Dreaming of that perfect, creamy cacio e pepe but keep getting clumps? Been there. Let’s figure it out together.
So you cooked pasta cacio e pepe. You followed the recipe down to the T, but the cheese turned out clumpy.
“Go figure,” you mumbled to yourself, pulling out your phone and hitting up the Internet for some answers. Luckily for you, you landed on this page—and we’ve got the scoop you’re looking for.
Keep reading to find out why cacio e pepe pasta gets lumpy, and what techniques you can use to prevent it from happening again.
Why Cacio e Pepe Turns Out Clumpy
If your cacio e pepe turned out clumpy, it’s probably because the cheese was too thickly grated, or it was exposed to too much heat when getting tossed with the pasta.
Cacio e pepe is all about using three ingredients to make an incredibly creamy sauce without any butter or cream. Those ingredients are hard Italian cheese, the salty and starchy pasta water, and black pepper.
Mix them right, and you’ll get the most decadent cheese sauce for your pasta. Mix them wrong, and you’ll end up with a clumpy, odd dish.
How to Prevent Cacio e Pepe From Turning Out Lumpy
Grate your cheese finely:
Chunky-grated cheese won’t melt as well as finely grated cheese, even if you’re doing everything else right with the sauce.
Grate the cheese on the finest side of the grater and watch out for chunks that might crumble and fall in the sauce. If they do, they won’t melt completely and will turn into lumps.
Use the right kind of cheese:
When your sauce only has three ingredients and one of them is cheese, you really can’t cut corners on the quality of the cheese.
Unfortunately, the stuff at the supermarket called “parmesan” isn’t always the real thing, especially if you’re in the United States where the term isn’t regulated.
Head to the Italian deli and pick up authentic cheese like Parmigiano-Reggiano, Grana Padano, or Pecorino Romano.
Tell the cashier at the counter you’re making cacio e pepe and ask for their suggestions; you’ll likely be happy with what they recommend.
Make the sauce away from the heat:
But there’s another factor that affects how your cacio e pepe pasta turns out—and that factor is heat. Many TV chefs and cookbook authors don’t emphasize its importance enough.
Cheese contains a lot of proteins, and those proteins can break down and clump up with too much heat.
It’s not at all that different from how you break an egg into a soup, and the proteins in the egg denature and coagulate to turn into egg drops. This is the opposite of what you want when making cheese sauce for your cacio e pepe.
If you try to make the sauce in the pot you boiled the pasta in, the residual heat of the pot might cause the cheese to become clumpy.
So do this instead: Make the sauce by mixing together grated cheese, a ladle or two of pasta water, and a generous amount of black pepper in a bowl.
When the pasta is done boiling, fish it out with a pasta fork and add another splash or two of pasta water if you need to thin the sauce a bit.
Grated cheese and pasta water don’t need additional cooking—they’re already safe to eat—so there’s no heat involved!
We’ve demonstrated this technique in our cacio e pepe recipe.
What to Do With Lumpy Cacio e Pepe
How can you salvage your lumpy cacio e pepe?
Unfortunately, if your cacio e pepe pasta turns out lumpy, all you can really do is suck it up and eat it.
Or… you can turn the pasta into an appetizer instead by giving Pennsylvania-based Italian marketplace DeLallo’s cheesy cacio e pepe pasta bites recipe a try.
Bottom Line
The reason for lumpy cacio e pepe? It’s always the cheese.
Cacio e pepe can turn out clumpy if you use cheap cheese, grate it too thickly, or if the cheese gets too hot when you’re making the sauce.
Do yourself a solid: buy quality cheese, use the smallest holes on your grater, and mix the sauce in a bowl away from any heat.
P.S. Don’t forget to buy good pasta! For our favorites, check out our list of the best Italian pasta brands.
