Choose your pasta shape, preferred pork, and cheese to customize pasta carbonara to your liking or to use what you have on hand.
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Updated on January 25, 2024
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Italian pasta carbonara traditionally includes eggs, cured pork, and cheese, and it's easy to modify with different types of each and additional ingredients. Start with our stellar spaghetti carbonara and riff from there with caviar, clams, garden herbs, spinach, and more for a classic pasta that's silky, hearty, rich, and potentially earthy, sweet, or smoky. These are our favorite carbonara recipes.
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Creamy Spaghetti Carbonara with Peas and Ham
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Jasmine Smith's modern take on the dish relies on ham instead of traditional pancetta for a dose of smoky flavor and richness.
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Summer Crab Carbonara with Lemons and Capers
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2020 F&W Best New Chef Douglass Williams’ method for carbonara makes for a simple, creamy carbonara without the stress.
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Spaghetti Carbonara
The Food & Wine Test Kitchen came up with the ultimate carbonara combining a silky egg-based sauce, crispy guanciale, and Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheeses. Chefs advise on technique, and it's ready in 30 minutes.
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Clams Carbonara
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Boston chef Matt Jennings’s pasta combines two beautiful things: salty, rich carbonara and spaghetti alle vongole, prepared with briny New England clams.
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Garden Herb Spaghetti Carbonara
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Raid your window box or kitchen garden for this super-fast carbonara.
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Smoked Gouda Carbonara
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In a clever play on carbonara, Justin Chapple uses smoked Gouda cheese, adding a deliciously smoky flavor to this silky, hearty, and totally delicious pasta.
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Spinach Pasta Carbonara
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"This epitomizes the beauty of few-ingredient cooking," says Claire Robinson. Indeed, she freshens up the classic, rich pasta by simply adding a few handfuls of spinach to the fettuccine just before it's finished cooking.
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Sun Dried Tomato and Goat Cheese Carbonara
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Sun dried tomatoes add a subtle sweetness and acidity to this easy weeknight pasta dish.
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Linguine Carbonara
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No book about quick pastas would be complete without a version of this classic. It's made with little more than bacon and eggs.
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Caviar Carbonara
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For special occasions, Food & Wine’s Justin Chapple makes beautiful, fresh pappardelle pasta, then tosses it with a quick and decadent carbonara sauce laced with briny pops of caviar and lemon zest. When he doesn’t feel like making the pasta from scratch, he buys the noodles fresh at his local Italian market.
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Calabrian Carbonara
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New York City chef Andrew Carmellini uses Calabrian 'nduja, the spicy, spreadable sausage, to bring loads of delicious heat and flavor to his silky carbonara.
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Spaghetti with Anchovy Carbonara
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Chris Cosentino adds briny flavor to his pasta with cured tuna heart. He shaves it on right before serving.
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Spaghetti Carbonara with Green Peas
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A carbonara sauce always has eggs, bacon (usually pancetta), and Parmesan or pecorino cheese; some versions contain heavy cream, others do not. Top Chef contestants Elia Aboumrad and Sam Talbot made their decadent sauce with plenty of cream; to add color and freshness they also added a less conventional ingredient — a handful of green peas.
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Frascatelli Carbonara
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At Union Square Cafe, executive chef Michael Romano tops homemade frascatelli, a dense spaetzle-like pasta, with a combination of pancetta, cheese, and cream.
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Bucatini Carbonara
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Italian carbonara is famously rich, combining pancetta or guanciale (cured pork jowl), egg yolks and cheese. At Holeman and Finch, Linton Hopkins adds his own Southern accent to the dish with house-cured pork and local eggs.
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Creamy Spaghetti Carbonara
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This classic Italian dish benefits from 6 ounces of delicious pancetta.
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