Food Wars: Mexican Food v. Italian Food

It always strikes me as an arbitrary rule taken up by snobs on Top Chef.

Idk there is quite a bit of skill & technique in Italian cooking, including some of the most famous dishes. Cacio e pepe and carbonara are both famously tricky to get right consistently.

Oh, sure, cacio e pepe being a particular bugbear for me. But there are oh 500 other pasta sauces/dishes you can make that are extremely forgiving.

That's true. I finally wisened up and don't buy any jarred sauce. Yeah you can go all out and make a "Sunday gravy" if you want, but I can make a pretty tasty tomato sauce in 15 minutes with pantry items. And I actually prefer the rawer tomato taste to the one that develops after simmering them for hours.

cacio e pepe isn't so great

Minus the time it takes potatoes to bake ( a "set it and forget it" step), one can make, say, gnocchi alla sorrentina from scratch in 40 minutes. Can't believe it took me til I was in my 40s to realize how quick and relatively simple something like that is to make.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4eaNqTbDDA
The 1st version shown here is best method I've encountered.
You really have to like pepe to enjoy cacio e pepe. But you can use the same concept to make cacio e qualunque.

cacio e pepe is a LIE the italians can keep it
i cant make it correctly no matter how much i try & life is too short to cry over fkn noodles & cheese

*DO NOT TELL ME HOW TO MAKE IT SUCCESSFULLY OR I WILL CUT YOU*

i am personally done w it

I think low effort defines success. It will never deliver on the hype.

I've had great cacio e pepe, just never by my own hand.

But how great really?

Sitting in an alley in Rome it was pretty fucking great. As great as any three ingredient pasta where one of the three ingredients is water. It's super simple, which is what makes it hard.

Sitting in an alley in Rome was the magic 4th ingredient.

(pasta + cheese + water) x (scooters + accordions)

Well, yeah.

I've eaten some delicious cacio e pepe. I've made some miserable pasta wrapped with inedible grey ropes of claggy pecorino.

I'm a dab hand at recreating Roberta's' pizza approximation of Cacio E Pepe, the deathless Cheesus Christ.

Carbonara is American. Most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s. Panettone is a modern invention.

Meet Alberto Grandi, who has dedicated his career to debunking the myths around Italian food – FREE TO READ👇https://t.co/yQMdhNULts

— FT Weekend (@ftweekend) March 23, 2023

Fascinating article. I knew I liked carbonara too much for it to be anything other than an American creation, built for filthy American palates.

The chart in the thread is misleading. Carbonara (and Amatriciana) are not Cacio e Pepe with guanicale (and tomato) added.