I really love good food. I’m far too lazy to go through the hassle for myself or even for Rachel and I, but I look forward to excuses when I can “entertain” and make it worthwhile to cook something non-trivial. My culinary experience is rather limited, so I generally try something new at each opportunity. I’ve had limited success in the past: my strombolis and cheesesteaks were excellent IMHO. I tried homemade chicken noodle soup last winter, and it was ok but not flavorful enough.
Last night we had invited 7 or 8 people to join us for dinner and a movie. I suppose it was a blessing in disguise that only 2 were able to come. My goal was to make a homemade carbonara sauce, although I know it to be slightly different from the way it is described in that link. My experience is that carbonara is simply alfredo sauce with added bacon and freshly ground black pepper. I looked at dozens of different recipes online, rejecting the many that used raw eggs or some abnormal ingredient. Among the recipes I liked, there was one common theme: approximately equal parts butter and heavy cream with double that amount of parmesan cheese. Beyond this, some recipes used milk to make the sauce thinner while others used flour to make it thicker.
I started with about 1.3 cups of melted butter, then added 1 cup of heavy cream and allowed it to simmer on low heat to reduce. After about 10 minutes I started gradually adding a combination of grated parmesan cheese, grated romano cheese, and fresh romano cheese until I had used approximately two cups of combined cheeses. This looked and smelled about right, but it was a bit too liquidy to properly stick to the pasta. Remembering some of the recipes I had seen before, I added two teaspoons of flour and stirred. At this point, the sauce looked perfect and I left it on low heat while I attended to other things. When I looked back at the sauce a minute or two later, it was totally different. There was now a separated mixture of solid white cheesy goo and yellow buttery liquid. We tried stirring, increasing the heat, decreasing the heat, and adding more cheese, but nothing returned it to looking like alfredo sauce. We eventually gave up and the brave among us ate it on our pasta. Despite the strange consistency, it tasted delicious with added bacon and pepper. If anyone has an explanation for why adding flour would cause this effect, I would be pleased to hear it.
so, i’ve been trying to figure out what whent wrong in this cooking adventure and here’s what i came up with. i found a website discussing different types of sauces. according to this website, for cream-based sauces, you need to cook an equal combination of flour-fat first over low heat until it bubbles and then add the cream/cheese. so, apparenty, you’d need to deal with the butter/flour combo before you deal with the extra stuff.
hm, i guess that didn’t really answer the why flour did what it did to your sauce, but more, this is how you’d prevent separation from happening next time.
Comment by lisa — June 20, 2006 @ 3:03 pm