Think Twice Before Ordering This Salt Bomb From An Italian Restaurant

Your average homemade or restaurant pasta is likely less salty than some of those unhealthy canned pastas you should avoid. Still, some pasta dishes lean heavy on sodium, and pasta carbonara is notorious for it. But is it actually that bad? We spoke to Jessica Montanelli, the Tuscan-born Italian food blogger at Cooking My Dreams, who gave us an in-depth explanation about this salty Roman pasta. Montanelli says that the ingredients in pasta carbonara are extremely salty, even if a well made plate of the stuff should taste balanced: "Real guanciale is quite salty, yes, plus pecorino cheese has quite some sodium in it. But if done well, the amount of sodium should be balanced in the remaining ingredients. In the end, it shouldn't taste salty."

Montanelli refers to the traditional main ingredients in the dish (besides the spaghetti). Guanciale is a type of pork which gets its name from the Italian word for cheek; it is, fittingly, a pig's cheek or jowl which has been heavily salted and preserved. Meanwhile, pecorino cheese comes from sheep's milk (It comes from the Italian word for sheep, as another fun fact) which is also heavily salted, and only tastes more salty as it ages. Plus, if you're comparing carbonara to pasta amatriciana, the carbonara variety also includes egg and goes lighter on the tomato, which further salts up the ingredients.

So what if you enjoy pasta carbonara but want to cut down on that saltiness just a little? When eating out, Jessica Montanelli says that a high-quality restaurant recipe won't overpower your palate with salt. "If the restaurant is good, they'll add no salt to the eggs, and less salt to the pasta water to balance it," she says. "You cannot remove the sodium from the dish once it's served." Asking for substitutions can be tricky because these salted ingredients are essential to the dish. One London restaurant even made news for canceling carbonara after constant modification requests made it impossible to prepare.

If you're making pasta carbonara at home, though, it's an entirely different story — and fairly easy to cut down on salt. Montanelli offers a few ideas for homemade carbonara, suggesting, "You could reduce the amount of salt in pasta water, and make sure to not add any more salt to the other ingredients." You could certainly switch to grilled pork or unsalted bacon as well. If you make too many substitutions then it may not really be pasta carbonara anymore, but you shouldn't let that stop you, necessarily. Compared to other types of pasta, carbonara is occasionally called an indulgent pasta because of all that egg and salt — but that doesn't mean you can't mess around with this mouth-watering Italian dish.