Sixty Five

Anyone who says that they know how to make fettuccine carbonara is full of shit. This also holds true for any dish that is popular enough to have carved out a space in the collective unconscious and earned itself a name. If you find yourself talking with somebody and the topic of food comes up and they insist that their -insert dish here- is the best, you can rest assured that they are, in fact, delusional. This person knows in their heart of hearts that they have cracked the code and are able to produce the platonic ideal of this dish better than anyone on the entire face of the planet. This is simply wrong.
When somebody says out loud, “My Fettuccine Carbonara is the best,” they cease to be a reasonable person to Fyndraxis. What you can hope to achieve instead is a good method. You can say out loud at a dinner party or a bar “I have a pretty good fettuccine carbonara method” and not sound like a complete asshole. Well, you will still kind of sound like an asshole, but not because you are deluded.
Fyndraxis has made this dish thousands of times and is well steeped in its lore. He is even to the point where they are past a first name basis and he just calls it carbo. Carbonara means coal miner’s wife in Italian. We call it this because the generous amount of black pepper in the dish looks like flakes of coal that her husband has brought home on his clothes. It is also a simple dish with humble ingredients. In fyndraxis’ method, there are five ingredients. Egg yolk, black pepper, Parmigiano Reggiano, cured pork jowl, and pasta. A lot of people fuck around with cream and herbs, and it certainly makes a tasty dish, but it lacks the simplicity and honesty of what he would consider a true Carbonara. Sure, here and now after the end of the world he could finally admit that his Carbonara is the best, but he would never say it out loud.
As Bird lazed on the couch in his workshop trying to take a nap, he got water on to boil and salted it until it tasted like the ocean. He summoned some guanciale (cured pork jowl), and minced it up into small cubes. The jowl was put in a saute pan on low heat to render slowly. There is very little actual meat in a pork jowl, and it is mostly fat. Rendering out this fat is important to the process. What you are left with after you are finished rendering is crispy little guanciale bits and an impressive amount of cheek fat. Saving this fat for the sauce is key to its execution. Fyndraxis put the fat aside in a small bowl to cool while he moved on to his next task.
He separated six egg yolks and put them in a bowl being sure that no whites had made it through the process. He even separated the small white ligaments that keep the yolk centered in its shell because attention to these small details can always be tasted on the plate. He grated in about a quart of Parmigiano Reggiano, which seems like a lot, because it is, but when it is grated it becomes mostly air. He whisked the yolk and cheese together to form a dense batter. One can tell when they have added enough cheese when the batter starts making sticky sounds and wants to live in the middle of the whisk. To this he added freshly ground black pepper. Pre ground black pepper that has the misfortune of finding itself in the presence of Fyndraxis is solemnly laid to rest in the trash with other things that he wouldn’t put in his mouth.
Once his yolk and cheese batter was prepared, he slowly whisked in his cheek fat. The fat neatly tucks itself into the protein lattice that the egg yolks have provided. This emulsification of fat into protein is a very important culinary technique. It lets us produce delicious things like hollandaise, bernaise, mayonnaise or pretty much any other aise you can think of. If you were to tell your average brunch goer that their eggs benedict was in fact covered in hot lemon mayonnaise, it would probably turn their stomach, but hollandaise is delicious and deserves every bit of slack that we can give it.
Bird’s nap wasn’t really coming together, so Fyndraxis decided he could finish the dish. This yolk and cheese batter could be made days in advance in preparation for a meal and it was Fyndraxis’ practice to usually have some on hand if he wanted to pull something impressive out of his ass.
Pasta is a complicated subject. Just because you spend hours making something from scratch doesn’t necessarily mean that it is good. For Carbonara, using dried pasta is your best bet. As wonderful and satisfying as it is to make fresh pasta, this is the wrong application for it. A dried pasta can be cooked to a state that is referred to as al dente, Fyndraxis likes to think of this as medium well. Being al dente (translated as “to the tooth”) means that the pasta will still have a little fight left in it and be able to stand up to the sauce it is about to inhabit. Using a dried pasta crafted from northern Italian durum flour, extruded through bronze dies and dried in the fresh mountain air of the Dolomites would be ideal for this dish. If artisan pasta like that is not available, Fyndraxis would use off brand macaroni product before he would be caught dead ruining this dish with fresh pasta.
Once his pasta was in the bath, he fussed at it with a pair of tongs making sure that the cooking process was proceeding to his liking. When the pasta reached a perfect medium well, he did not run to the sink and dump it in a colander like a psychopath. He used his tongs to pull out steaming portions of pasta and lay them in his room temperature sauce.
The pasta is coming out of the boiling water at roughly 100c so you have to work quickly so you don’t end up with scrambled eggs. Tossing the pasta gingerly in your batter does a couple of things. Number one, it cooks the eggs and melts the cheese. Number two the bit of salty starchy pasta water that came along for the ride helps the emulsification process and you end up with a beautiful silky golden sauce. You should use your tongs for this, taking care to keep the pasta moving while the sauce comes together. Working in your rendered jowl adds a wonderful crunch to an otherwise soft dish.
Finally, he prepared to plate the dish. As a cook, this is a make or break moment. If not plated carefully, a well looked after dish could end up looking like somebody used the plate to wipe their ass. Fyndraxis is not a fan of toilet plates, so he takes his time spinning the pasta into two little nests that land on the plate easily and don’t look like they were thrown there by a child. A touch more black pepper and an irresponsible amount of parmesan and it’s good to go.
Bird gave up on her nap and joined Fyndraxis at a small cafe table for two. As she sat down, he reflected on the state of Carbonara in the world. It was unacceptable. Under no circumstances at any point in history should anybody be able to pull off the best Carbonara. This would have to change. The fact that it was digital carbonara created in a simulated environment was beside the point.
Mycellus was right to be afraid of his power. He did have the power to completely change the way that things worked. Fortunately for everything living on earth Fyndraxis didn’t want to transform everything he saw into a nanite monoculture, he merely wanted a world where making the best Carbonara was impossible.