So we’ve all heard the stupid, Sunday comics joke about carbonara/alfredo: “it’s just like mac & cheese for adults!” Har har, roll laugh track, throw pie, etc.
And yeah, after you get past the “gee golly, isn’t that just a hoot and a holler” moment, you realize that they’re pretty much full of shit. Carbonara and Mac & Cheese are NOTHING alike, unless you consider having pasta and cheese enough to qualify for “alike”. In that case, a plate of lasagna is the same thing as that horrible gray pasta salad I had forced down my throat at last weekend’s bbq.
No, they’re way the hell different, and not just because of the ingredients, but because of the method. Mac & Cheese, for all of its creamy deliciousness, is pretty much just slapping cheese in a pot and adding cream and pasta. No fanfare, no moment of culinary creation, just stir and stir and plop: food. Really good food, but still. There’s no art to it.
Carbonara, on the other hand, has that moment. It’s the moment when you slowly pour the raw eggs and cheese into the pasta and stir, and watch everything go from a pile of gross to a piece of sublimity, of pasta-borne perfection, in seconds. Maybe I’m romanticizing it a bit, but hey, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Take something misunderstood and misappreciated and make love to it. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do here: make something that’s a hell of a lot more than just “grown-up Mac & Cheese”.
And then make love to it.
(Don’t actually put your genitals near hot pasta, I don’t need a lawsuit coming my way from you idiots) —Fresh Beats, Fresh Eats
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