Have made this for years using the recipe in the magazine, but due to a recent move could no longer find the magazine and logged in here to get the recipe. Hate seeing the comment from 2 years ago about the cheese turning into a blob of playdough as there is a simple solution that should have been noted in the original recipe or suggested by staff in their response. I too had the playdough incident happen the first few times I made this grating the cheese with a microplane. You have to use one of the old school box graters that has the one side meant for hard cheeses--the little nobby round jagged things that turn the cheese into fine crumbs/powder. Then the recipe works perfectly. The problem is that most box graters these days have replaced that side with the super fine microplane, and that simply leaves the cheese in long (albeit fine) strips, and they coalesce into a glob in the water. But I searched on amazon and found one with the old school nobby round jagged side and purchased that for this recipe. Buy this and the sauce will turn out amazing.

Great! One of our faves. Even better with Guanciale.

Simple enough recipe but I botched the cheese sauce. May need to watch a video. I hand grated the pecorino w/ a micro plane and even weighed it out b/c I was halving the recipe. The cornstarch dissolved fine and cheese moistened, but once I put on heat and kept whisking, it remained in a giant blob. Turned up the heat hoping it might melt more, but no luck. Still tasted good. I like pepper, and cacio e pepe, but I do find it too salty. I never used to salt my pasta water but have started to out of peer pressure, lol. A tablespoon for half recipe the noodles was a lot, not to mention w/ the cheese. . . too salty for me. Like others, I would do more pancetta :-)

The cheese sauce came together ok but there was too much pepper and not enough pancetta and cheese. I’m going to double the pancetta next time, half the pepper, and try Parmesan.

This is the second time this happened. I shredded the cheese with a micro plane so it was very finely grated. Used Costco Romano cheese. Followed the directions and the cheese initially melted in the cornstarch water but as it sat waiting for the spaghetti to cook it all became a blob. Do I need to use a different cheese? Melt the cheese last?