For the first decade of my career, I took cooking incredibly seriously. As a restaurant cook, not to mention a nerd, I loved steeping myself in the history of a dish and all its traditions. I obsessed over pasta shapes, flour types and varieties of tomatoes and their specific, appropriate uses. I wanted my food to echo hundreds, or even thousands, of years of tradition — or at the very least to be something a nonna would recognize and enjoy.
Last December, in preparation for an appearance on the “Today” show, I spent a week of frantically practicing — and failing at — making my favorite pasta, cacio e pepe. While the classic Roman dish is simple — made with only pasta and its cooking water; cacio, or Pecorino Romano; and abundant freshly ground black pepper — it’s not always easy to make.
I first fell in love with cacio e pepe as a restaurant cook. The trick to getting a thick, creamy sauce lies in combining the cheese and pepper with starchy pasta water in just the right way; this usually requires a lot of erratic stirring and sweat. A professional kitchen, an industrial stove with powerful burners, a seemingly bottomless pot of starchy pasta water and the knowledge that a cleaning crew would be wiping down the walls later gave me everything I needed to practice pan after pan of pasta until I was satisfied with the satiny sheen of the melted-cheese sauce, proud that I hadn’t needed to rely on butter, oil or cream to bring it together. But years later, practicing the dish in my home kitchen late at night, I couldn’t get it right. No matter what I did, the cheese wouldn’t melt properly, instead leaving behind a curdled mess.
Panicking, I asked for advice from colleagues, all of whom essentially said, “Stir harder.” But no matter how hard I stirred, I couldn’t get it to work. Desperately, I turned to YouTube. A quick search for “cacio e pepe” yielded a video from Elizabeth Minchilli, an American food writer in Rome and one of my most trusted sources on the city’s cuisine. In the three-minute video, Minchilli visits the kitchen of Flavio de Maio, a master of cucina Romana and producer of one of Rome’s most beloved bowls of cacio e pepe. I watched in a state of semi-disbelief as he used an immersion blender to combine grated cheese, ground pepper and a few spoonfuls of cold water into a creamy paste before tossing it with hot, just-cooked pasta. He then used a little bit of pasta water to thin it out to the right consistency. It looked glorious, but I couldn’t help thinking that the Roman shepherds thought to be the progenitors of this dish weren’t zipping the cheese into a paste with a blender.
My desire to adhere to tradition was being tested. I briefly considered using the method, before realizing that I couldn’t go on national television and teach something I’d learned in a panic at the 11th hour from an internet video that another food writer had posted about a restaurant chef in Rome. Instead, I asked to make another dish for the TV segment. But in the meantime, I couldn’t stop thinking about that cheese paste.
A few weeks later, I was at the home of my dear friend Greta Caruso while she was cooking dinner using her favorite ingredient: farro, an ancient grain. “It has the virtue of brown rice and the pleasure of pasta,” she loves to exclaim when introducing farro to a newbie. When she asked me how I’d like to eat it that night, I replied, “With lots of cheese.” But then she added an obscene amount of pepper, and we called it farro e pepe. It was chewy, salty and entirely satisfying. And it made me wonder what farro might be like when coated in de Maio’s cheese paste.
Soon after, I bought a big bag of farro. While it simmered in a pot, I made the cheese paste with an immersion blender, which was as simple to prepare as I’d hoped. When the grains were fluffy and split, I drained them, reserving some of the starchy water. In a big bowl, I stirred the farro with a generous spoonful of the cheese paste, watching with glee as it melted like butter to coat the grains in a layer of salt, pepper, richness and tang. Even though to an untrained eye it might have looked like porridge, I proudly sent a photo of it to Caruso, the only other person I knew who’d get such a thrill from a bowl of whole grains. She responded with expletives and exclamation points, and when I told her that it tasted as good as I could have imagined — like mac and cheese, but for a sophisticated palate — she excitedly wrote, “All I want is for farro to have its day in the sun!”
If anything could turn farro from a specialty ingredient into a universal pantry item, it’s blended cheese. I quickly used up my leftover paste — stirring a spoonful into grits, tossing it with boiled green beans and, of course, for making cacio e pepe — and started daydreaming about using the technique with other hard cheeses. Asiago, Parmesan and even clothbound Cheddar would make for fantastic versions. “Keep a jar of it in the fridge,” I’ve been telling anyone who will listen, “and you’ll never need to make mac and cheese from a box again!”
There was a time when I would have scoffed at the idea of bringing an electric appliance near a bowl of pasta; at the thought of making cacio e pepe with any pasta shape besides the traditional tonnarelli, let alone farro; or at the notion of blending cheese with water and then keeping it in the refrigerator to use later in the week. I’m still a traditionalist. I’m just more of a pragmatist now too. And I can see that “stirring harder” isn’t the only path to satisfaction for me anymore. So with the unexpected delights that tend to appear when I relax, I’m going to take a break from this column. I’ll travel, learn, eat and cook — and when I return next year, I’ll share it all with you. In the meantime, though, please make yourself some farro e pepe, and think of me.
