Time-saving, budget-friendly weeknight meals: We all need more of them, and it can be hard to keep things intriguing when you’re making the same convenience dishes over and over again. Here’s one unusual way to inject new life into one of our favourite fast weeknight pastas, cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper pasta).
Cacio e pepe gets its lush sauce from just three ingredients: butter, grated cheese, and black pepper. To keep things exciting, Kaitlin Leung from The Woks of Life suggests swapping out some of your everyday black pepper for white pepper as well as Sichuan peppercorns, pink-coloured peppercorns known for lending a pleasantly tingly, fizzy feeling to popular Chinese dishes like ma po tofu. Writes Kaitlin:
The flavour of this cacio e pepe recipe is really full-bodied and delightfully East meets West-esque. The black and white peppercorns provide warmth and spice, and the Sichuan peppercorns leave that most excellent tingly numbness in your mouth, giving the dish a whole new level of complexity.
We’re looking forward to making pasta tonight (al dente, of course), then giving one of our favourite sauces an Asian mini-makeover for a refreshing take on a Roman classic.
“Spicy Numbing” Cacio e Pepe [The Woks of Life]
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