Recipe 16 - Easy Sausage Carbonara

This recipe seemed waaay too good to be true. A carbonara made with just an egg and some Parmesan cheese??? Either way, I’m on board for the ride! I love Italian sausages (seriously, I probably eat them at least once every two weeks, which is probably more than most people) so having an excuse to eat them in a creamy pasta sounds perfect to me. 

The Shopping Experience 

Finding the ingredients for this recipe was no problem at all! The only issues I ran into had to do with deciding which ingredients of a kind to get. What I mean by this is that Jamie’s recipe called for 3 sausages but doesn’t specify which type to get and also calls for tagliatelle and I had to decide how big of a box I should buy. Not exactly big problems, right? Hot Italian sausages are my person favourites so that’s what I got for this recipe. I also bought the cheapest/smallest package of tagliatelle that I could find, or so I thought. I later found out that what I actually grabbed was a package of linguine. They look so dang similar! I wasn't about to go back to the grocery store just for that so it was good enough for me!

Once again, I’m using the pre-packaged parmesan cheese from my last two blog posts in an effort to save money and not be wasteful. If anyone is a cheese purist, you’ll be pleased to know that I’ll be out of the pre-shredded stuff after this recipe! 

The Cooking Experience

This recipe instructed me to cut open the sausages and roll the meat into meatballs. This is something I have never done before but it seems so obvious and purely genius! I love sausage meat because it is typically very well spiced. I’ll definitely be making meatballs with them outside of this recipe too! 

While I was cooking, my doubts about the tastiness and even the success of the recipe were going strong. All you do to make the sauce is mix the egg with some Parmesan and parsley. I kept thinking, this seems way too plain to be comparable to a true carbonara, right? 

But I was wrong!

The Eating Experience

This recipe was delicious! All my doubts about the sauce being lacklustre faded away as soon as I started seasoning the dish with salt and pepper and tasting it as I cooked. The spice of the hot Italian sausage was the perfect balance for the creaminess of the pasta. Even though there is absolutely NO cream used in this recipe, the carbonara is actually very creamy! I can definitely see remaking this one again sometime soon since I’ll have a bunch of leftover parsley to use up.

Final Thoughts

My only complaint about this recipe is that I really don’t think I needed to go out and buy tagliatelle (aka linguine) just for this recipe. I really don’t think the type of pasta matters too much in this recipe as long as it’s a long noodle. I’m pretty sure the spaghetti I already owned in my house would have tasted just as good!

The first recipe of the pasta chapter was good but this recipe was really damn good! The gluttonous side of me actually wishes I doubled the recipe so I could have eaten more of it. But lucky for my digestive system, I didn’t do that. This time...

Total estimated cook time: 15 minutes

Total actual cook time: 35 minutes