Sexy St. Agur Carbonara Recipe

Sexy St. Agur Carbonara Recipe – and why bacon smells so amazing!

The classic Carbonara is a simple recipe egg, bacon and pasta. However, that’s not that much to write home about or at least, not sufficiently impressive to make a date swoon. So at Sexy Cooking, we’ve spiced things up with our Sexy St. Agur Carbonara Recipe. Okay, it will make Carbonara purist a bit angry but often chefs struggle to make the traditional, classic recipe without it tasting slightly like a bacon omelette, so here is the cheaters answer.

Ingredients for Sexy St. Agur Carbonara Recipe

100 grams of chopped SMOKED bacon
1 small onion (finely chopped)
1 clove of garlic (finely chopped)
6 medium mushrooms (medium sliced) or handful of peas
Large spoonful of St. Agur (sweet blue cheese)
Splash of cream
Splash of white wine
Handful of parsley (finely chopped)
Good quality spaghetti or linguini pasta

Cooking the Sexy St. Agur Carbonara

First put on a pan to heat in salty water. Apparently, the Italians say you can tell if the water is salty enough if it’s ‘as salty as the sea’. Most of the salt will remain in the water, so don’t be too worried about blood pressure – the Italians aren’t!

1. Heat pan with little olive oil and gently cook onions and garlic till slightly colored.
2. Remove and set aside, heat pan again and on a fierce heat, fry the mushrooms – you want them to brown at edges, effectively caramelising them.
3. Remove and set aside with the onions, heat pan again and fry the bacon properly*.
4. Put pasta onto boil (will take around 10 minutes).
5. Once bacon is ready (crispy, brown and salty!), add the onions, garlic and mushrooms back into the pan.
6. Deglaze the pan using the white wine and add the St. Agur, cream and parsley.
7. Drain the pasta and add to the pan. Don’t pour the sauce over the pasta – if you add it to the frying pan, it will absorb all the lovely, creamy sauce you’ve made.
8. Serve with parmesan shavings and a little olive oil.

Why bacon smells so amazing!

* Cooking bacon correctly is a strange and surprisingly difficult art. The reason bacon smells so amazing in the morning and seems to drift about one mile is because of the Maillard** reaction where the fats and sugars in the bacon caramelise.

The trick is to cook the bacon on a high heat for 1 minute or so and then to leave to slow cook for 10 minutes. If you cook the bacon too slowly initially, you end up with boiled bacon – which is bad news in anyone’s books as far as I know.

** Mailard – “The Maillard reaction is a chemical reaction between an amino acid and a reducing sugar, usually requiring heat. It is vitally important in the preparation or presentation of many types of food, and, like caramelisation, is a form of non-enzymatic browning. The reaction is named after the chemist Louis-Camille Maillard who first described it in the 1910s while attempting to reproduce biological protein synthesis, although it has been used in practical cooking since prehistoric times.” – Wikipedia