Spaghetti Carbonara

Bring the 2 litres of water to the boil in a pan wide enough to hold the spaghetti flat.

Stir in the 10g of fine salt.

Grate the pecorino on the finest holes you have, so it goes to a powder rather than shreds that sit in the sauce as rubbery threads.

Put the guanciale batons into a cold wide frying pan and set it over medium-low heat.

Render for 6-8 minutes, turning the pieces, until the fat has gone from opaque white to clear and the lean edges are deep gold and crisp at the corners.

Keep the heat low through all of that. Guanciale dropped into a hot pan browns and hardens on the outside while the fat inside is still solid, and that rendered fat is half the sauce.

Take the pan off the heat and leave the guanciale sitting in its own fat.

Whisk the 3 yolks, the whole egg, the pecorino and three quarters of the ground pepper together in a bowl until they form a thick, even paste with no streaks of white left.

Cook the spaghetti for 1 minute less than the packet says, until it still has a firm white core when you bite a strand.

Ladle 300ml of the cooking water into a jug before anything is drained. As in the cacio e pepe in this collection, that starchy water is an ingredient, and once it is down the sink there is no way back.

Lift the spaghetti straight into the guanciale pan with tongs, letting it drip but not draining it dry.

Set the pan over low heat and toss for 20-30 seconds, until every strand is slick with the rendered fat.

Take the pan off the heat and wait a full minute, until it has stopped sizzling and no steam is coming hard off the base.

Do not shorten that minute. Egg yolk starts setting at around 65C/149F, and a pan still hot enough to fry turns the eggs into fine yellow threads sitting in a greasy pool the second they land — a sweetish scrambled egg with pasta in it, and nothing brings it back.

Loosen the egg and cheese paste with 60ml of the reserved water, whisking until it pours off the whisk in a thick ribbon.

Pour the paste over the pasta.

Toss hard and continuously for 30-60 seconds, lifting the strands high so the sauce moves through them, until it turns glossy and clings.

Put the pan back over the lowest heat for 10-15 seconds only if the sauce still looks watery, moving the pasta the whole time and lifting it off at the first sign of thickening.

Loosen with the reserved water a splash at a time, until the sauce slides slowly off the strands rather than clinging in a paste.

Taste it. Between the salted water, the guanciale and the pecorino it should need no more salt.

Serve into warmed bowls straight away, with the remaining pepper over the top.

Eat it at once. This sauce is held together by heat and starch alone, and it stiffens and dulls within a couple of minutes on a cold plate.