Hello dear readers, my name is Shelby, and I'm what you'd call a pasta fanatic. I eat it at least once a week, and I'm always looking to try out new recipes. Basically, I have a passion for noodz and I don't care who knows it!
I also love TikTok, and luckily for me, people on the app LOVE sharing tips and tricks about how to make next-level pasta dishes, like the vodka sauce and fettuccine alfredo my coworker Farrah recently tried.
So, when I came across this TikTok by Inna Oh (aka @souljaboyupinnoah), where she makes Cacio e Pepe that's apparently "better than the restaurants," I knew I had to try it for myself!
When I spoke to Inna, she said she based her creation on a recipe originally shared by @nicolavittoria, but opted to use Parmesan cheese instead of pecorino Romano for a stronger flavor. I decided to stick with Inna's choice of cheese in order to get the full effect of her recipe!*
Here's the ingredients you'll need:
—Spaghetti noodles
—Peppercorns
—Parmesan cheese
—Pasta water
Now, I'm going to say right off the bat that I anticipated this recipe to be preeeeeetty easy to pull off. I'm no chef, but the TikToks made it look super simple and it only required four ingredients! It didn't even need any butter, which is almost always in cacio e pepe recipes! So, I went into it pretty darn confident.
To kick things off, I boiled the pasta and got to work crushing the peppercorns, which proved to be pretty hard without a pestle and mortar. I tried a few different things — a spatula, a spoon — and eventually landed on a tiny tin bowl (lol). I started to toast 'em up and it seemed like we were well on our way!
But things quickly took a turn. When I grated up the cheese and poured in some pasta water to make the paste, it became less of a paste and more of a solid ball or cheesy sludge.
I threw the massive cheese ball on the pasta in a last-ditch attempt to mix it in with the pepper and pasta water, but as you can see, that didn't go over very well.
I was a little disappointed, but wasn't about to let this small speed bump stop me from making the perfect cacio e pepe! I grabbed some more cheese and grated it MUCH thinner this time, hoping that would help the cheese mix with the pasta water a little better. Luckily, it did!
I added the pasta to the pan of peppercorns and pasta water, removed it from heat, and threw in the paste. BUT THEN, things took another turn. When I attempted to mix the cheese-paste into the pasta to create the sauce, it quickly congealed on the tongs to create more solid cheesy sludge balls. I also think I added too much pasta water???
At this point, I was feeling pretty discouraged.
But this wasn't the time to give up, this was the time to DIG DEEP. I ate my sad non-cacio'd pasta, got a good night's sleep, bought some linguine noodles because they were out of spaghetti noodles at the store (don't @ me), and walked back into the kitchen ready to HANDLE THIS.
On my third try, I followed the same steps as before, but this time used WAY less pasta water when mixing my paste, and also didn't add as much to the toasted peppercorns. Once the pasta was ready to mix in, I threw it in the pan, tossed in the cheese paste, and mixed like my life depended on it!!!
The cheese still kind of coagulated, but as I kept mixing and tossing the pasta, it finally started to resemble something like sauce! Definitely not perfect, but considering it was a HUGE improvement from my results before, I decided to call it a win.
I even tried to swirl the pasta onto the plate to make it fancy just like the TikToks, but that was also kind of a fail. Oh well, whatevs.
Here's the finished product! It may not have looked exactly like the original recipe, but considering my journey, I was pretty stoked about how it turned out.
