Springy Asparagus Carbonara Recipe

While the phrase "springy asparagus" may have you envisioning veggies bouncing out of a pan, the asparagus in this dish is only lively in flavor rather than movement. Here, recipe developer Erin Johnson uses springy in the vernal sense of the word, telling us, "Asparagus makes carbonara feel lighter and perfect for spring." Plus, spring marks the start of asparagus season, when fresh-picked stalks start appearing from farmers' markets to grocery stores.

"Carbonara feels like a comfort food to me, and, as such, I like to showcase it," says Johnson, explaining that she makes a main-event meal of this savory, creamy pasta with nothing more than a simple green salad as an accompaniment. Though you're likely to finish off this recipe in one evening, Johnson has a trick for making next-day carbonara leftovers taste as fresh as possible: Save some pasta cooking water and use it to reheat the pasta on the stove until warm and glossy. 

Bring a large pot of water to boil and add the salt.

Add spaghetti to the boiling water and cook until al dente, according to package directions.

Once the spaghetti is cooked, reserve 1 cup of the pasta cooking water before draining the spaghetti.

Add spaghetti and asparagus ribbons to the skillet with the pancetta and toss to combine.

In a large bowl, beat together the eggs, egg yolks, Parmesan, and pecorino until smooth.

Gradually add the spaghetti mixture to the bowl with the egg mixture, stirring vigorously with tongs, to coat the pasta in the sauce. If necessary, add reserved pasta water 1 tablespoon at a time to thin the sauce to a cream-like consistency.

To make the asparagus ribbons called for in this recipe, you'll first need to trim or snap off the hard, fibrous bits from the bottom of each stalk. Once this is done, use a vegetable peeler to shave the stalk down until you have nothing left but a pile of ribbons (and perhaps some broken-off tips, which are OK to leave in). While Johnson admits that it does take a little more work to prepare the asparagus this way, she says that the delicate ribbons "twirl perfectly with the spaghetti for the ultimate bite." Shaved asparagus, too, tends to be more tender than whole asparagus spears, making for a better texture in this pasta dish.

If you choose to substitute a different type of pasta, however, you may not need to ribbonize your asparagus after all. Johnson says that if you'll be going with a shorter, chunkier kind of pasta, such as rigatoni, chopping the asparagus into similarly-sized chunks may be a better bet. Since chunks won't cook as quickly as ribbons, you may want to add the asparagus to the boiling pasta in the last 2 minutes of cooking.