Creamy spaghetti carbonara – quick and easy recipe

You only need a handful of ingredients and less than half an hour of your time to make this creamy spaghetti carbonara. It’s packed with bacon and smothered in a mouth-watering, cheesy cream and egg sauce. This is one of my favourite pasta dishes. I hope it becomes one of yours too!

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Cream spaghetti carbonara

This creamy spaghetti carbonara is truly one of the quickest and easiest pasta dishes I know. And yet, for all its simplicity, it is one of the tastiest pasta recipes out there.

Carbonara is made with pieces of crispy bacon, mixed into perfectly cooked spaghetti, and smothered in a creamy sauce of eggs, parmesan cheese and cream.

It’s so easy, even a child could make it. All you need are the 4 main ingredients, which you probably already have in your pantry or fridge, and you can make this creamy carbonara dish in minutes. There’s no need to spend time stirring a sauce. The eggs and cheese are just stirred into the hot pasta, and the heat from the pasta cooks the eggs and forms a silky sauce which coats every strand of pasta with creamy deliciousness.

The fifth ingredient, which isn’t included in a traditional carbonara recipe, is cream. I make no apologies for the fact that I’ve included it in this recipe. I just like the extra creaminess that you get from using fresh cream, and you can substitute this with a little of the pasta cooking liquid if you prefer.

Ingredients for spaghetti carbonara

This recipe serves 4 people, but you can easily scale it up to cater for more. I’ve given guidelines for increasing the quantities below.

To make this dish you will need:

• Pasta – you can use any long pasta such as fettuccine, linguine, or tagliatelle. I like to use spaghetti. The choice is yours. Depending on appetite, for this recipe, you should allow about 1 cup of cooked pasta per person. 8 ounces of dry long pasta equals 4 cups of cooked pasta.
• Bacon – classic carbonara calls for guanciale or pancetta. For this recipe, I have substituted that for normal bacon, cut into dice. You could also use bacon lardons if you prefer. Don’t scrimp on the bacon – you will need half as much bacon by weight as pasta.
• Eggs – You should allow 1 whole egg per person. In case you are worried about the eggs cooking sufficiently in this dish, I recommend using pasteurised eggs.
• Grated Parmesan cheese – if you can get it, you could use pecorino cheese, but parmesan is a perfectly acceptable substitute.
• Cream – you can use single cream or double cream. If you prefer you could substitute this with half and half, or even milk. If you don’t want to use and cream at all you can use some of the water that the pasta was cooked in.
• Ground black pepper – this dish benefits from lots of ground black pepper. Add this according to your own taste.
• Salt – this is optional. I always cook my pasta in salted water, but that is to my own taste. There should be sufficient saltiness from the bacon and cheese so that you won’t need to add any additional salt to the rest of the dish.
• Chopped parsley – for garnishing

How to make spaghetti carbonara

Get the complete list of ingredients and full instructions for making this recipe on the printable recipe card at the end of this post.

Cook the pasta in boiling salted water for the length of time indicated on the packet.

Cut the bacon into 1cm dice and fry gently over a low heat until the fat has been released and the bacon is nicely crispy. If the bacon was very fatty, you may need to drain some of it off. Leave a little fat in the pan as this adds to the flavour of the finished dish.

While the bacon is frying, mix the eggs, cream, pepper, and parmesan cheese in a bowl.

Drain the pasta and add the hot pasta to the bacon in the frying pan. Reserve 1 cup of pasta water. Some of this will be added to the sauce to aid in thickening.

Mix in the eggs, cream and cheese

Pour the egg and cheese mixture over the hot pasta and mix it through. The heat from the pasta should cook the egg and coat each strand of pasta.

Stir in approxinately 1/4 cup of pasta water. The starch from the pasta cooking water will help thicken the sauce. Use more pasta water if necessary.

If you omit the cream altogether then use 1/2 to 1 cups of pasta water for the sauce.

Garnish with chopped parsley and serve.

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Variations

You can add other ingredients to this recipe to suit your own taste. Here are a few suggestions:

• Fry 1 cup of chopped mushrooms with the bacon before adding the pasta.
• Add frozen peas.
• Chop some cherry tomatoes in half and add to the bacon about halfway through the cooking time.
• Crush a clove of garlic, until it is just broken, then fry with the bacon. Remove the garlic clove once the bacon is cooked.
• Stir 1 or 2 tablespoons of chopped fresh basil through when you add the eggs, and omit the parsley.

Can I freeze spaghetti carbonara?

The unfortunate answer is ‘no’. This dish will not reheat well as the sauce will split and become runny when defrosted.

Can I make this dish in advance?

Fry the bacon ahead of time, and also cook the pasta. Store the bacon and pasta separately in covered containers in the fridge. Also, store some of the pasta water in a screw-top jar.

When you are ready to assemble the dish, place the bacon and spaghetti in a frying pan (or large saucepan) and heat gently until piping hot. Then mix up the eggs, cheese and cream follow the recipe instructions for adding these to the dish.

Additional resources

Don’t forget to check out my handy Cookery Conversion Calculator if you want to convert any of your recipe measurements from grams to cups, ounces, tablespoons or millilitres and vice versa. You can also use the calculator for converting oven temperatures between Fahrenheit, Celsius and Gas marks.

If you live at a high altitude you may find you need to adjust your baking recipes to compensate for this. You can read all about it in this post on baking at high altitudes.