My Carbonara: The Basics & Scallop Carbonara: The Variation

Cut the bacon. Authentic recipes use guanciale or pancetta, but since Pecorino Romano is very salty, pair it with a mildly salted bacon. The house-made version is smoked over apple wood chips at 80°C for 6 hours.

Cut the garlic. Many carbonara recipes leave garlic out, but use plenty of it to make a pasta that suits Japanese palates. It also pairs well with the bacon.

Boil the 1.8 mm pasta in kombu water. Heat the kombu water and remove the kombu just before it boils. The umami comes through fully, so the dish is satisfying even with less salt in the sauce.

Make the carbonara sauce. Use 3 eggs, combining the yolks with lardo (cured pork fat) and Pecorino Romano only. Add a generous amount of Lorenzo No.3 olive oil.

Heat the olive oil and garlic in a frying pan, and once it starts to bubble, add the bacon. When the bacon plumps up, add the white wine, then the chicken brodo.

Whip the egg whites into meringue. At the restaurant they take it as far as an espuma, but meringue is plenty at home.

Emulsify the cooked pasta with the sauce and plate it, top with Pecorino Romano shaved with a girolle, and add the meringue. Finish by grinding Kurata Pepper black pepper over the top to complete the basic version.

[The Variation] Prepare scallops that have been kombu-cured since the day before. Scallops are mild in flavor, so curing them in kombu concentrates the taste and gives them a slightly sticky texture closer to bacon. The kombu used for curing goes into the broth as well.

Reduce the broth from the dried porcini and dried scallop, rehydrated in water since 2 days ahead, in a pot down to about one-tenth. With no cheese in the dish, the guanylic acid umami makes up for it.

Cook 2 large cloves of garlic thoroughly in olive oil. Scrape up the flavorful bits stuck to the bottom of the pan and reduce it into something rich, like a red wine sauce.

For the fat that replaces the cheese, toast cashew nuts and pine nuts to bring out their aroma, then grind them in a mill grinder into a grated-cheese-like powder.

Squeeze the orange juice and marinate the scallops in it along with olive oil. Sear just the surface with a torch to add more aroma.

Make the sauce for the variation. Use 3 eggs, the yolks and lardo, then add the reduced broth and a little sardine fish sauce. Roughly chop the scallops.

Toss the pasta, boiled with the same timing and salt concentration, in the frying pan. Once the garlic and scallops coat all the ingredients and the whole thing emulsifies to a white color, turn off the heat. Sprinkle with the ground nuts and black pepper to complete the variation.