Ketchup carbonara

or, how to get banned from an entire country

Good morning, clowns!

It occurred to me just now that I do not actually know when or why I started addressing you all as clowns on a regular basis. Who even says that anymore? Apparently, I am a relic of an ancient time when court jesters were still a thing and everyone ran around in full suits of armor, waving swords at each other, while eating gruel made entirely out of pebbles. Let’s momentarily ignore the fact that I’m Korean and that my ancestors probably wouldn’t have been within 5,000 miles of that area back then. In fact, if I was anywhere near there, those very same armor-clad people would have probably been waving those swords at me.

Speaking of people waving swords around, the Internet got really mad at the New York Times cooking section last week, because one of their recipe developers added tomatoes to pasta carbonara. In fact, pretty much all of Italy shit their pants over this recipe. As the greatest food writer in all of history, I have no choice but to keep track when people get mad about food, and quietly nod when people get red in the face with a weird kind of recipe-induced anger. I know. It’s the heavy mantle I must bear.

Carbonara is one of those classic recipes that you don’t fuck with because people will be mean to you on Twitter about it, which is the modern day equivalent of waving around a sword. I am all about swords today. We were talking about it at work at my day job at The Takeout, and my coworker Aimee suggested I do something about pasta carbonara with my newsletter.

So, I thought to myself, “Dannis, an entire country is enraged about someone putting tomatoes in a pasta dish. Let’s see if you can make people even angrier about it. What can you do to take this dish to the next level?”

Ketchup should do the trick.

Maybe not just ketchup.

In fact, I decided to pave my own road and change everything about the dish, yet still call it carbonara. This would do it. Instead of spaghetti noodles, I’d use penne, instead of guanciale (cured pork cheek)* I’d use hot dogs, American cheese instead of Pecorino Romano, and I’d douse the whole thing with ketchup at the end. Carbonara…with a twist!

*A thing food writers do is sometimes put parenthesis next to an ingredient and explain what it is. It is to remind you we know a lot about food, even though a lot of the time we just Google the same thing three times just to be absolutely certain we’re not wrong so you can’t claim you can do our jobs better than us.

The best way to cook penne pasta for carbonara is in the microwave.

Don’t get mad at me, I don’t make the rules. Unsalted water, of course.

I placed the pasta in the microwave, set it for eight minutes, and took out the recycling while I did it. I took a picture of the pasta in the microwave, but the inside of our microwave is so splattered right now with unknown substances that I couldn’t bring myself to show you. It even smells like fifty types of food mashed up together.

Huh. Turns out you can actually cook pasta just fine in a microwave. I was not emotionally prepared for this kind of success.

When making a classic pasta dish, it’s important to keep some pasta water saved in case you need it to smooth out your pasta sauce. So I reserved it by drinking all of it.

I still can’t believe this microwave pasta thing worked.

Traditional carbonara has pork in it, which is why I used an Oscar Meyer hot dog, whose two main ingredients are mechanically separated turkey and chicken.

We need to address a few things in this photo, both about this hot dog. One of the things is that I can’t get over how shiny it is. I could practically see my own reflection in this wiener, a phrase that will surely net me the entire set of James Beard Awards for the rest of time.

Second of all, I do not know why this thing came pre-ripped, as I plopped this glistening wiener in, straight from the package.

Next, as stated in the traditional ancient carbonara recipes, which possibly date back to as far as *checks notes* the 1950’s, you must mash up the hot dogs coarsely with a wooden spoon and let the residual heat melt the American cheese.

You may be wondering about the egg.

Instead of adding the egg to the dish, I simply let the egg stare at the pasta and hot dogs, which is a traditional method of cooking an egg. It’s called the scaring technique, where you scare the egg into scrambling itself.

Another very important detail to this dish is that you must serve it in an appropriate serving bowl, which is a decorative bowl you got from judging a ramen festival a long time ago.

This is the only bowl you can use, otherwise this becomes a completely different dish. No, you can’t have mine.

Finally, douse the entire mess— er, dish with ketchup and serve with the scared egg on the side.

Eat the whole thing with your fingers, and don’t forget, it’s not authentic unless you go onto Twitter and complain about it, telling people that you finally found the biggest culinary abomination on the Internet. Though if you think this is bad, you should see what people do with Korean food over here.

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If you survived this long, you are a true champion of cuisine. If I angered you, please be sure to share this all over social media and don’t forget to tell me what a terrible food writer I am for adding something to carbonara, which is probably the biggest loaded gun of all recipes. Sharing this does absolute wonders for Food is Stupid and my main goal is to ruin my entire career.

And, of course, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, because not only does it keep the newsletter going, it’s going to pay for a few big bodyguards for when we travel to Italy someday wearing a shirt that says, “I PUT KETCHUP ON MY CARBONARA.” And you get some special content along the way, which will probably be my living will.

As always, no matter what, thank you all for being here. Last week’s shenanigans with the Banana Loca turned out pretty great (thank you, Banana Loca for your great contribution to society). And in fact, the hot dog version for paid subscribers yielded probably the most disturbing food photography I’ve ever taken.

See some of you on Friday, when I try ketchup on macaroni for the first time, something I swore to myself I’d never do, but now I can’t stop thinking about it.