Clarence Court Courgette Carbonara with Fresh Bucatini (Vegetarian)

This dish is one of our limited-edition recipes in celebration of the joy of eggs, Italy’s favourite scratch cooking staple. Packed with Vitamin B12, protein and omega-3, the humble egg is a nutritional powerhouse which has held a special place in the Italian pasta making tradition for centuries. To really pay tribute to the uovo in all its glory, we’ve teamed up with none other than Britain’s most distinguished egg producers, Clarence Court, on a limited-edition tasting menu. 

This fresh take on the classic carbonara is sure to delight both vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike. Instead of using the traditional guanciale or pancetta in this carbonara, we substitute pieces of gently browned courgette. Their fresh and subtly sweet flavour adds depth to this dish and helps to balance out the gloriously creamy carbonara. Our carbonara sauce contains eggs, a drop of cream, freshly ground black pepper and decadent aged Italian cheese. The addition of courgette here creates a vibrant vegetarian carbonara, mixing textures and flavours in a creative and delicious way. 

For the pasta, we selected bucatini. The word “bucatini” comes from the Italian word “buco”, which translates to “hole”, a reference to its hollow shape. And while long, tangled strands of bucatini prove deft at capturing the creamy carbonara sauce, the pasta’s unique shape was actually born out of practicality. Ancient pastai (pasta makers) who encountered difficulty when cooking dried pasta with consistency sought to invent a novel solution to their problem. The pastai settled on a new method, which saw dough rolled around a thin rod (known as a ‘ferretto’), to produce a long strand of hollow pasta. The resulting “buco” in the centre of each bucatino helped to prevent inconsistencies in cooking, but also distinguished this shape from others, securing its popularity in Italian - and particularly Roman - cuisine.