Carbonara challenge

So Sam at work still pretends he’s a student. He is not one. But he would love to still be one. (Fair enough to be frank). To this end, he is a hopeless cook (despite having had a Saturday job in a bakery when he was growing up…). I know. Suspicious.

Anyway, whilst I was daydreaming about food in my £1, starving state, he talked me through the contents of his fridge. There we have it, staring him in the face – a basic carbonara.

Butter, flour and milk to make a Roux sauce, add a bit of cheese, fry some bacon and egg, cook some pasta…I even gave him a recipe. How hard could it be?

For the record, here’s how to make a roux sauce:

c.15g butter

1/4 pint milk

c.150g flour

Don’t weigh anything. Just whack a nob of butter in a sauce pan. Gently melt it. Add flour slowly, whilst whisking, to form a smooth, thick, yellow paste. Get the paste as full of flour as it will take, whilst staying as a paste. Then, slowly, begin to add milk, again whisking all the time. You don’t want any lumps. Make sure to whisk all the mix into a nice lump-free mixture before adding the next glug of milk. Carry on until your sauce is slightly looser than you’d like (it’ll continue to cook a little). Add a handful of grated cheese, a splash of lea and perrins, season with salt and pepper and you’ve got a great basic sauce for pasta.

Well, you’ll see that it is apparently not that simple:

So

Alas alack, I have made little impression as of yet. But I will break him. He will become Gordon Ramsay by the time he’s graduated. Oh wait…