Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

No amount of winning will save him if that transgression surfaces. 

At least he didn't email somebody a gay joke over a decade ago.

Lmao. Yeah....but he did kill a guy.....but the private email gay joke is worse imo. 

My family has always made it with butter.

Do you use olive oil instead?

There are 4 ingredients in cacio e pepe. Water, pasta, cheese, pepper. Butter and/or olive oil are cheating. Romans would bite their thumb at you, sir!

The key is that you need starchy pasta, cooked in barely enough water to cook the pasta, so that you end up with a VERY starchy water. That emulsifies the cheese into a sauce. Butter/olive oil shouldn't be necessary. 

(My actual recipe uses butter and olive oil. It's really hard to get enough starch with some Barilla or other grocery store brand pasta. But I'm looking to try it with starchy pasta from the Italian market next time and omit the cheater ingredients.)

There are 4 ingredients in cacio e pepe. Water, pasta, cheese, pepper. Butter and/or olive oil are cheating. Romans would bite their thumb at you, sir!

The key is that you need starchy pasta, cooked in barely enough water to cook the pasta, so that you end up with a VERY starchy water. That emulsifies the cheese into a sauce. Butter/olive oil shouldn't be necessary.

(My actual recipe uses butter and olive oil. It's really hard to get enough starch with some Barilla or other grocery store brand pasta. But I'm looking to try it with starchy pasta from the Italian market next time and omit the cheater ingredients.)

Yeah well the Italians are horrified at our Americanized abomination of "meat sauce" where we add meat to the red tomato sauces, but they can have my Sunday gravy when they pry it from my chubby, dead, American fingers.

A good friend is visiting from France now, he's a professor of mathematics who does work at Tech several months out of a year.  He says there isn't any "real French" food in the US.  I suspect there isn't any real Italian food either.  The Mexican restaurants are all authentic.

Anyway, he says the ingredients are just not the same here, and even French chefs tailor their cuisine to American tastes.  Our favorite French restaurant has a French chef and owners.  My wife likes it a lot, but she says it too is Americanized.  It's quite good and I probably lack the discernment to know.

We have some really good Italian places around us, and a new Persian restaurant is about to open up he street called Rumi's.

Future Openings - Rumi’s Kitchen (rumiskitchen.com)

Yeah I don't know.  We have several good French restaurants here in Austin, and they all taste authentic and comparable to what I've eaten during the many months I've spent working/living over there.

There are also plenty of Italian restaurants here that specialize in Italy-Italian, and they tend to focus by region.  What's common and popular in Tuscany isn't really anywhere close to what they eat in the South or in Sicily.  And the Ligurian coast has its own unique wine and cuisine.  What I've had at our local Tuscan-inspired restaurants is very true to what I had in that same region in Italy.

Americanized NY/NJ style Italian is something else entirely, but we all know it's not really true Italy-Italian food and I've never really heard anyone claim it to be such.

I suppose it's possible that my palate simply can't pick up the differences, but I also think that pride and nationalism come into play.  It's not all that different than a Texan claiming it's impossible for anyone outside of the state lines to make good BBQ.  In reality, I've had good BBQ as far away as Sunnyvale, CA.

Most people in America have never had Chinese food either. They've had American Chinese food, which is quite heavily different from Chinese food.

I think that's true but it's not necessarily because it's not available.  If you look around most large metropolitan areas, you can find authentic Chinese food.  I used to bring in my vendors from Foxconn, Compal, and some others, for week-long Quarterly Business Reviews.  They always liked to hit up the BBQ and Tex-Mex places, but they also always wanted to have one meal at this local Chinese place right next to our headquarters.  They loved it, and told me that it was very authentic.  They were often surprised because I told them just to order whatever they felt like, I wasn't afraid to try anything, and in general I liked all of it.

And tomatoes weren't even indigenous to Europe, they were brought back from South America by the Spanish, so the Italians can go jump in a lake if they think they own the only proper ways to use that particular food.

Now, if the Aztecs come along and tell me I'm doing it wrong, I might listen.