Foreword: Ignore the background of my photo, yes I eat at my desk haha. Its convenient.
So yeah I made Carbonara for the first time last night. Andy Cook's recipe. It was delicious. But I ended up not having the right ratios of ingredients so I was left with a lot of leftover of the pecorino and egg mixture, as well as some extra Guanciale fat. I was missing more cooked guanciale pieces and pasta water.
I really did not want this to go to waste, especially the liquid gold that was the fat, so I used my admittedly surface-level knowledge of this dish to try and save this bit of the sauce for later use:
What I did was, as gently as I could, on a super low heat, I heated the sauce in a stainless steel pan until barely warm. I then drizzled a tiny bit of just-under-boiling water into the sauce, along with a small amount of corn starch. Like ~half a tsp.
I thought, well, if the main parts of this sauce are guanciale fat, pecorino, egg, and pasta water starch, then I could make the sauce come together by adding just a little starch myself manually, as I had no more pasta water left.
After doing this, the mixture quickly came together into a beautiful silky sauce. So I let it cool at room temp, with cling-wrap pressed down onto the surface so no skin formed. Once it was room temp I put it in the fridge overnight.
The next day I reheated the sauce as slowly as I could over a double-boiler. It looked a little chunky at first but I kept going and it smoothed out a decent amount. Not perfect but I kept pressing on anyway.
I then tossed it as usual with some hot pasta, the usual crispy guanciale, and a maybe a half-ladle-ful of pasta water. Let the residual heat do the work. And lo and behold, the image above. The texture seemed perfect to me.
It was beautiful!
Look, I really dont know if I had to go through all that extra effort to save the leftover sauce ingredients, or if there was an easier way, but I did what I did anyway and my method seemed to work really well, so I'm considering it a success. I really thought something would go wrong to be honest.
P.S does anyone have a good use for plain, on-its-own guanciale fat? Its the only thing I'm left with after this. I have maybe 2-3tbsp of it in my fridge now, not a lot. Might just cook eggs in it or something?
Thanks for reading,
– a learning amateur home cook
by equinox_games7