Irish site, global appeal

[waider]

I stumbled upon Great Food while searching for a recipe for carbonara. Actually, I'd just cooked same, using the recipe from Cooking for Blokes, and thought the presence of onions in said recipe didn't particularly seem right when I'd finished making it, so I was looking for an alternative. Anyway, the Great Food site looks pretty neat, but it'd be nice if they had an RSS feed for their news stuff rather than suggestion that you (a) make them your home page; (b) visit often; (c) sign up to some mailing list or other. Hello, 1995 just called, it wants its user interaction back.

Comments

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

Its CSS is also a mess, with bits of CSS stuck anyhow into the html in addition to a very dodgy css file. They'd be much better off doing a Wordpress site or something like that, which would automagically provide an rss feed too.

As for carbonara, the story is that U.S. and/or British troops in Italy during WWII were issued bacon and eggs. Some of them asked their Italian hosts to cook 'em up, whereupon the Italians invented carbonara. I don't know whether there's any truth to this.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia sez the Carbonara dish is as old as the sands of time, but was popularized in the U.S. after WWII because of the Allies' rations.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Reading this, I'm strongly suspecting the presence of onions in the Cooking For Blokes recipe was a thinko - maybe cut-and-paste from a tomato sauce / bolognese recipe in the same section. It made the dish interesting, but I'm not sure I'd do it again. Plus, no eggs were included.

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

I've never seen onions in carbonara. It's not only the taste that's wrong, but also that onions are too watery. A good carbonara sauce is thick and the onion juice would spoil that effect.

This is the recipe from Marcella Hazan:

1/2 lb. pancetta or bacon
2 tbsp. olive oil
1 tbsp. butter
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1/4 cup dry white wine
Salt
1 lb. pkg spaghetti
3 eggs
1/4 cup freshly grated pecorino romano
1/2 cup ditto parmesan
pepper
finely chopped parsley

Chop bacon/pancetta into 1/4" strips
Put oil, butter and garlic into pan, sauté till garlic gets a bit dark, then take it out and bin it
Put bacon/pancetta into same pan and sauté till crisp at edges
Add the wine, let boil off for a couple of minutes, turn off the heat

Boil and salt water, cook spag
Break 3 eggs into a large bowl, beat them lightly while adding pepper, parsley and all the cheese
Drain the spag and add it to the bowl. Toss to coat spag with egg and cheese mixture, then add the contents of the bacon/pancetta pan and toss again.


I always find it hard to mathematically distribute the bits of bacon evenly throughout, and I've never made this with wine. But Hazan's recipes are usually worth trying. She says this is for 4 to 5 people, but she's always assuming the pasta's a first course before meat and veg so for a main dish it's about right for 2.

[(Anonymous)]

Not to be arrogant, but the real recipe is made with a cut from the pork's cheek, I don't even know the english name; anyway the irish bacon could be good enough.

Absolutely no olives, butter, garlic, white wine and parsley; add the bacon before (which was previously fried with olive oil and a onions), and the egg+cheese mixture afterwards; that's it =)

Antonio