Cacio e pepe is a simple dish in appearance. It has taken years of tweaking, paying attention, and appreciating our own taste to make it something truly crush-worthy. Cacio e pepe is our go-to pasta sauce when showing off the tremendous qualities of freshly extruded noodles. I am a huge fan of the Teflon insert in a bronze chitarra die because it keeps the square edges sharp and mimics the structure of a ramen noodle. It allows me to travel two different paths with the same die: classic Italian and neo-Japanese. I start our sauce by slowly toasting black pepper in a blend of olive oil and butter. I then build the sauce around the noodles, adding them to the pan with a generous amount of pasta water and freshly grated Pecorino Romano to create a creamy, fluid emulsion of fat, starch, and cheese. The result is a slurp-able nest of spicy, decadent noodles.
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