Maybe carbonara purists won’t like this version, but what does it do? 🙂
I want to dedicate it to everyone who loves vegetables as I do and who will appreciate this very creamy pasta, made with pumpkin.

It is a dish where you play with textures and can be quite challenging. The most common mistake? Cooking the yolks of carbonara so much that it resembles … scrambled eggs. But if you follow my advice, that won’t happen.
In this recipe, I also wanted to recreate that slightly smoky flavor typical of carbonara by adding a little smoked paprika to the squash.
A note about cheese: remember to grate the pecorino on a fine grater. Only in this way will the cheese be able to melt completely into the egg yolks and not create lumps.

Try the recipe and let me know how it went!

Ingredients for 2 persons

180 g of spaghetti
4 egg yolks
4 spoons of finely grated Pecorino
150 g of peeled butternut squash
Oil
Black pepper
Smoked paprika

Time: 20 minutes

Let’s cook!

Boil the water to cook the spaghetti.
In the meantime, cut the squash and cook it in a frying pan with a drizzle of olive oil until crunchy. Add a pinch of smoked paprika and mix. Set the cooked squash aside, in a small bowl. Don’t clean the pan from the oil (we are going to use it later).

In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the Pecorino and the freshly ground black pepper. Set it aside.

Cook the spaghetti very al dente (2 minutes before the normal cooking), drain them saving the cooking water. Transfer them in the same pan where you cooked the squash and sauté them for 1 minute with a lid of cooking water, in order to facilitate the production of starch (that gives a special creaminess to the pasta).

Remove the pan of the pasta from the stove, add the squash to the pasta and mix for a few second (it will help to reduce the heat of the pasta, avoiding the egg to cook). Add the carbonara cream you prepared, mixing and coating the spaghetti with it. Serve the pasta immediately with a sprinkle of more Pecorino and pepper.

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