Last updated on October 29, 2023
A pasta dish from the tradition of Central Italy, made with three ingredients: pasta, black pepper and Pecorino Romano cheese. If you do it right, it tastes great. We are Italians and we share the original recipe
Cacio e pepe is one of the typical pasta sauces from Latium and Rome, just like Carbonara and Amatriciana, which has become particularly popular also abroad in recent years.
In 2018, cacio e pepe was also discovered (or rediscovered) by the NY Times, who writes:
«It is among the most basic, simplest pastas there is, and suddenly trendy to boot. Why? Because when made right, it is incredible».
We at All Italian agree. And that «When made it right» is very important to understand the essence of the cacio e pepe sauce.
Because if you make cacio e pepe with the wrong cheese or procedure, the pasta dish will be a bit disappointing. But with the right ingredients and the right method of preparation, as the NY Times puts it, it is incredible.
On this page we make the Italian recipe for spaghetti cacio e pepe, step by step.
How do you translate «cacio e pepe»?
In Italian 🔊 Cacio e pepe means «cheese and pepper».
Cacio is the generic name of cheese made with milk, rennet, salt and aged in the classic round shape.
The word cacio comes from the Latin casĕu: probably related to the English cheese.
An Italian expression you may be familiar with is: 🔊 Come il cacio sui maccheroni, literally «like cheese on macaroni», to indicate a particularly suitable combination. For example:
A good coffee after a meal is «come il cacio sui maccheroni».
The Italian words we use in this page:
| 🔊 Cacio | Cheese |
| 🔊 Formaggio | Cheese |
| 🔊 Pepe nero | Black pepper |
Cacio e pepe pasta is made with only 3 ingredients; despite this, many consider it a difficult recipe.
The first advice is of course about the quality of the ingredients; while the most difficult preparation step is to obtain a smooth cheese sauce without lumps.
To make the creamy sauce (🔊 cremina, as we say in Italy), we pour a little boiling water over the finely grated Pecorino.
This step can be done in two ways:
Make the sauce separately and, when the pasta is ready, pour it over the pasta
Make the sauce along with the pasta in the last minutes of cooking
With both you get an excellent cacio e pepe.
In Italy, there are endless discussions about how to make a perfectly smooth and lump-free sauce.
👉 If you're a little geek about cooking, we recommend the cacio & pepe scientific recipe, made by journalist and Italian Dario Bressanini.
Bressanini explains the details about the water temperature and the ripening of the cheese for the cacio e pepe sauce.
He makes the pasta sauce separately, in a bowl, then pours it over the drained pasta and adds pepper.
Instead, we propose the method used in Rome: we mix pasta and sauce briefly, like a risotto, and add a little pasta water.
This way sauce and pasta combine well and the dish is tastier.
To melt the cheese we use pasta water, which contains starch and allows the Pecorino to melt perfectly.
And to get a starchy pasta water we have a trick: we use less water than usual - and this way we also speed up cooking and save energy. A win-win.
| Ingredient image | Ingredient name | Cups | Grams | Ounces |
|
Spaghetti | 11.29 oz | 320 g | |
|
Pecorino Romano cheese | 4.23 oz | 120 g | |
|
Black Pepper | 2 teaspoons |
Cacio e pepe is known for being a dish with a particularly intense flavour; ideally you have already tasted it in Italy, maybe in Rome, before making it yourself: so you are already familiar with the original taste.
Otherwise it's hard to judge the quality of the dish you get. If it's not good, you can't be sure whether it's because of the preparation or the quality of the ingredients.
Cheese in particular is the most important ingredient and must be of good quality. The choice of the cheese is very important for the success of the cacio e pepe.
Cacio e pepe sauce was born in Latium, in central Italy; the cacio of the recipe is the classic cheese original of those areas, the Pecorino Romano.
Pecorino is ideal for this recipe because it melts easily with the starch of pasta water.
To obtain a perfectly smooth cacio e pepe without lumps, it is preferable to use a not too seasoned Pecorino. A cheese aged for a long time contains less water and, used in this recipe, produces more lumps.
That said, in Italy many make cacio e pepe also with other aged cheeses, such as Parmigiano Reggiano; even though Pecorino is the ingredient of the original recipe.
👉 Our advice is to use a cheese that you really like. When the dish is ready, the pasta will have a very distinct taste. If the cheese isn't very good, so is the cacio e pepe.
We also advise against the use of ready-made grated cheese.
Cacio e pepe is made with black pepper: not green pepper, not the red one, not flavoured pepper.
For this recipe we use freshly ground pepper, which is more aromatic.
A common mistake when making cacio e pepe is is adding too much salt. Pecorino cheese already contains a lot of salt, so if you salt the pasta water normally, the dish will be too salty.
To soften the salty taste, we therefore recommend to add less salt to the pasta water.
When cooking pasta, the rule in Italy is 10 g of salt (0.5 US tablespoons) for every 1 liter of water (about 1 quart).
For cacio e pepe you can use 8 g (0.4 US tablespoons, 0.29 oz), unless you like salt very much.
Pasta cacio e pepe served with too much salt has always been a classic of the "best" Roman taverns: a savory pasta makes customers order more drinks. 😀
In the recipe to cook pasta al dente, we recommend using the proportions of 1 L of water (1 quart) for each 100 g pasta (3.5 oz).
To make cacio e pepe pasta we need water that is rich in starch.
Add less water than usual, for example 0.6 L (about 0.6 quarts) per 100 g of pasta (3.5 oz).
👉 Since we use less water than usual, don't forget to stir the pasta often to prevent it from sticking.
We always use a large pot to cook pasta; even if in the "cacio e pepe" we use less water than usual, to release more starch from the pasta - starch necessary for the sauce.
We mix the pasta with the sauce in a pan, while it is on the stove over very low heat, like a risotto: it is the way to get extra creamy pasta dishes.
Without a spaghetti spoon, it is difficult to transfer the pasta from the cooking pot to the pan.
The first thing to do is fill a cooking pot with cold water and warm it over medium heat.
As we wrote, for the cacio e pepe we use less pasta water than usual; the pot should still be big enough for long pasta like spaghetti.
While the water is heating, grind the black peppercorns and grate the cheese finely.
Ideally, the pepper is crushed into small flakes and not completely pulverized. We use half a teaspoon of black pepper per serving.
Grate the cheese into a bowl and set aside. Most of it is for the sauce; save some to sprinkle over the course before serving.
When the water boils, add the coarse salt (again fewer than usual, because Pecorino is already very salty) and put the pasta into the cooking pot (🔊 butta la pasta in Italian).
After adding the spaghetti, roast the pepper in a pan over medium heat.
The pan should be large enough to contain the pasta we will add in the next step.
Roast the pepper for a minute and add a little pasta water.
When the pasta is halfway done (after 4 or 5 minutes of cooking), turn off the heat in the cooking pot and transfer the pasta to the pan where the pepper is roasting.
You can use spaghetti spoon for this or a a skimmer if you use short pasta.
Leave the pasta water in the cooking pot: you will need it for the next steps.
Continue cooking the pasta in the pan, with a little pasta water. When the water has almost evaporated, add a tablespoon of pasta water.
Stir regularly to prevent the spaghetti from sticking.
Pecorino cheese has the property of melting perfectly with the starch of pasta water: however, it is necessary to use only a little water and to mix well.
When the pasta is almost ready, one minute before it is al dente, reduce the heat to very low and add the Pecorino. At this point there should be pasta water in the pan, but very little.
Now mix quickly for a minute: cheese and pasta water create the typical creamy sauce of cacio & pepe.
Is the pasta al dente and the sauce well mixed? Turn off the heat and put the pasta on the plates.
Before serving, you can decorate the dishes with a pinch of pepper and grated Pecorino.
Your pasta cacio e pepe is ready. Buon appetito! 🍝
In the restaurant in Italy, when you finish eating, the waiter will ask: 🔊 andava tutto bene? (was everything fine?)
Traditionally, cacio e pepe is made with long pasta: dry, fresh or with egg.
The most common types of pasta we make with cacio e pepe are:
dry pasta such as spaghetti and bucatini
tagliolini, which sometimes you can find fresh in the grocery store
tonnarelli, also known as maccheroni alla chitarra: spaghetti with a square section which De Cecco exports in the dry version with eggs.
Like the other pasta sauces from Roman cuisine, cacio e pepe is also prepared with large pasta such as tortiglioni and rigatoni.
The pasta that, according to the Italians, does not suit cacio e pepe, is short pasta: like the macaroni as they are known outside Italy.
This is indeed the opinion of the Italians. Abroad eating cacio e pepe with short pasta probably doesn't seem so strange, since in America mac & cheese is a classic.
We called this page Original Italian Recipe, but as we often write: Italy is big and rich in culinary traditions, very different from each other.
In that sense, there is no original Italian cuisine; there are instead local customs and traditions.
Cacio e pepe is part of the pasta recipes from Latium and from the nearby regions of Central Italy.
This pasta sauce shares with Gricia, Amatriciana, Carbonara the preparation method of the sauce based on a mix of cream of Pecorino Romano and cooking water.
The «Italian tradition» started when many of these recipes were collected in fundamental books such as «The science of cooking and the art of eating well» by Pellegrino Artusi.
The Cacio e pepe pasta owes its fame to the fact that it is made with two simple ingredients: Pecorino Romano and black pepper.
Like many other recipes from Italy, it has humble origins: pepper and aged cheese are perishable food that could be preserved by the shepherds of Lazio and Abruzzo during the transhumance.
Transhumance (in Italian 🔊 transumanza) is the seasonal movement of shepherds and herds from mountain pastures to the plains.
In Italy we call a pasta without tomato 🔊 pasta bianca, witte pasta; cacio e pepe is an excellent example of this, as is aglio, olio e peperoncino: simple and very tasty pasta dishes.
We frequently update our pages about Italian pasta with the recipes from the local and regional tradition of our Country.
I am Italian from Trentino. I studied philosophy in Padua and worked for many years between Milan and Amsterdam in the field of media and culture.
Since 2021 I write on All Italian to practice foreign languages; meanwhile I share with you the customs and traditions of my country, and the recipes that I prepare at home.