The Great Carbonara Debate: A Conversation with Rachel Ray

It was a day like any other when I sat down to talk to my friend and fellow food enthusiast, Rodol. We were going to tackle one of the most iconic dishes in Italian cuisine - carbonara. But this wasn't just any ordinary conversation about pasta. Oh no, we were diving into the nitty-gritty details of what makes a truly great carbonara.

"I was thinking, you know, could I possibly be given another riff on carbonara," Rodol began. "The last time I saw you making carbonara, you left pretty defeated. It's gonna take me a little bit to kind of recover from this." The conversation started off with a bit of self-deprecation, but soon turned into a heated debate about the finer points of carbonara.

"I know what you're talking about," Rachel chimed in. "I was thinking, I just kept coming back to this idea of like could I possibly be given another riff on a carbonara. The last time I saw you making carbonara, you left pretty defeated it's gonna take me a little bit to kind of recover from this." It seemed that both Rodol and Rachel were determined to prove themselves as the ultimate carbonara experts.

"I was thinking about what you did with the alliums," Rachel continued. "You ended up going with scallion, just scallion no garlic there was some garlic in there just a touch and technically there were um scallion whites in the saute and scallion greens on top." Rodol nodded along as Rachel outlined her thought process behind the dish.

"You know what we're not gonna split scallions here," Rachel said with a smile. "Okay okay you got the chili but you went green instead of red, you know that's fine did you deglaze your pan with anything after you sauteed?" It was clear that Rodol had taken some liberties with his carbonara recipe.

"I'm i am like the king of putting unnecessary alcohol into dishes," Rachel joked. "Is it is it pecorino in this, it's parmesan and pecorino, it's equal parts but if you're following carbonara rules you could kind of have one or the other or both." The two continued to banter back and forth, each trying to outdo the other with their culinary expertise.

"I know you've picked up on the parsley," Rodol said. "Any other herbs?" Rachel thought for a moment before responding. "Maybe something with a woody stem thyme, thyme and then there's also lemon, what zest and juice that's a bummer was it pancetta." The conversation turned to the all-important ingredient of pancetta - or in this case, bacon.

"Oh yeah my like my my January corn left unjuiced," Rodol said with a chuckle. "That concludes everything that you missed okay where did you land on the on the sauce?" It seemed that both Rodol and Rachel had taken some liberties with their sauce recipes as well.

"I ended up going just yolk," Rodol replied. "You got it was there butter or olive oil, there was olive oil." The conversation continued back and forth, each trying to outdo the other in terms of flavor and technique.

"Yep yep yeah it was tricky to triangulate that heat rachel's is a little bit better like between like the corn juice the vermouth the lemon that's a little bit annoying," Rodol said. "That i didn't get that brightness and when i did have a version with a little bit of brightness it was just so over the top." It seemed that both chefs had their own take on how to add brightness to their carbonara.

Finally, we moved on to scoring. "You gave yourself a 75," Rodol said. "I actually gave you an 78." The conversation turned into a discussion about who had done better and why.

"I figured you were probably missing that acid," Rachel explained. "I mean obviously i can't taste it but there were a couple other things there that i think probably made the dish taste a little different." Rodol nodded along as Rachel outlined her thoughts on acidity in cooking.

"You gave yourself an 80," Rodol continued. "i gave you a 92." The conversation turned into a discussion about technique and how both chefs had scored themselves differently.

"Appearance was even better than i had hoped," Rodol said with a smile. "your overall score is an 86." It seemed that the judges - in this case, Rachel Ray's show - had given Rodol's carbonara a solid 86 out of 100.

"But if you want to call that a b but if you want to call that a b plus," Rodol said with a laugh. "I looked back at your bobby flay carbonara mac and cheese episode, you got an 85 okay you've taken a year and you've gotten one point better oh my god yeah." The conversation ended on a high note, with both chefs laughing and joking about their culinary endeavors.

As we wrapped up the conversation, I couldn't help but think that this was what cooking was all about - debating, experimenting, and pushing each other to be our best. Whether you're a seasoned chef or a beginner cook, the art of carbonara is something that should be taken seriously. But most importantly, it's something that should be enjoyed with friends and family over a delicious meal.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone it's rhoda and i'm here for a secret conversation about chris morocco once again we are going to put chris's super taster abilities to the test this is rachel ray's crabonara we're challenging chris to replicate this exact dish with every ingredient in just one day he'll be able to taste it touch it smell it but at no point will he be allowed to see this dish because he only has one day we're going to give him three lifelines but there's a catch using them will dock points off his final score at the end of the day we'll come back to see his final creation and i'll be the judge all right i'm so confused about what this is this somehow smells exactly like my grandmother's brazil there's something herbaceous happening maybe it's that it's giving me like that parsley i'm also getting like a sharp kind of like cheesy smell okay i didn't know what that was that's good a little bit of zip to this a little bit of heat that tasted like a little bit of meat with a with a definite squidge factor yeah it tastes like a cured pork product absolutely leaning towards the uh the guanciale there i don't like pancetta sometimes we certainly have and i can't even remember what the right answer was in the end is that pancetta yes bobby's not following the rules here it didn't taste super smoky or anything like it felt more like a pancetta but like really fatty also then like what is this tastes like lobster the fact that i've only gotten very modest sized pieces of this and it's kind of sweet touch saline but very like clean makes me feel like maybe it's it's more crab and then there seemed to be some um some corn in there okay pasta it's kind of a creamy sauce we have the aggressive bite of some parsley so i was justified in thinking it was parsley in here i guess the cheese could just be parm it puts me in the world of a carbonara i'm gonna i'm gonna assume that there has to be some some onion it could be a splash of actual cream could it have like an egg yolk so far we've got allium let's assume that it's onion pancetta although it could be our old friend guanciale probable crab i've got heat of some sort could be an aggressive amount of black pepper i'm not getting like tons of chili like pieces of identifiable green chili i just don't have any idea what you would call this dish or who or who would have made it jamie oliver's insanity pasta okay so let's work from the ground up butter evo crab pancetta guanciale i'm saying onion but no garlic corn spaghetti black pepper chili flake parmesan heavy cream is that jude all right so this is my list of ingredients unfortunately i don't have the ability to add ingredients later on unless our culinary production team happens to have them they're gonna go out get this stuff and then i'm gonna have my first crack at this so let's just like start by cutting some onion and having a bit of a chap it all starts to go wrong when you don't really know a possible name for the dish this presumably has to be has to have a name with some sort of recognition factor right um so this is just some corn on the cob just cutting the kernels off corn and crab like that's like pretty classic right it's where like the crab and cheese intersect that things get a little bit murkier right can i can we like get real for a sec i don't think i've ever i've never messed with king crab like we've gotten in the test kitchen but like brad always deals with the crabs you know so i have blue crab and then i have some king crab you know king crab has a little bit more of that meaty lobster-like intensity but without being but without being like kind of as firm as lobster okay this is going well i feel horrible about this process i'm making a real pig's ear of it let's maybe cut up some of this guanciale which is cured um pork jowl like funky you know and then pancetta much milder i feel like it's pancetta this time pancetta is um like italian rolled bacon cured but not smoked the guanciale is pretty funky burger but we're gonna do them side by side it's going to be great i whispered something into brad's ear i think i recall in that video and somebody dm'd me to be like chris what were you saying abroad it's a little bit like finding out what bill murray told scarlett johansson at the end of lost in translation and put some guanciale in there and some pinch out of there in either case i think we're on the right track the pancetta and that slightly softer flavor i think is kind of what i'm looking for here i already like how this is cooking up better the guanciale already it has so little moisture left in it that like it cooks out pretty readily it is so intensely porky all right let's see we're going panchata sorry brad i know that was a different video but i think you're still wrong right something like this so i now have pancetta onion and corn and then we're gonna drop some pasta the main other element that i want to add while we have some hot fat in there is our black pepper i just want to make sure it kind of blooms out and toast a bit in the fat i'm not sure about the chili flake it wasn't like the intense heat of chili it felt much more like the kind of numbing you know more sort of like front of your mouth heat of black pepper i will put in some crab right before the pasta goes in just because i want to warm it through but i think like the elephant is in the room is sort of how we're gonna make this pasta creamy let's say we're heading in a positive direction i think what we're gonna have to determine is like are we looking at a carbonara situation where there's egg yolk and cheese and pasta cooking water or are we looking at or it's like cream and cheese so i'm grating some parm carbonara begs the question of whether we need pecorino or some kind of combination of parm and pecorino yeah pasta went into the pan i'm just getting some pasta cooking liquid in there oops and then we're going to divide the pasta into um into three bowls i think i just want to cook a little bit of like that sort of starchy pasta water in there it's just good pasta cooking practice and just really helps amalgamate all the flavors that are in there also what i think we're gonna do is throw some parm right in here since i think i want parm in all three of these versions i just wanted to put a little more water in there to just kind of help like the palm sort of melts and incorporate into the sauce carbonara often uses some combination of like whole egg or or you know but mostly yolk i just want to kind of like do a little test great so pasta is nice and coated with like that starchy kind of parmy you know kind of sauce then um we're going to divide it into a few bowls so i have egg yolk in one bowl i'm just gonna mix it with a little bit of the sauce and then incorporate some pasta so that will be a version two here version one maybe we'll do some like heavy cream version three just for fun we'll do creme fresh just because you know i sort of mentioned it and why not finish the thought what's throwing me off is that like i have like one white bowl and two glass bowls all right and then just to confuse you further even though i said i was gonna put cream in bowl one i'm actually gonna put it in bowl three have fun with this one editor just a splash crumb fresh is cultured cream sort of in the in the vein of like sour cream and that aroma is like that yogurty aroma is like a dead giveaway though like that's not what this smelled like no way this is our egg yolk this doesn't seem like it's cheesy enough it's just like the mind of like would they possibly give me another carbonara this is with heavy cream they're both pretty close i'm really torn between the egg yolk and the heavy cream i'm gonna start adding some of the other elements to the dish like the crab parsley and then see see what's what this egg yolk the balance of flavors is there like i think we're getting enough fat between the egg yolk and the cured meat it's not to say that something else couldn't be there but like the balance overall is really good i'm kind of leaning towards egg yolk i'm gonna go with the egg yolk for this first tasting all right so this is my first version of the dish chris's creamy crabby carbonara pasta this is the version with the egg yolk i don't have a fork just for clarity it needs to be tighter needs to be richer thicker creamier more cheese more egg yolk yeah because we're we're not there yet but i think we're on the right track just in terms of the flavor balance sort of i'm giving myself 63s across the board because if if if experience is any guide i always somehow score myself too high at this stage of the game so for ingredients i'm going to give myself a 63 taste i'm also going to give myself a 63 technique 73 appearance i'll give myself a 73 as well that takes me to a d plus god it hurts to say that 68 average second tasting here we go yeah there's just a whole other level of like cheesiness and richness pecorino is gonna deliver that kind of brute force intensity a little better than the parmesan was in mine which was a little bit softer mellower more buttery it also backs up that like black pepper flavor and puts us more in the mode of um carbonara hold on that was a scallion top i believe like just like a little cross cut scallion top has that sort of telltale ring you know i sort of felt it like on the tongue i went with um onion i'm thinking maybe we'll switch that to scallion hold on i just got a piece of um it was a grain of red chili that's what i was like looking for the whole time before like a fr like a chopped up chili pepper okay better late than never during this tasting i picked up some kind of fresh chili pepper scallion and i think we're gonna switch to pecorino so i feel like this was really productive actually i feel pretty good with like where i'm at right now i have one more shot at making this dish before i have to present it to rhoda i didn't feel like there was like raw green scallion tops but i did get that scallion in the mixture so yeah i i'm gonna go i'm gonna go with some scallion now i have no idea whether that was red chili or green chili in my mind green chili just makes more sense with this dish i'm certainly a good bit hotter than the jalapeno this is like kind of like a personal preference thing do i want a red chili when i have like a green herb like parsley in a dish it just starts to look a little it's just not how i roll sorry brad and i you know kind of explored the differences between guanciale and pancetta in the context of bobby flays like carbonara mac and cheese so i just want to see if i could grab him and just sort of talk this through a little bit i'm going to throw some questions at him he hasn't seen this dish so you know he it's not really cheating thank you brad we have a similar situation so i have like a pasta that's like crab some like i believe chili pepper maybe some scallion no it's like fresh like like spaghetti you know but it's like i can't figure out it's creamy and it's cheesy you know and i feel like once you've put cheese in with crab what are you supposed to do figure out like whose dish this is because this is impossible it can't be done right right i feel like you and i ended up going with guanciale last time and it was totally wrong they probably got some like real funky like weird yeah some like in the bottom of some case or something that it was like starting to get like real like gnarly and porky i guess my main thing is like if you're talking about pancetta crab scallion fresh chili are are we talking carbonara should i be putting egg yolk in this or should i be putting cream you know if we just was like for a million dollars i would i would probably finally answer really okay cool all right good all right buddy thanks all right so brad said it was cream so we're going with egg yolk i'm gonna stick with pancetta i like the fat that it rendered out i guess you could put a drizzle of olive oil in a little bit okay build build a little extra that richness that i was kind of lacking before i think we're doing black pepper and green chili just for what it's worth all right gave that a little head start corn is going in now black pepper get a little toasty so crab is going in and i'm sticking with the king crab because we've got it and frankly it would be a shame not to use it gonna get a little liquid in there this is our egg yolk with some pasta water and i threw some of the pecorino in there you could fold the cheese directly into the you know the pasta itself definitely like a whole different level of funk with that pecorino i think we're good we're going to the plate i don't know it just looks a bit of a mess to me i mean that's kind of like what i tasted like all these flavors jammed up against each other all these textures you know kind of right up against one another okay so for our ingredients i'm gonna go with a 75 because i really am still not clear where all of the creaminess is coming from this is obviously a long-standing issue and a weak point of mine it's just you can taste creaminess but it can come from so many different places technique i'll say 80. there's any number of different orders of operations here in terms of appearance i'm going to give it like an 85. this is the dish that i'm tasting in my mind taste-wise i feel like i'm like i'm coming in like 85 i think i'm like i'm pretty close here so that puts me apparently at an 81 which uh is a b minus this is the one i'm going to be presenting to rhoda and we'll see i i honestly like all of these i'm so fascinated to know who came up with this and what the name is because i think the name will be so instructive in terms of how this dish might actually come together hey rhoda how was your day it was it was all right you know i just kept back coming back to this idea of like could i possibly be given another riff on a carbonara the last time i saw you making carbonara you left pretty defeated it's gonna take me a little bit to kind of recover from this when it's like the final reveal you know you just feel like chris penn and like best of the best where you know they've done like the brick breaking at the end and he's just sitting there like kind of crying like what are you even counting them for man chris may i present to you rachel ray's crabanara okay okay not bad yeah pretty close so tell me what were your alliums so i ended up going with scallion just scallion no garlic there was some garlic in there just just a touch and technically there were um scallion whites in the saute and scallion greens on top but you know what we're not gonna split scallions here okay okay you got the chili but you went green instead of red you know that's fine did you deglaze your pan with anything after you sauteed no so there was vermouth in there i'm i am like the king of putting unnecessary alcohol into dishes i know is it is it pecorino in this it's parmesan and pecorino it's equal parts but if you're following carbonara rules you could kind of have one or the other or both so you know at least you didn't throw anything random in there no there's no like asadero cheese so i know you've you've picked up on the parsley any other herbs no maybe something with a woody stem thyme thyme and then there's also lemon what zest and juice that's a bummer was it pancetta it was pancetta dan would like me to point out that you did not use the corn juice oh yeah my like my my january corn left unjuiced that concludes everything that you missed okay where did you land on the on the sauce i ended up going just yolk you got it was there butter or olive oil there was olive oil is she did she use red and green chilies or just red uh just red i just tasted rachel's now i'm trying mine i could see there being lemon in here there's one more thing in yours that wasn't in rachel's black pepper yep yep yeah it was tricky to triangulate that heat rachel's is a little bit better like between like the corn juice the vermouth the lemon that's a little bit annoying that i didn't get that brightness and when i did have a version with a little bit of brightness it was just so over the top that i just moved away from it um okay we're gonna go into scoring for ingredients you gave yourself a 75. i actually gave you a 78. okay you know what you got the big things for taste you gave yourself 85. i gave you an 80. okay because i figured you were probably missing that acid i mean obviously i can't taste it but there were a couple other things there that i think probably made the dish taste a little different yeah that's factuals for technique you gave yourself an 80. i gave you a 92. okay i but see i was i'm i i've deliberately been more modest in my self-scoring today you're not building yourself up no just to be knocked down no does rachel temper her yolks with pasta water yes did you oh yeah okay just just making sure the score is validated all right great we're good and appearance you gave yourself an 85 but i gave you a 95. appearance was even better than i had hoped so your overall score is an 86. okay it's like so i probably would have called that a b but if you want to call that a b plus you go right ahead i looked back at your bobby flay carbonara mac and cheese episode you got an 85 okay you've taken a year and you've gotten one point better oh my god yeah i don't i don't feel i feel pretty good about this to be honest job well done thanks rodol great to see you pleasure all right best to your family take care i think appearance wise this was great i think i got most of the elements that actually have like physical form which i'm happy about it was some of the elements that you purely had to taste a few things that like i missed and that is deeply annoying but i'll take it in 86 i mean come on yeah um i feel good and um yeah we'll see what tomorrow brings i wish like stove manufacturers could just come to some kind of consensus about like knob placement and what they control right because i feel like it changes is that just mehi everyone it's rhoda and i'm here for a secret conversation about chris morocco once again we are going to put chris's super taster abilities to the test this is rachel ray's crabonara we're challenging chris to replicate this exact dish with every ingredient in just one day he'll be able to taste it touch it smell it but at no point will he be allowed to see this dish because he only has one day we're going to give him three lifelines but there's a catch using them will dock points off his final score at the end of the day we'll come back to see his final creation and i'll be the judge all right i'm so confused about what this is this somehow smells exactly like my grandmother's brazil there's something herbaceous happening maybe it's that it's giving me like that parsley i'm also getting like a sharp kind of like cheesy smell okay i didn't know what that was that's good a little bit of zip to this a little bit of heat that tasted like a little bit of meat with a with a definite squidge factor yeah it tastes like a cured pork product absolutely leaning towards the uh the guanciale there i don't like pancetta sometimes we certainly have and i can't even remember what the right answer was in the end is that pancetta yes bobby's not following the rules here it didn't taste super smoky or anything like it felt more like a pancetta but like really fatty also then like what is this tastes like lobster the fact that i've only gotten very modest sized pieces of this and it's kind of sweet touch saline but very like clean makes me feel like maybe it's it's more crab and then there seemed to be some um some corn in there okay pasta it's kind of a creamy sauce we have the aggressive bite of some parsley so i was justified in thinking it was parsley in here i guess the cheese could just be parm it puts me in the world of a carbonara i'm gonna i'm gonna assume that there has to be some some onion it could be a splash of actual cream could it have like an egg yolk so far we've got allium let's assume that it's onion pancetta although it could be our old friend guanciale probable crab i've got heat of some sort could be an aggressive amount of black pepper i'm not getting like tons of chili like pieces of identifiable green chili i just don't have any idea what you would call this dish or who or who would have made it jamie oliver's insanity pasta okay so let's work from the ground up butter evo crab pancetta guanciale i'm saying onion but no garlic corn spaghetti black pepper chili flake parmesan heavy cream is that jude all right so this is my list of ingredients unfortunately i don't have the ability to add ingredients later on unless our culinary production team happens to have them they're gonna go out get this stuff and then i'm gonna have my first crack at this so let's just like start by cutting some onion and having a bit of a chap it all starts to go wrong when you don't really know a possible name for the dish this presumably has to be has to have a name with some sort of recognition factor right um so this is just some corn on the cob just cutting the kernels off corn and crab like that's like pretty classic right it's where like the crab and cheese intersect that things get a little bit murkier right can i can we like get real for a sec i don't think i've ever i've never messed with king crab like we've gotten in the test kitchen but like brad always deals with the crabs you know so i have blue crab and then i have some king crab you know king crab has a little bit more of that meaty lobster-like intensity but without being but without being like kind of as firm as lobster okay this is going well i feel horrible about this process i'm making a real pig's ear of it let's maybe cut up some of this guanciale which is cured um pork jowl like funky you know and then pancetta much milder i feel like it's pancetta this time pancetta is um like italian rolled bacon cured but not smoked the guanciale is pretty funky burger but we're gonna do them side by side it's going to be great i whispered something into brad's ear i think i recall in that video and somebody dm'd me to be like chris what were you saying abroad it's a little bit like finding out what bill murray told scarlett johansson at the end of lost in translation and put some guanciale in there and some pinch out of there in either case i think we're on the right track the pancetta and that slightly softer flavor i think is kind of what i'm looking for here i already like how this is cooking up better the guanciale already it has so little moisture left in it that like it cooks out pretty readily it is so intensely porky all right let's see we're going panchata sorry brad i know that was a different video but i think you're still wrong right something like this so i now have pancetta onion and corn and then we're gonna drop some pasta the main other element that i want to add while we have some hot fat in there is our black pepper i just want to make sure it kind of blooms out and toast a bit in the fat i'm not sure about the chili flake it wasn't like the intense heat of chili it felt much more like the kind of numbing you know more sort of like front of your mouth heat of black pepper i will put in some crab right before the pasta goes in just because i want to warm it through but i think like the elephant is in the room is sort of how we're gonna make this pasta creamy let's say we're heading in a positive direction i think what we're gonna have to determine is like are we looking at a carbonara situation where there's egg yolk and cheese and pasta cooking water or are we looking at or it's like cream and cheese so i'm grating some parm carbonara begs the question of whether we need pecorino or some kind of combination of parm and pecorino yeah pasta went into the pan i'm just getting some pasta cooking liquid in there oops and then we're going to divide the pasta into um into three bowls i think i just want to cook a little bit of like that sort of starchy pasta water in there it's just good pasta cooking practice and just really helps amalgamate all the flavors that are in there also what i think we're gonna do is throw some parm right in here since i think i want parm in all three of these versions i just wanted to put a little more water in there to just kind of help like the palm sort of melts and incorporate into the sauce carbonara often uses some combination of like whole egg or or you know but mostly yolk i just want to kind of like do a little test great so pasta is nice and coated with like that starchy kind of parmy you know kind of sauce then um we're going to divide it into a few bowls so i have egg yolk in one bowl i'm just gonna mix it with a little bit of the sauce and then incorporate some pasta so that will be a version two here version one maybe we'll do some like heavy cream version three just for fun we'll do creme fresh just because you know i sort of mentioned it and why not finish the thought what's throwing me off is that like i have like one white bowl and two glass bowls all right and then just to confuse you further even though i said i was gonna put cream in bowl one i'm actually gonna put it in bowl three have fun with this one editor just a splash crumb fresh is cultured cream sort of in the in the vein of like sour cream and that aroma is like that yogurty aroma is like a dead giveaway though like that's not what this smelled like no way this is our egg yolk this doesn't seem like it's cheesy enough it's just like the mind of like would they possibly give me another carbonara this is with heavy cream they're both pretty close i'm really torn between the egg yolk and the heavy cream i'm gonna start adding some of the other elements to the dish like the crab parsley and then see see what's what this egg yolk the balance of flavors is there like i think we're getting enough fat between the egg yolk and the cured meat it's not to say that something else couldn't be there but like the balance overall is really good i'm kind of leaning towards egg yolk i'm gonna go with the egg yolk for this first tasting all right so this is my first version of the dish chris's creamy crabby carbonara pasta this is the version with the egg yolk i don't have a fork just for clarity it needs to be tighter needs to be richer thicker creamier more cheese more egg yolk yeah because we're we're not there yet but i think we're on the right track just in terms of the flavor balance sort of i'm giving myself 63s across the board because if if if experience is any guide i always somehow score myself too high at this stage of the game so for ingredients i'm going to give myself a 63 taste i'm also going to give myself a 63 technique 73 appearance i'll give myself a 73 as well that takes me to a d plus god it hurts to say that 68 average second tasting here we go yeah there's just a whole other level of like cheesiness and richness pecorino is gonna deliver that kind of brute force intensity a little better than the parmesan was in mine which was a little bit softer mellower more buttery it also backs up that like black pepper flavor and puts us more in the mode of um carbonara hold on that was a scallion top i believe like just like a little cross cut scallion top has that sort of telltale ring you know i sort of felt it like on the tongue i went with um onion i'm thinking maybe we'll switch that to scallion hold on i just got a piece of um it was a grain of red chili that's what i was like looking for the whole time before like a fr like a chopped up chili pepper okay better late than never during this tasting i picked up some kind of fresh chili pepper scallion and i think we're gonna switch to pecorino so i feel like this was really productive actually i feel pretty good with like where i'm at right now i have one more shot at making this dish before i have to present it to rhoda i didn't feel like there was like raw green scallion tops but i did get that scallion in the mixture so yeah i i'm gonna go i'm gonna go with some scallion now i have no idea whether that was red chili or green chili in my mind green chili just makes more sense with this dish i'm certainly a good bit hotter than the jalapeno this is like kind of like a personal preference thing do i want a red chili when i have like a green herb like parsley in a dish it just starts to look a little it's just not how i roll sorry brad and i you know kind of explored the differences between guanciale and pancetta in the context of bobby flays like carbonara mac and cheese so i just want to see if i could grab him and just sort of talk this through a little bit i'm going to throw some questions at him he hasn't seen this dish so you know he it's not really cheating thank you brad we have a similar situation so i have like a pasta that's like crab some like i believe chili pepper maybe some scallion no it's like fresh like like spaghetti you know but it's like i can't figure out it's creamy and it's cheesy you know and i feel like once you've put cheese in with crab what are you supposed to do figure out like whose dish this is because this is impossible it can't be done right right i feel like you and i ended up going with guanciale last time and it was totally wrong they probably got some like real funky like weird yeah some like in the bottom of some case or something that it was like starting to get like real like gnarly and porky i guess my main thing is like if you're talking about pancetta crab scallion fresh chili are are we talking carbonara should i be putting egg yolk in this or should i be putting cream you know if we just was like for a million dollars i would i would probably finally answer really okay cool all right good all right buddy thanks all right so brad said it was cream so we're going with egg yolk i'm gonna stick with pancetta i like the fat that it rendered out i guess you could put a drizzle of olive oil in a little bit okay build build a little extra that richness that i was kind of lacking before i think we're doing black pepper and green chili just for what it's worth all right gave that a little head start corn is going in now black pepper get a little toasty so crab is going in and i'm sticking with the king crab because we've got it and frankly it would be a shame not to use it gonna get a little liquid in there this is our egg yolk with some pasta water and i threw some of the pecorino in there you could fold the cheese directly into the you know the pasta itself definitely like a whole different level of funk with that pecorino i think we're good we're going to the plate i don't know it just looks a bit of a mess to me i mean that's kind of like what i tasted like all these flavors jammed up against each other all these textures you know kind of right up against one another okay so for our ingredients i'm gonna go with a 75 because i really am still not clear where all of the creaminess is coming from this is obviously a long-standing issue and a weak point of mine it's just you can taste creaminess but it can come from so many different places technique i'll say 80. there's any number of different orders of operations here in terms of appearance i'm going to give it like an 85. this is the dish that i'm tasting in my mind taste-wise i feel like i'm like i'm coming in like 85 i think i'm like i'm pretty close here so that puts me apparently at an 81 which uh is a b minus this is the one i'm going to be presenting to rhoda and we'll see i i honestly like all of these i'm so fascinated to know who came up with this and what the name is because i think the name will be so instructive in terms of how this dish might actually come together hey rhoda how was your day it was it was all right you know i just kept back coming back to this idea of like could i possibly be given another riff on a carbonara the last time i saw you making carbonara you left pretty defeated it's gonna take me a little bit to kind of recover from this when it's like the final reveal you know you just feel like chris penn and like best of the best where you know they've done like the brick breaking at the end and he's just sitting there like kind of crying like what are you even counting them for man chris may i present to you rachel ray's crabanara okay okay not bad yeah pretty close so tell me what were your alliums so i ended up going with scallion just scallion no garlic there was some garlic in there just just a touch and technically there were um scallion whites in the saute and scallion greens on top but you know what we're not gonna split scallions here okay okay you got the chili but you went green instead of red you know that's fine did you deglaze your pan with anything after you sauteed no so there was vermouth in there i'm i am like the king of putting unnecessary alcohol into dishes i know is it is it pecorino in this it's parmesan and pecorino it's equal parts but if you're following carbonara rules you could kind of have one or the other or both so you know at least you didn't throw anything random in there no there's no like asadero cheese so i know you've you've picked up on the parsley any other herbs no maybe something with a woody stem thyme thyme and then there's also lemon what zest and juice that's a bummer was it pancetta it was pancetta dan would like me to point out that you did not use the corn juice oh yeah my like my my january corn left unjuiced that concludes everything that you missed okay where did you land on the on the sauce i ended up going just yolk you got it was there butter or olive oil there was olive oil is she did she use red and green chilies or just red uh just red i just tasted rachel's now i'm trying mine i could see there being lemon in here there's one more thing in yours that wasn't in rachel's black pepper yep yep yeah it was tricky to triangulate that heat rachel's is a little bit better like between like the corn juice the vermouth the lemon that's a little bit annoying that i didn't get that brightness and when i did have a version with a little bit of brightness it was just so over the top that i just moved away from it um okay we're gonna go into scoring for ingredients you gave yourself a 75. i actually gave you a 78. okay you know what you got the big things for taste you gave yourself 85. i gave you an 80. okay because i figured you were probably missing that acid i mean obviously i can't taste it but there were a couple other things there that i think probably made the dish taste a little different yeah that's factuals for technique you gave yourself an 80. i gave you a 92. okay i but see i was i'm i i've deliberately been more modest in my self-scoring today you're not building yourself up no just to be knocked down no does rachel temper her yolks with pasta water yes did you oh yeah okay just just making sure the score is validated all right great we're good and appearance you gave yourself an 85 but i gave you a 95. appearance was even better than i had hoped so your overall score is an 86. okay it's like so i probably would have called that a b but if you want to call that a b plus you go right ahead i looked back at your bobby flay carbonara mac and cheese episode you got an 85 okay you've taken a year and you've gotten one point better oh my god yeah i don't i don't feel i feel pretty good about this to be honest job well done thanks rodol great to see you pleasure all right best to your family take care i think appearance wise this was great i think i got most of the elements that actually have like physical form which i'm happy about it was some of the elements that you purely had to taste a few things that like i missed and that is deeply annoying but i'll take it in 86 i mean come on yeah um i feel good and um yeah we'll see what tomorrow brings i wish like stove manufacturers could just come to some kind of consensus about like knob placement and what they control right because i feel like it changes is that just me\n"