Quorn Carbonara

39/70


And so, this classic pasta dish has never been one of my favourites, nor one of my husbands. For some reason creamy pasta sauces are not really too appealing to me and I also tend to avoid them because of the fat content, but in the name of this experiment I this week decided the time was nigh to confront the carbonara.


The quorn in this recipe can be either ham or bacon cut into strips. I chose to use the bacon and it was the first time I had used this particular quorn product, I have to say we were mighty impressed with it and it managed to eradicate a very bad memory from years ago of the last time we tried any kind of veggie bacon (think pink cardboard). It stays a nice texture even when fried off and tastes of a lovely smoky bacon flavour - it worked really well in this dish.


I have to say the pair of us were very pleasantly surprised by this pasta dish and enjoyed it way more than we were expecting to. I loved the fact that this is a very quick dish to create and from start to finish it took me around the predicted 20 minutes. I opted to use low fat creme fraiche and that also cut the fat - it came out lower in points than I was expecting too - so all round a success!


This is the carbonara in the pan as I was stirring through the sauce at the end:

And this is the dish served:

You can see that I used tagliatelle rather than the suggested spaghetti, this was simply because I had a packet of fresh tagliatelle in the fridge but I think it works well with this creamy sauce as there is more surface area for it to stick to.


The recipe is simple although I did not follow the suggested timings due to using fresh rather than dried pasta. Firstly you saute off the bacon/ham strips until they are slightly coloured (I did this using low fat oil spray to avoid extra points while boiling water for the pasta), then you make the sauce by combining the creme fraiche, grated hard cheese (I used grana padano), eggs, nutmeg and some black pepper. Once the pasta is cooked you simply drain it, put it back in the hot pan and stir through both the bacon and the sauce. 


The heat of the pan and the pasta cooks the raw egg in the sauce so you do not need to worry about this, it leaves you with a silky, creamy sauce and with the quorn bacon it really does capture the classic carbonara flavours.


In terms of weight watchers points, each portion is worth only 13 points which is pretty low considering the style of dish and the creamy sauce. This is broken down as follows: pasta (6), creme fraiche (2), quorn (2), cheese (2), egg (1).


We gave this dish 7/10 which is higher than I was expecting it to score, I will likely make it again aswell because it was actually very tasty and lower in points than I thought. Nice one quorn!