Recipe Notes: Pasta Alla Gracia

6 January 2019

Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, November 2018

Using Google Translate to translate "pasta all gracia" from Italian to English shows that it means "pasta alla gracia", so not very helpful. However, the recipe provides an alternate name for the dish that requires no translation into English: Rigatoni with Pancetta and Pecorino Romano. The recipe in the magazine  uses a pound of rigatoni and serves six. I used the "for two" recipe on the web site with ½-pound of dry pasta.

Pasta Alla Gricia is a simple dish with just five ingredients: pancetta, extra-virgin olive oil, rigatoni, black pepper, and Pecorino Romano cheese. I only had two choices for pancetta at Whole Foods: thin slices or a package with small cubes. I choose the latter as it provided pieces closer in size to those needed, though they were still too small and seemed leaner than those in the video on the ATK web site. The pancetta was cooked in EVOO to render the fat. The recipe calls for keeping ¼-cup of fat but I didn't get that much so I augmented it with additional EVOO. The pasta was cooked in unsalted water (there is enough salt from the pancetta and cheese) until al dente. Some of the pasta cooking water was brought to a boil with the rendered fat and black pepper in the pot used to cook the pancetta. Then over low heat, the pasta and pancetta were added followed by finely grated Pecorino Romano. This was stirred until the cheese melted, creating a nice sauce for the pasta. Preparation took just 40 minutes but would have been faster if I had started the pasta before cooking the pancetta. 

I am not a big cheese fan, I still don't like to nibble on pieces of cheese. However, I do like the flavor of Pecorino Romano when used to make a sauce for pasta. This is a nice, simple dish and made a nice, simple dinner accompanied by a green salad. It was not a great dish, but a good one especially given the ease of preparation. As usual with ATK "for two" recipes, we had this dish for two meals and it was definitely better the first time, but still okay the second warmed in the microwave oven.