Hi, I'm Guillermo, senior video producer for Chowhound. Today I'm in the Seaport District of New
York City to meet with world-renowned chef Jordan Frosolone whose going to
teach me how to make it celebrated Cacio e Pepe dish. Chef Jordan is the
executive chef at 10 Corso Como, an imported Italian half restaurant half
gallery concept. For those of you afraid to make pasta sauces because you think
it's a long simmered affair you'll be surprised how easy this dish is. You only
need four ingredients in a couple of minutes of your time,
the magic is all in the details. One of the things that you know made me come
here today to learn from you how to make this dish is the Cacio e Pepe from 10
Corso Como that made the New York's best list. How does that feel? To be on that list is an
amazing honor especially with such a pedestrian dish so to speak, I mean so
many people do it and it's so simple and to have been recognized for doing
something very well that is something so simple... I think that's a bigger honor.
Yeah it makes me so happy and it's what I've always strived to do you know
to make it simple and clean and not fussy and not innovative, just
a really great dish of food.
Good? I'm gonna learn from you how to make this so then I can do it in my
house and be like guess who taught me how to make a Cacio e Pepe! And it's so easy!
Chef thank you so much for having me in your kitchen I'm so excited to
attempt to make pasta from scratch for the first time it's my very first time
doing this. You can do this in the traditional method which is the well
method which comes in here or you can also do it in any sort of mixer blender
KitchenAid something. Like the people
that have the KitchenAid to like mix it and then put the attachment in...yea that's it, much easier.
Since I want to learn how to do it so this is yeah this yes so we
make a very basic pasta dough mm-hmm we have all-purpose flour about two cups of
it, about a tablespoon of salt ,and two whole eggs, and that makes about?
This will make about enough pasta for six to eight people depending on what your
portions are... or if you don't want to share with anybody. Right!
I'm gonna pretend I'm gonna become a pro at this I just get my hands in.
Start with the flour on a cutting board or any sort of large surface area that you may have the
method because hence the well in the middle of the flour where you're
gonna put the eggs. So your flour, salt mix, you get the well there
Slowly add the egg into it. You do it too fast what happens? So then if you do it too
fast you know that runs it may break through part of the wall
yeah it's just gonna make your life a little bit more
difficult than it needs to be. What I'm gonna do is just slowly start
mixing the eggs and while you're mixing the eggs just slowly start incorporating
a little bit of a flour into it
Aside from breaking the well, losing your eggs, what are the other things that
people mess up when they're trying to do pasta from scratch?
Letting the dough rest is important
because then once you sheet the pasta it really has a tendency
to sheet out and then become a lot smaller.
So there's the final product. Gorgeous! We have an electric pasta shooter
there's obviously smaller ones that are more practical for a home cook on the
market some with a hand crank, some of them that are electric, I see some attachments
So this is just going to sheet the pasta into long sheets when you use
this and we make lasagna sheets and make shapes just like tagliatelle, so a wide
variety.
There you go some tagliatelle... oh yes brag about this today.
First thing you do is drop the pasta to the recommended cooking time either on
the package or if it's a fresh pasta you know it could take anywhere from one to
two minutes, if it's a drier pasta, cooking time to
typically be 8, 10, 12 minutes depending on the pasta. So the pasta goes down take
a little bit of the pasta water you can see there's a lot of starch inside of
the water itself which is very very useful in the in the sauce making
process because you need the actual starch to help thicken the sauce
So the water and
then cracked black pepper we actually use 24 cracks of black pepper out of this
pepper mill. I love the exact number! Nine 10 11 12 13
so this is the sauce that's all it is is pasta water and pepper I'll bring this
up to a boil and then I'll pull this sauce off and once the pastas done
cooking we'll cook it for ultimately like a minute less than the desired
cooking time and we'll finish the pasta in the sauce because it's
going to still keep cooking and then it also give us time to adjust the sauce
to the consistency that we want. The spaghetti that we use it has a lot
of dexterity and it's very resilient so we have some time to adjust, help it
or fix it if you need to. that's why an extruded pasta or a giant pastas almost better than a super fresh pasta.
So sheep's pecorino is a traditional cheese used in this dish, what does that bring to the dish?
It really has a very salty flavor profile and you know the saltiness is a
brightness of that cheese specifically kind of is one of the defining factors of it. It's not
uncommon for people to use parmigiano or people to use a combination of both
parmigiano and pecorino, but traditionally it was always pecorino because back in those days
parmigiano may or may not have existed but it certainly wasn't as avaliable and the
shepherds were raising sheep so that's that's what they had it.
Way back when they first started - when this first dish was starting to come to
origin like there we actually started with a little bit of lard
So some pig fat okay in order to kind of start in emulsify the dish as well so...using butter now.
Again, a strict traditionalist would say absolutely not but who are we to say.
When a dish is so simple it's so easy to screw it up right
because if you miss one step or you have one thing up the whole thing is thrown
off. Right and there's really no room to hide so you know there and there's a lot
of things that can be messed up as you can see if the if the cheese goes in and
it starts to curdle it doesn't make this I'm just creamy sauce, if there's not a lot of pepper,
it's kind of lacking if it's not a lot of cheese...there's really
nowhere to go. There's no sauce to hide it because the sauce is one of the
main things. And the pasta is cooked the way it's cooked
The pasta is about done, add the sauce back on
so you can see the pasta is going to start to suck up the rest of this water
and once it gets to a point where it's a little bit thicker than this is what I'm
going to start to add the cheese into it so then at this point I'm going to start
to add that cheese to it off of the heat
All right you want to plate this? Yeah! And I have to teach me how to do the the...
The toss? Put the the front of the lid a little bit down or the front
of the pan a little bit down yes and then toss like that
there you go... oh you gotta start somewhere.
Oh and the beautiful twirling too! So again the sauce a little bit saucier than you
might think just because again the pasta is going to continue to cook, continue to
absorb the sauce, and you're gonna finish it with some more cheese and more pepper
Mmmm Cheese!
it's so good. super cheesy the pepper level does have to be perfect right like if you
don't have enough pepper here I mean it becomes baby food right then it's just pasta with
cheese