Egg, Cheese & Guanciale Pasta

The famous Roman pasta alla carbonara is made with guanciale, eggs, pecorino, and black pepper. Full stop. The addition of peas, parsley, cream, mushrooms, and so on might make a good pasta, but it won’t be a real carbonara. With a dish this simple, even the tiniest change in ingredients makes an enormous impact, so Romans are hardly overreacting when they protest strange additions. The one generally accepted substitution is the use of pancetta or bacon instead of guanciale, but only in cas