Bucatini Cacio e Pepe - The Pasta Twins (2024)

FAQs

What is the point of bucatini? ›

Where spaghetti or linguine get coated with sauce, bucatini gets coated and filled with sauce. It's the ultimate delivery vehicle for velvety pasta sauces like cacio e pepe or carbonara. That hollow center gives you more sauce with each bite, and around here, we subscribe to the “More Sauce, More Life” lifestyle.

The pasta dough is fed into a machine that forces it through a perforated disk, very similar to a meat grinder. The shape of the pasta depends on the shape of the perforations. Bucatini are made with a disk with tiny circular perforations, which forces the pasta dough to emerge in long tubes.

But it is extremely hard to execute well because you need to control the heat. The cheese will become stringy if you heat up your pan too much (above 70 °C or 158 °F). I tested all the methods, so you do not need to! Cacio e Pepe is rare in restaurants because it is hard to serve warm without the corn starch trick.

Cacio e pepe means 'cheese and pepper' in several central Italian dialects. In keeping with its name, the dish contains grated pecorino romano and black pepper, together with tonnarelli or spaghetti.

A little like getting your extra cheese fix in stuffed crust pizza, the bucatini noodle's hollowed innards allow more sauce per bite. One of the most common sauces to serve with bucatini is the Amatriciana sauce. It is traditionally made with guanciale, a type of cured meat taken from the pork jowl.

I had confirmed that the bucatini shortage was real and understood that the bucatini shortage was a combination of factors: the pandemic's pasta demand, how hard it is to make bucatini because of its hole, De Cecco's strange and untimely barring from the U.S. border.

Tips for Making Cacio e Pepe

Let the pasta cool slightly—Ripping hot pasta plus finely shredded or grated cheese inevitably yields a clumpy sauce. Letting the pasta cool for 2 minutes before tossing ensures a perfectly creamy sauce.

Don't overheat the sauce.

If you've ever had the cheese clump up or stick to the pan when making cacio e pepe (very common, but always such a tragedy!), it was likely due to the cheese being overheated. Be absolutely sure that the burner is turned off below the sauté pan with the melted butter.

In one infamous episode of No Reservations, Bourdain visited a secret restaurant (later revealed to be Ristorante Roma Sparita) where he enjoyed a cacio e pepe so delicious, he listed a handful of life experiences he would sacrifice in order to eat it again (namely, a Jefferson Airplane concert, some acid trips, ...

Spaghetti is the traditional pasta for cacio e pepe, but even Roman establishments now use popular shapes such as rigatoni, bucatini, and thick, square-cut noodles called tonnarelli. Use a good quality brand that cooks evenly and retains its al dente bite.

Is carbonara the same as cacio e pepe? ›

Carbonara is the evolution of a dish once called 'cacio e uova' (cheese and eggs), more commonly known in the south of Italy. Carbonara – more Roman than the Colloseum! Another very similar traditional Roman dish, cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper), was born from the lack of eggs to make Carbonara.

Its unique consistency and tiny hole make it the perfect vessel for sauce, as well as a tasty first course that can be prepared according to tradition or with a fun and unique spin. But remember, like any pasta, it needs to be paired just right.

Bucatini's name is derived from “Buco”, the Italian word for “hole”. This tubed pasta was invented in an attempt to allow boiling water to cook the pasta from the inside out. Also known as perciatelli, these fragile sticks of semolina were formed by wrapping the dough around a rod, and sliding the metal out.

You may hear every now and then that breaking your long pasta before putting it in the boiling water is a culinary sin to all Italians everywhere. While nothing bad will happen if you do decide to do this to your bucatini or pappardelle to have it better fit in your pots, it's better if you leave it as is.

The key differences between the two are the size and the hole in the center. Bucatini is thicker than spaghetti, making room for that hollow center running throughout. While the two pastas are used in similar dishes, bucatini's center hole gives it a more interesting texture and makes it better at sopping up sauces.