I Tried This “foolproof” Trick With Cachio E Pepe and It’s Completely Legit

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If you’ve ever tried to make cacio e pepe at home and ended up with pasta covered in chunks of cheese instead of a delicious sauce, you’re not alone. That’s why I ran to the kitchen after reading that adding a little cornstarch (about ¾ teaspoon per serving) ensures a creamy, emulsified sauce every time. I’m happy to report that this advice is completely legit. And it requires virtually no additional effort!

Cacio e pepe, a beloved and deceptively simple pasta dish with pecorino Romano cheese and black pepper, is easy to make—on paper. Just add shredded cheese to your pasta and some of the starchy pasta water you used to cook, add some pepper, and there you have it, your creamy, cheesy dinner.

But this simple procedure can yield mixed results: sometimes you’ll end up with the perfect sauce, and sometimes you’ll end up with a tragic bowl of noodles and clumps of cheese floating in the water. Heartbreaking. It turns out that this discrepancy worries many nutritional scientists, too , and they’ve found that adding a little cornstarch is the best reliable way to avoid it. So I decided to try it.

What science tells us about cacio e pepe

The reason you can get a silky pasta sauce with just aged cheese and pasta water is because the starches leach into that very water. Unfortunately, this process is incredibly inconsistent and will depend on the ratio of water to pasta when boiling the noodles – and even then it’s usually around 1%, whereas 2% to 3% starch is needed to stabilize the sauce.

They suggest making a small amount of cornstarch slurry, making a gel out of it, and making a sauce with that starchy base so you always have a consistent amount to make the sauce work.

The cornstarch gel turns into a translucent gel. Photo: Ellie Chanthorn Reinmann.

Before testing, I was worried that the sauce might be too cornstarch-heavy, like white sauce instead of cheese sauce, but I was actually quite pleased with the results. A small amount of the gel is mixed with other ingredients, and the cornstarch has no flavor of its own, so its presence is completely undetectable. The finished sauce is smooth and, as it should be, has a distinct pecorino flavor. The most important thing is that no curds form.

The sauce, fortified with cornstarch, is thicker and silkier. Photo: Ellie Chanthorn Reinmann.
Cacio e pepe without cornstarch gel may remain watery or, worse, the whites of the cheese will curdle. Photo: Ellie Chanthorn Reinmann.

In the Popular Science article above, the instructions are a little vague and there is a step where the cheese and gelatinized starch are added to the blender. In my opinion, the small amount of ingredients involved doesn’t require purging with a blender (it’s more trouble than it’s worth), so here’s what I did instead.

Recipe for Caccio and Pepe

Ingredients:

  • ¾ teaspoon cornstarch

  • 1 tablespoon water

  • 1 ounce Pecorino Romano cheese, finely grated

  • 2 ounces spaghetti

  • Ground black pepper

1. To make starch booster, combine cornstarch and water in a small bowl. Stir until completely combined and add to a medium saucepan. Heat skillet over medium-low heat and stir with rubber spatula until thickened. This happens quickly, taking only about a minute. Let it cool while you cook the pasta.

2. Cook pasta in boiling salted water according to package instructions.

3. Add grated cheese to the starch gel and mix a little. Add the hot, freshly cooked pasta to the pan with about a tablespoon of cloudy pasta water and stir everything together over medium-low heat. The ingredients will combine to create a creamy sauce. If you like a looser consistency, add more pasta water. Garnish with plenty of black pepper and enjoy immediately.

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