Restaurant Recipes: Brown Crab Cacio e Pepe from Manteca

After spending five minutes with chef Chris Leach, it became clear that Cacio e pepe was a firm favourite at Manteca, his bustling Italian-inspired nose-to-tail restaurant in Shoreditch. But it isn’t quite the version you’d find in Rome.

The dish is said to date back to Roman shepherds, who relied on its few hardy and long-lasting ingredients – pecorino, black pepper, and dried pasta – on their lengthy seasonal migrations. At its core, it's all about getting the emulsion right, with the starchy pasta water binding everything into this thick, glossy sauce. It was a trip to California that got Chris thinking about a different kind of emulsion. Struck by the inventive flavour combinations he found there, he rethought how he was using brown crab in more traditional pasta dishes and wondered, instead, what would happen if he folded it into cacio e pepe. The result is rich and full of flavour, with a hint of the sea running through the Italian classic, and here’s how to whip it up at home. 

Manteca's Crab Cacio e Pepe Recipe

INGREDIENTS

Serves around 4 people

• 100g brown crab meat (at the restaurant they blitz the crab meat into a very smooth paste, this makes the sauce velvety. If you can’t blitz it, it won’t be an issue, it will just be a slightly coarser texture)  
• 50g of butter  
• 20 cracks of fresh black pepper (about 5g)  
• 400g of dried pasta – a short pasta like rigatoni or spaghetti works very well   
• 80g grated grana Padano  
• 1 lemon 

METHOD

• Put a large pot of water on to boil, when it boils add enough salt so it tastes like a highly seasoned soup. Cook the pasta for about a minute less than the packet instructions.  

• While the pasta is cooking, toast the freshly ground pepper in a large pan over a medium heat. When you can start to smell the aromatics of the pepper, add the butter and a generous splash of pasta water (about 100ml) and let it all boil into an emulsion.    

• Add the brown crab meat and mix until it is homogenised. Remove from the heat until the pasta is nearly done.

• When the pasta is ready, strain and add to the sauce. Put on a medium high heat until the sauce begins to boil then take it off the heat. Add the grated cheese, tossing until evenly distributed. Season with lemon and salt until it tastes good to you.    

• Distribute among four plates and finish with a crack of fresh black pepper on each.

Basta.