The Pasta Queen's Carbonara Baked Potato Is Crushing The Flavor Battle

In a carb-obsessed world, potatoes have received a bad rap and are often associated with high-calorie dishes like mashed potatoes, potatoes au gratin, and french fries. Popular diets like Atkins place potatoes in the same category as bread and pasta, considering them empty calories. The starchy tuber is one of the most popular and versatile vegetables, yet it has been relegated to a side dish, not the main attraction.

A 1995 study found potatoes top the satiety index, meaning they make people feel full longer after eating them, which prevents overeating. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition found that when people enjoyed healthy potato recipes daily, they lost weight.

Baked potatoes are blank canvases that can be topped simply with butter as a side dish or loaded with barbecued pulled pork for a main course. For generations, we were told to wrap russet potatoes in aluminum foil before baking them. However, Idaho Potato advises against that method. Potatoes are 80% water, and covering them traps in the steam, making the skin soggy and the flesh gummy. Instead, pierce them with a fork and cook them directly on the oven rack for best results.

Although The Pasta Queen, Nadia Munno, is known for her theatrical pasta recipes on TikTok, she traded her beloved spaghetti for baked potatoes as the base for a traditional Italian pasta sauce. Munno tops fluffy baked potatoes with carbonara sauce for a meal bursting with umami and flavor.

In a recent TikTok video, The Pasta Queen pops russet potatoes in the oven while she whips up the Italian equivalence of bacon and eggs. Carbonara is a simple recipe that allows quality ingredients to shine, as Italian recipes do. It is a creamy, salty, rich sauce made with egg yolks, Pecorino Romano cheese, guanciale, and black pepper, traditionally tossed with spaghetti. The creamy sauce coats each pasta strand with crispy bits of guanciale in every twirled forkful.

The sauce begins by rendering the fat from lardons of guanciale. Guanciale is an Italian cured meat made from the pig's cheek and is similar to pancetta. The high fat-to-meat ratio gives a meaty, salty richness to dishes. Although similar to bacon, guanciale isn't smoked so that it won't overpower the sauce (per Allrecipes). Once the fat has been rendered, the crispy lardons are whisked with the remaining ingredients in a double boiler.

The creaminess of carbonara traditionally comes from emulsifying egg yolks, cheese, and rendered pork fat with starchy pasta water. Since there is no pasta in this recipe, Munno uses the starchy cooked flesh from a potato and whisks it into the sauce to give it body (per MasterClass). To finish the dish, Munno fluffs the baked potato flesh with a fork before topping it with the sauce, bright yellow from the egg yolks and salty from the Pecorino and guanciale. If you enjoy spaghetti carbonara, this is a must-make recipe.