-I'm Mary Beth Albright with "The Washington Post."
I'm not sure if you can hear the recorder upstairs,
but my son's in online school, and they have music right now.
So it's 51 6th graders playing the recorder.
[recorder playing in distance] Welcome to my world.
Today we're celebrating our friends in Italy
with pasta carbonara.
It's delicious and so comforting every single time.
And you don't need a lot of ingredients to make it.
We'll talk about about substitutions
if you don't have an egg or bacon or whatever.
For the creamiest carbonara sauce,
you do have to follow a few steps.
But you will get this, and if it doesn't come out
exactly silky creamy the first time, that's fine,
'cause you can practice it a couple of times.
It's delicious to practice, and you will get this.
Step one, make some spaghetti.
Turn on a big pot of salted boiling water.
Our next step is to cook some chopped bacon.
It's about four slices of bacon.
I'm gonna wait for that bacon to crisp up.
I like to cook the bacon until it's crunchy,
but definitely not too brown.
If you don't have bacon in the refrigerator,
you can use a really high quality ready cooked bacon bit
and just put it in at the end.
While the bacon is cooking,
put an egg in a bowl and whisk it.
Now put in about 1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese, grated.
There we go.
The better quality Parmesan cheese you use,
the better quality the carbonara's going to be.
Now, look, if you don't have an egg in the house,
I understand.
You can put in a little bit of whole milk,
or if you have heavy cream around, you can use that.
And then it'll just be a pasta with cheese cream sauce.
And if you don't have Parmesan cheese,
you can really use any grated hard cheese.
Remember, as I always say, the harder the cheese,
the longer it lasts.
So stock up.
So you want this bowl to be large enough
to hold all of the pasta at the end
because this is where we're going to toss it.
Okay.
So you want to drain the bacon on a paper towel,
a nearby paper towel.
Now, you can see, at the bottom,
you still have all of this delicious, flavorful bacon fat.
This is going to add terrific flavor,
so leave that bacon fat in the pan.
We're going to cook some garlic in that.
Yeah.
So, now put the garlic into the pan over low heat.
Leave the bacon fat in.
Oof. Yeah.
Your house is going to smell --
Your neighbors might come over and be like, "What is that?"
You can share it with them if you want.
Oh, God, that looks beautiful, doesn't it?
Sweat, little garlic.
Sweat!
Garlic is not really traditional in a carbonara,
but I put garlic in pretty much anything anyway.
So this is three cloves.
I could put five cloves in this, and I'd be good.
Garlic sweating in bacon fat, just that smell!
The pasta is almost al dente,
so I'm going to take out about 1/2 cup of this pasta water.
This is liquid gold, my friends,
because it's starchy and it's salty
and it's going to add great body
and mouth feel and saltiness to our sauce.
Now, we're taking this pasta water.
It's very hot, as you can see.
I have a heat-proof measuring cup.
And we're going to use it to start the sauce.
Now, if you just put this right into a pan,
the egg would scramble and it would turn into little bits.
We don't want that to happen.
If it happens, it's fine.
It's still delicious.
But we'd like the make the sauce really creamy, so here we go --
Slow drizzle of hot water into the egg and cheese mixture.
And whisk it the whole time.
Put in maybe, I don't know, two or three tablespoons
just to get the sauce going.
Look at how glossy at beautiful that sauce is getting.
There we go.
Again, look, if your eggs scramble a little, it's fine.
This is why you get to practice it,
and then you get to eat it.
All right. There we go.
Now put the bacon and garlic from the skillet into the sauce.
Get all that delicious goodness
off the bottom of the pan if you can.
There we go.
Pasta's done.
Let's drain it.
Because we've already prepared the egg
and the sauce with some hot pasta water,
we can put the hot pasta right in here.
Now add your drained bacon.
And I love a lot of ground black pepper in my pasta carbonara.
And you just toss it right in the bowl.
We're gonna serve it right from this bowl.
If you have some parsley, fresh parsley, put that in.
If you don't, don't worry about it.
Or you can always use some dried parsley from your pantry.
If you don't have either, don't worry about it.
Just adds some nice freshness and flavor if you have it.
I'm gonna save a little in the bowl for finishing plates.
Half a pound of pasta is about four servings.
I could sit here with a fork right now
and eat this whole thing.
I'm not going to -- Not on camera, anyway.
Oh, yeah.
I'm just going to finish it with a little fresh parsley on top
to remind everybody that there is fresh life out there.
At a time when things feel really cuckoo,
making yourself a hot meal can be real self-care.
Everyone needs a plate of hot food right now.
Pasta carbonara is comfort in a bowl.
It's nourishing food for the body and for the soul.
I'm Mary Beth Albright with "The Washington Post."
Take care.