“These days, you have to make do with what you have in the fridge”, said Joe Bastianich while preparing a cacio e pepe, a favorite of his two boys, Miles and Ethan, from his NYC kitchen. A recent guest of #BUTTALAPASTA, IG Live event with La Cucina Italiana editor Maddalena Fossati, the celebrity restaurateur and TV personality prepared the Roman dish with a few shortcuts.
Bastianich’s pasta requires just a few ingredients: Grana Padano, a good quality butter (he uses one from Piemonte), pasta (he chose capellini), and broth. The secret of this quick dish was revealed by his mother Lidia, leading authority in Italian cooking in the US. “You have to make a broth of Grana,” he said. “I use my mother’s broth, but I want to reserve some for tonight when I will be making tortellini in brodo, so I will be performing a miracle. If you add the industrial broth (not more then 50%) to Lidia’s, automatically it will all transform all of it in Lidia’s brodo. It is like when Jesus fed the masses with one fish!”
Joe Bastianich
While the pasta is cooking, Bastianich starts by adding Chilean olive oil in the broth, “a bit of South America” as he said, the butter, grated grana, and fresh ground pepper. He finishes cooking the pasta for the last 2/3 minutes in the reduced broth, adding butter, Grana, and cooking water if needed.
“The dish takes 7 minutes from start to finish”, he said. “If you have a good broth, you can reduce it, add a fat like butter or olive oil and it will be good. You can’t go wrong.”
He likes to pair cacio pepe with a good white, like a Sauvignon Blanc from his signature Bastianich winery.
The restaurateur gave followers a peek out his window on deserted Madison Square Park on a cloudy day, and a tour of his well-stocked fridge, as expected from a family in quarantine: kombucha, Eataly’s leftover pizza, hot dogs, mushroom soup, meat sauce, vitamins, a wide variety of Asian condiments and six types of mustard. Where is Lidia’s broth, one might wonder? No worries, it’s in the freezer.