed potato, flour and egg. They sometimes include other ingredients, such as herbs or seasonings. Italian in origin, they're often eaten in the same way as pasta (however, they're not pasta) – with a sauce or tossed in butter and garlic.

Pasta is typically made from wheat flour mixed with water and eggs. Since a gnocco (a single lump of gnocchi) is made primarily from potatoes, it's technically a dumpling. I turned to Katie Barreira, our test kitchen director, for further explanation.