Zucchini Cacio E Pepe

Caccio E Pepe literally means cheese and Pepper in Italian. These two simple ingredients when meshed with spaghetti offers you a sophisticated and well-seasoned dish. Not all cheeses are made equal, so the cheese of choice here is Pecorino Romano. More on the cheese later. A few weeks ago, I received a review copy of the cookbook, the Vegetarian Reset and this recipe is inspired and adapted from the cookbook. There are a lot of fun recipes using vegetable noodles aka zoodles and cauliflower rice. This particular one, seemed so easy and doable. It works so well with my better for you goals, so I have played with this enough to make it mine. And here you get Zucchini Cacio e Peppe

Making the Zucchini Work

Whether you want this to feel like pasta or just a fun and elegant take on zucchini, you need to get the texture right. Zucchini is a watery vegetable, so giving it a high heat sear with garlic does wonders for it.

It will release some water. I toss it a bit of half and half and finally the cheese. Essentially using the zucchini and garlic liquid to form its own sauce. By the way, here is a cacio e pepe recipe that we make with shrimp and pasta.

About the cheese

Traditionally Cacio E Pepe is made with Pecorino Romano, a sheep milk cheese that is saltier and aged less than Parmesan. My son loves Parmesan so drawing inspiration from the original recipe, I use a mixture of both. A note here is that, the cheeses make this quite salty. I strongly recommend not adding any extra salt. But that is me. You taste and try this and decide how you want to handle it. The cheese is tossed in and the zucchini is stirred until it melts. And then we have lot of black pepper!

All in all, you have a show stopping dish for all seasons.