How to make it

First, start off by melting some butter in a pan with plenty of freshly cracked black pepper. Black pepper is a key flavor in cacio e pepe and toasting it in butter helps coax out it’s spicy floralness – the heat of the butter will draw out flavor and the pepper will infuse the butter with all that goodness.

After the butter is melted and the pepper is toasted, it’s time to add our thickening agent, flour. Stir the flour in completely making sure there are no lumps. At this point, our goal is to coat eat flour granule with fat so that the flour easily combines with the milk to create a smooth sauce.

Once the flour is cooked into the fat, it’s time to gradually add the milk. Adding it in slowly will help prevent lumps. Don’t worry if the sauce clumps up right away, just keep whisking over low heat.

When all the milk is incorporated, it’s time to add the cheese. Take the sauce off the heat and add the cheese in batches. The residual heat of the sauce will melt the cheese. The sauce will probably look kind of lumpy, but don’t worry, we’re going to smooth it out with starchy pasta water. At this point, if you want to cool down the sauce and pop it in the fridge in a container, you can do so. If you do, you can have almost instant cacio e pepe pasta any day of the week.