Chicken Carbonara Recipe (Real Egg Sauce, Plus a Creamy Version)

1. Salt the chicken first, then crack, grate and cut. Prep starts with the chicken, which needs time with its salt. Crack 2 tsp of black peppercorns coarsely and divide it in two before anything raw is touched — 1 tsp for the chicken, 1 tsp for the sauce. Pat 1 lb (450 g) of boneless, skinless thighs dry, cut into 3/4 in (2 cm) pieces or leave whole, and season with 3/4 tsp of kosher salt (coarse) and the chicken's 1 tsp of pepper; leave it uncovered on a plate in the refrigerator, bottom shelf, while you do the rest — 20 minutes for thighs, 30 for breast (add those 10 minutes to the prep time). Set out a second, clean plate for the cooked pork and chicken now, so the one that held the raw meat never sees them again. Wash hands, board and knife. Put 3 quarts (2.8 liters) of water on to boil with 1 tbsp (about 15 g) of salt — less water than the package suggests, so it runs starchier, and half the usual salt; the pecorino and pork salt the dish later. Grate 3.5 oz (100 g) of Pecorino Romano to a powder and weigh it. Cut 3.5 oz (100 g) of rindless guanciale or pancetta into batons 1/4 in (6 mm) thick and 1 in (2.5 cm) long. That is the 20 minutes of prep.
2. Render the pork from a cold pan, then lift it out — 8 minutes. Put the pork batons into a large, cold skillet — 12 in (30 cm) if you have one; the chicken needs the room — over medium-low heat for about 8 minutes, stirring now and then, until the fat runs clear and the lean is deep gold with crisp edges and a chewy middle. Pancetta renders less than guanciale; that is what the optional teaspoon of oil is for. Lift the pork out with a slotted spoon and leave the fat: 2–3 tbsp is exactly enough to sear the chicken in, so pour off any more. The pork comes out now because it would burn at the heat the chicken needs; it goes back in at the end, where its crisp edges can be seen.
3. Sear the chicken hard in the pork fat — 7 minutes. Raise the heat to medium-high and wait until the fat shimmers. Lay the chicken in a single layer with space between the pieces — two batches of 3–4 minutes each, about 7 minutes in all. Crowd the pan and the chicken steams grey in its own juice, the chain-restaurant failure this page exists to avoid. Leave the pieces alone for 2 minutes to take color, then turn and finish. Check the thickest piece with an instant-read thermometer: 165°F (74°C) is the FSIS minimum for poultry, and a thigh will go 10°F (about 6°C) past it and stay juicy. Whole thighs take about 4 minutes on the first side and 3 on the second; breast is done the moment it reads 165°F (74°C). Move the chicken to the clean plate with the pork — not the plate the raw chicken sat on — and keep the fat in the pan.
4. Whisk the egg and cheese paste — 2 minutes. In a bowl wide enough to hold all the pasta and chicken later, whisk 4 egg yolks with 1 whole egg, then stir in the grated pecorino and the remaining 1 tsp of pepper to a thick, almost dry paste. That stiffness is correct; the pasta water loosens it in a moment. Mixing the cheese into the egg now, rather than over the pasta later, is the best protection against clumps: every grain is coated in egg before it meets heat. Set the bowl somewhere warm but nowhere near the burner. This is also the moment to decide who is eating: for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised, these eggs should be pasteurized, because the finished sauce is warmed, not cooked — or make the cream version below.
5. Cook the fettuccine one minute short, and save the water — 10 minutes. Drop 14 oz (400 g) of fettuccine into the boiling water, stir for the first 30 seconds, and cook to one minute short of the package time — about 10 minutes for most dried fettuccine; it finishes in the pan. If you are doing one thing at a time, as the 30-minute cook time assumes, this is when you slice whole thighs across the grain into strips about 1/2 in (1 cm) wide. About 2 minutes before the pasta is done, scoop 1 1/2 cups (360 ml) of the cloudy cooking water into a jug; you will use perhaps a third, and you cannot get it back once the pot is drained. If peas are going in, add 1/2 cup (70 g) for the last minute. Drain loosely and do not rinse.
6. Burner off: pasta, pork and chicken back into the pan — 1 minute. Turn the burner under the skillet off — off, not low — and give the pan 30 seconds if it has sat hot since the chicken came out. Tip the drained fettuccine into the fat — away from you; the fat is still hot enough to spit — and toss hard with tongs for 30 seconds, so every strand is glossed with pork fat and the browned bits lift off the pan. Add 2 tbsp of the reserved pasta water and toss again; the starch and fat form a thin glaze, the foundation the egg builds on. Return the chicken and the crisp pork, with any juice from their clean plate, and toss once more. The chicken is already at 165°F (74°C) and needs only warming. This is why it was seared first: the next step can never be heated.
7. The emulsion, with the heat already gone — 1 minute. Hold the back of your hand 1 in (2.5 cm) above the pasta: hot enough to feel, not to hurt. Whisk 3 tbsp of the hot pasta water into the egg paste to loosen it to a thick batter, which tempers the egg. Then either pour the egg over the pasta in the skillet or — safer, because a heavy pan holds heat and the chicken makes the pile deeper and hotter than a plain carbonara — tip the pasta, chicken and pork into the egg bowl. Toss fast and continuously for a full minute, lifting from the bottom. The sauce goes from streaky to smooth to glossy as the pasta's residual heat thickens the yolk, around 150–160°F (65–71°C), without taking it to 160°F (71°C), where it starts to grain, or 165°F (74°C), where it is curds. Add pasta water a tablespoon at a time until it flows like satin and coats the chicken too, then stop.
8. Serve within two minutes — 1 minute. The sauce is at its best for about two minutes and then tightens, so the bowls should be warm before the pasta is drained; a rinse with pasta water does it. Twirl the fettuccine into a nest with tongs turned inside a ladle and set it in the center of each bowl. Lay the chicken over the top — fanned if you seared the thighs whole, tucked through if you used pieces — so it is seen, not buried. Spoon the crisp pork over, then a fine snow of extra pecorino and a last crack of pepper; peas, if you cooked them, go where they show. Nothing else: no parsley, no oil, no cream. Plating takes the one minute the sauce gives you.

Safety & hygiene Important

• Chicken to 165°F (74°C) — a thermometer, not a guess. The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service sets one safe minimum internal temperature for all poultry, thigh or breast, whole or in pieces: 165°F (74°C), measured with a food thermometer in the thickest part. Color is not a test — thigh meat can stay pink near a blood vessel when well past safe, and breast can look white well before 165°F (74°C). Small pieces in a hot pan get there in minutes; whole thighs take longer, so check two. Here the chicken must be fully cooked before it goes near the egg, because the emulsion is built with the burner off and never heated again. The UK Food Standards Agency's visual test — steaming hot throughout, no pink meat, juices running clear — is the fallback if you have no thermometer; the thermometer is better.
• Do not wash the chicken, and give it its own board. Rinsing raw chicken under the tap does not clean it; it spreads it. The USDA's position is that washing raw poultry splashes bacteria such as Campylobacter and Salmonella onto sinks, taps and nearby surfaces, and in its 2019 observational study with North Carolina State University, 60 percent of the cooks who washed their chicken left bacteria in the sink, and 14 percent still had it there after they thought they had cleaned the sink; a quarter of them also got bacteria onto the salad being made beside it — though so did many non-washers, so the salad figure is really about hands and boards. The UK Food Standards Agency has given the same advice since its 2014 campaign. Pat the chicken dry with paper towel instead, which also helps the sear, and bin the towel. Cut it on a board nothing else touches until the board has been washed in hot soapy water, use a clean knife for the pork and cheese, and wash your hands for 20 seconds before you pick up the grater.
• The eggs are warmed, not cooked — choose the egg, or choose the cream version. The egg emulsion reaches roughly 150–160°F (65–71°C): hot enough to thicken, deliberately not hot enough to set. FDA and USDA guidance is that egg dishes be cooked to 160°F (71°C) — 165°F (74°C) when the dish also contains meat or poultry, as this one does — and since nobody holds a thermometer in a tossing bowl, treat the sauce as a lightly cooked egg. US guidance is that any dish served with raw or undercooked egg be made with pasteurized eggs or egg products; that advice is aimed at everyone, and it is non-negotiable for anyone pregnant, over 65, under 5 or immunocompromised, the groups for whom a Salmonella infection is most dangerous. Healthy adults using ordinary shell eggs are accepting a small risk knowingly; pasteurized shell eggs, sold in some US supermarkets, change nothing about the recipe. The cream version is the other answer: it can be taken to 165°F (74°C) — the figure for an egg dish with meat or poultry in it — without curdling, because cream dilutes the egg proteins and raises their setting point. In the UK, the Food Standards Agency has advised since 2017 that eggs carrying the British Lion mark (or, since 2021, the Laid in Britain mark) are safe for infants, children, pregnant women and older people even runny — but not for the severely immunocompromised, who should still cook eggs thoroughly; eggs outside those schemes should be fully cooked for vulnerable groups.
• The two-hour clock, leftovers, and reheating once. The rules for what is left are those for any cooked chicken and egg: no more than 2 hours at room temperature in total, 1 hour if the room is above 90°F (32°C), then into the refrigerator in a shallow container. US guidance (USDA) gives cooked leftovers 3–4 days at 40°F (4°C) or below; UK guidance (FSA) says 48 hours and reheat only once. Reheat in a pan over low heat with a splash of water, stirring, until steaming hot — 165°F (74°C) on a thermometer in a piece of chicken, not just the pasta. The egg version goes slightly grainy; the cream version survives better. Do not reheat twice, and do not freeze the egg version, which separates. The cream version can hold for a crowd in a low oven above the USDA hot-holding line of 140°F (60°C) for about an hour; the egg version cannot be held at all.
• Allergens, and what is in the pork. This dish contains egg, milk (Pecorino Romano, and Parmigiano-Reggiano if you blend) and wheat (the pasta) — three of the major allergens that must be declared in the US and the EU — and pork unless you leave it out, which matters for religious and dietary reasons. The cream version swaps pecorino for cream and Parmesan, so still milk. Pecorino is a sheep's-milk cheese, which does not help anyone with a cow's-milk allergy; the proteins involved are shared across species. Gluten-free fettuccine works unchanged, though its water carries less starch and you may need more of it. Guanciale and pancetta are cured with salt, pepper and often nitrites, and some artisanal pieces add wine, garlic or rosemary; bacon (streaky bacon, to a British reader) is usually smoked as well. Read the label if that matters.
• Salt the chicken in the fridge, and mind the hot fat. The 20–30 minutes the chicken spends with its salt is a dry brine, and FSIS is explicit that brining of any kind happens in the refrigerator, not on the counter — uncovered on a plate on the bottom shelf, where nothing can drip onto it and it can drip onto nothing. Then the fat: the pork renders into 2–3 tbsp of hot fat, the chicken goes into it at medium-high, and later a pot's worth of wet pasta lands in the same pan. Lay chicken in away from you, drain the pasta loosely rather than dripping, add it with the burner already off, and pour any excess fat into a heatproof cup rather than the sink. Keep the jug of pasta water, the bowl of egg and the tongs within reach before the pasta goes in.

3 ways to plate it

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