Homemade Pasta Carbonara with Bacon

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure policy.

Make classic Italian pasta carbonara tonight with my tested-and-perfected recipe. This comforting pasta dinner is ready to serve in about 30 minutes, and features spaghetti in a creamy sauce with eggs, thick-cut bacon, and two kinds of grated cheese, Parmesan and pecorino Romano.

Pasta carbonara is a classy meal, and at the same time so comforting. Because when you’re hungry there’s nothing better than carbs, salt, and cheese! My easy carbonara recipe is a family-style crowd-pleaser for good reason — it’s a quick Italian pasta recipe made with simple ingredients.

I grew up in an Italian family, but the homemade pasta sauces my mom and grandmothers cooked was usually red sauce and meatballs. It wasn’t until I went to Italy and tasted this phenomenal dish in Rome that I was able to perfect the recipe to a “T”!

My kids have always l-o-v-e-d what they’ve endearingly shortened to “carbonara,” or pasta with bacon and cheese. To this day it’s still the most requested dinner on their birthdays.

I even included a version of bacon carbonara in my cookbook, but I’ve perfected the recipe to show you how to make this restaurant-quality dish at home.

Ingredients tips:

• Dried pasta: You can use your preference of spaghetti, bucatini, fettuccine or linguine. Long strands of pasta noodles are the best for slurping.
• Cheese: Use fresh hunks of Parmesan cheese (or Parmigiano Reggiano) and Pecorino Romano cheeses and grate them fresh for the very best flavor.
• Bacon or pancetta: American-style smoked bacon isn’t really a thing in Italy. Cured pork jowl — guanciale — or pancetta is most often used in traditional carbonara recipes. Outside of Italy, it’s become common to use bacon, which is more readily available. Look for thick-sliced unsmoked bacon, if possible. You can also use pancetta if you want to be very close to the original. Ask the meat or deli counter to slice it into 1/2-inch thick rounds, then slice it yourself into 1/2-inch cubes.
• Eggs: My recipe uses a higher ratio of large egg yolks to whole eggs (3 to 1), which is true to the authentic Roman-style carbonara.
• Peas: Not at all a traditional ingredient in carbonara, but frozen peas are an add-in option. I started adding peas to pasta carbonara when my kids were little for an extra hit of vegetables and green color.

Cream in carbonara: Yes or no?

This much is true — authentic carbonara doesn’t use heavy cream. I imagine that if you told an Italian to pour cream in a carbonara sauce they would moan dramatically while rolling their eyes. In other words, it’s considered a no-no.

The reason carbonara sauce is kind of magical has to do with chemistry. It happens when the heat of the cooking water and hot pasta quickly “cook” the egg mixture. That’s all there is to it. The egg proteins thicken when you combine hot pasta with raw eggs, transforming into a creamy-textured sauce that coats the noodles.

My recipe stays true to the classic method. It’s rich-tasting and satisfying made with egg yolks alone. Adding heavy cream makes the sauce a bit too rich, more like an alfredo sauce.

How to make spaghetti carbonara:

What if carbonara sauce curdles?

Carbonara is a sauce made with raw eggs. For that reason, there’s always a chance the eggs in your sauce will “cook” too much, and almost look like bits of scrambled eggs.

First of all, don’t worry. What causes it is the heat of the piping-hot pasta coming into contact with the eggs without enough room for it to steam. Your carbonara will still taste great, but try these steps to master the technique:

• Whisk the hot pasta water into the eggs just before adding the pasta.
• Mix the sauce and pasta in a large shallow bowl (as opposed to a deep mixing bowl) so that the heat doesn’t concentrate at the bottom of the bowl.
• Toss the egg mixture and pasta quickly and repeatedly until all the strands are coated.