Four Ingredient Spaghetti Carbonara for Two

While it’s alluring to serve your sweetheart a perfectly seared steak au poivre with brandy cream sauce, butter-poached lobster tail and chocolate soufflé for dessert this Valentine’s Day, you really don’t have to break the bank or spend hours preparing the perfect meal to impress someone. Sometimes the most common, inexpensive ingredients yield results worthy for a special occasion.

This four ingredient spaghetti carbonara for two, is not only delicious, but requires only four (yes four) ingredients and comes together in under 30 minutes from start to finish. Silky spaghetti noodles are coated in a creamy parmesan and egg-yolk based sauce and speckled with flecks of bacon – the sum of its parts harmonizing together perfectly to create an end result fit to impress.

As it goes with many of my favorite foods, I can still vividly remember the first time I tasted and fell in love with spaghetti carbonara. It was – fittingly – in Italy, years ago, and one of the very first nights I had arrived in Rome. As I’m sure you can imagine it was quite the conundrum figuring out what to order on a menu that was basically tailored to me, listing every single one of my favorite Italian foods.

After painstakingly studying the menu and playing a food tug-of-war in my head, I finally settled on a squash ravioli with butter and sage – one of my all-time favorite pastas. I was fairly confident in my decision post-ordering, and even as our dishes approached the table, I was still certain I made the right choice.

It. Was. delicious. And everything I’d imagined in my head and more – perfectly tender pasta stuffed with sweet butternut squash puree and delicately covered in fried sage and melted butter. Heaven on a plate if you will – or at least that’s what I initially concluded.

After I finished every last morsel on my plate, my friend graciously offered me a bite of his spaghetti carbonara I’d so callously overlooked, and of course I accepted…

It blew the ravioli out of the water. It was dumfounding to me how much flavor could be packed into what looked like such a simple, one note dish – I immediately wished I had also ordered it. After that moment, it quickly became one of my favorite items to order during my time over there, and immediately upon my return I figured out how to make it myself.

Since then it’s been something that I whip on a random Tuesday night when there’s barely anything in our fridge, but also something I make for a fancy Friday night dinner.

There are a variety of different ways to make carbonara, but today’s recipe is probably one of the most simple you’ll come across. It begins with the rendering of bacon, to be used in two different ways; first, to be sprinkled throughout the pasta strands, and second, to make the base of the sauce. In most traditional carbonaras pancetta is used as opposed to bacon, but I actually like the taste of bacon better in this particular instance.

Once the bacon is crispy and the fat has been rendered, the skillet is removed from the oven, the bacon is chopped up and aldente spaghetti is tossed in with the fat.

And then…the magic happens. Egg yolks and grated parmesan cheese are loosened up with a bit of pasta water, and then the hot noodles are removed from the stove and tossed with the egg and cheese mixture. The residual heat from the noodles starts to thicken and cook the egg yolks and cheese, creating this ultra luxurious cream sauce that is HEAVEN.

The bacon is sprinkled in, everything is seasoned with salt and freshly cracked black pepper and the meal is complete.

To make this a meal worthy of Valentine’s Day, I just serve it with a loaf of good-quality charred Italian ciabatta, a crisp Caesar salad and a bottle of red wine – romantic dinner, done!