When my attempt at cacio e pepe just failed because the pan was too hot
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trying cacio e pepe this weekend and feel like I should preemptively say me too, Andy :/
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I am going to be making cacio every day, doing variations. MAybe later today a second batch, to experiment with various paraments (e.g. roasting the pepper first)
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it's nontraditional but i recommend that for one variation you try a little sodium citrate to keep the sauce smooth
it's the stuff they put in american cheese and queso dip for texture reasons
here's one description of how to use it
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Kenji was recommending a bit of butter or olive oil for the same purpose to get the emulsion. I'll keep iterating (next one will be warming up the pepper in oil a bit, and then adding the oil to see if that helps) and if I can't get it there then I'll need this
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yeah i kind of go all-out with hacks like this: i add some oil, some thickened corn starch slurry, some sodium citrate
it's extremely effective for texture: the sauce can boil alone in a pot without losing its smoothness
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but the hacks can lose flavor! Especially the corn starch slurry, that's like a last ditch! It's like the cream-in-carbonara problem
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the slurry is only a small % of the total sauce, and there's starch in the pasta water anyway! not sure it dilutes things substantially
related, it's funny how much serious cooks care about rough pastas that will add starch to cooking water but won't add exogenous starch
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The sodium citrate is a great trick to help the cheese dissolve into the residual pasta cooking water (shouldn't affect the flavor at all—just 2% by weight). But of course it won't help you if the pan's so hot that the cheese already curdled.
i think what i do is different in that i prepare a molten and liquid cheese sauce separately from the pasta, using the help of the sodium citrate, and then add a that sauce to the cooked pasta, and i think this makes it ~impossible to curdle the cheese
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In my 2nd attempt yesterday it worked well! (Just with cheese and pasta water). But then I undercooked the spaghetti 🥲
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