Should You Add Ranch Seasoning to Cacio E Pepe?
The people who are crazy about Italian food on the Internet (and in my house) is one of my favorite forms of content. It is righteous anger, pure anger, anger that I (usually) have to experience indirectly through my Italian-American boyfriend. But even I, the person who orders pineapple for my pizza, is a little shocked by Kitchen’s Cacio e Pepe , written by Megan Splone.
Not that I don’t mind spicing up the ranch stuff. I certainly don’t. But the Bellezza of cacio e Pepe is that the two ingredients — freshly ground peppers and pecorino or PARM — get to a shine, spacious. The ranch as a scent is an eclipse. In all fairness, this dish seems to have been made for “two kids who hate black pepper,” so eclipse and blackout is exactly what it’s meant to be here for.
But semantics aside, I still needed to know if ranch cheese noodles were supposed to be something in my life, so I prepared them according to Megan Splawn’s instructions:
Here’s how I make my ranch cacio e pepe at home: While the pasta is boiling, melt a piece of butter in a large skillet. Add 2 teaspoons of homemade ranch seasoning or a tablespoon of the bag and let the seasoning simmer for 1 minute before adding the remaining pasta water (no more than 1/2 cup) to simmer. Add the noodles, stir and add the parmesan.
A good pen is not a standard measurement, but I know it when I see it. I ended up using three tablespoons of butter and a tablespoon of Hidden Valley because Hidden Valley is the platonic ideal of ranch seasoning and one of the only reasons anyone would build their own ranch is to avoid MSG. and I’m not about that life.
The resulting noodles were lovely. They tasted like ranches, but I wish I had used cheap shredded parma as the unusual cheese nuances I used were hard to spot. If you like ranch this is great news. But if you are told that you will have a cacio e pepe, and you are served it, you may be disappointed or – if you are Italian – get so angry that you will tweet about it . It’s a trick to convince kids to eat noodles, but the recipe is wack cacio e pepe.