Vegetarian (actually FISH) Carbonara w/ homemade fettuccine rolled out by hand aka “grandma style” (VIDEO)

Carbonara di Mare or as us English speakers call it, vegetarian Carbonara. The origins of the original Carbonara are interesting, in Italian the word “carbone’ pronounced carbone-ay means coal, the story goes that in Rome, the coal miners would order spaghetti cooked with pork fat and emulsify a raw egg into the dish at the table. What does this have to do with coal you ask? Well, apparently, as they were eating this amazing plate of food, the day’s coal would fall from their faces into the dish, leaving little black specks. Today, the specks are represented by copious amount of black pepper added. This dish has no pork, but it does have the emulsified egg – the black specks have been swapped out for red pepper (it looks prettier and tastes better with mint and capers). It’s super important to roll the pasta thin, unlike I did in this video, but very much like I did in the photograph.

Semolina Flour
Eggs
Anchovy Filets
(Mint)
Capers, rinsed
Garlic, sliced
Zucchini, cut into long batons
Kale, raw, shredded
Parmigiano Reggiano, grated
Pecorino Romano, grated
red pepper flakes (pepperoncino)

Method:
1 Make the pasta dough first: combine 1c semolina flour 1/2c all purpose flour (it’s helpful in keeping everything together) in a bowl with either just water, or some egg yolks. slowly incorporate the ingredients once they’re together you should begin kneading, if the dough is too dry add liquid if it’s too wet add flour. When it’s homogenous, make a ball, wrap it in plastic and allow 30mins of resting.

2 After 30 minutes, use either a rolling-pin or a pasta machine to roll the dough out, no thicker than a setting 3 on a pasta machine, which is about the thickness of one and a half stacked pennies. Slice them into long strips and set aside.

3 Place a large stock pot of water on high heat, when it comes to a boil add abundant amounts of salt, so that it tastes just shy of the ocean. A helpful pasta cooking key is this one: 1000ml of water for 100gr of pasta add 10gr. of salt.

4 sauté in a pan, the sliced garlic in a small amount of extra virgin olive oil, put a single anchovy in there too, add the capers as well. Once the anchovy has dissolved, add strips of zucchini. In a separate bowl add a raw egg and Pecorino Romano cheese.

5 add the pasta to the boiling water and cook for 2 minutes or using your best judgement. Once cooked add the pasta with a small amount of water to the saute pan, pour the raw egg and romano cheese over top, remove the pan from the heat, toss all the ingredients together, a good emulsification happens when fat is combined with air as Mario Batali once told me.

finish with some raw kale and pepperoncino flakes.