What's the difference between bacon and pancetta?

• 20 sizzling bacon and pancetta recipes (including Rachel Khoo's recipe, above)

Are bacon and pancetta interchangeable? L. Williams

It depends on how willing you are to compromise. There is no substitute for rashers of crisp, golden streaky bacon clamped between two slices of well-buttered soft white bread, accompanied by a runny fried egg and generously soused in White Crow tomato sauce. Try doing that with pancetta, and it's not the real deal. Conversely, a carbonara made with bacon is fine for share-house meals, but that's about it. Both are made with pork belly. Factory bacon is made by injecting a solution of salt, sugar, flavour enhancers, starch, and, in some circumstances, liquid pork protein and smoke flavour. Some bacon is then smoked. Factory bacon can be as much as 14 per cent water by weight. Pancetta is made by rubbing pork bellies with salt and perhaps some spices. The bellies are left for a week, during which time moisture is drawn from the flesh and some of the salt absorbed into the meat. The salt is then washed off, the bellies rolled and then hung to air dry for a month or so. During this time, some protein breaks down and turns into amino acids, which act as natural flavour enhancers. Pancetta has less moisture than bacon and is quite a deal saltier. Order thick slices from the delicatessen, chop into cubes, and fry off in a little oil to start slow-cooked dishes where they act like nature's stock cubes.

​I was watching a celebrity chef use some pasta water in their sauce. What does it do? G. Jeffers

It's all about the starch that has leached from the pasta into the cooking water. When heated in water, the starch particles absorb water and swell up and soften in a process called gelatinisation. Italian home cooks have, for a long time, spooned in some of this starchy water to the pasta sauce to change the mouthfeel, giving the sauce a smoother texture. Sometimes chefs will undercook their pasta by several minutes, drain the pasta, reserving the water, and then adding a considerable amount of the pasta water to the sauce. They then finish cooking the pasta in the sauce, during which time the pasta absorbs some of the sauce, thus thickening it. Italian cookery icon Marcella Hazan comments that the process, "imparts the same tedious, faintly gelatinous texture to what otherwise have been fresh and lively sauces. When used occasionally, it is to impart a special consistency to a dish. When the practice becomes routine, it ends by being boring." She likes the technique when used with seafood sauces when the salty liquor released by shellfish is absorbed by the pasta.

Letters

Recently we discussed omitting egg from burger and meatloaf recipes where it is used as a binder. One reader, A. Brearley, writes, "another alternative is to use 'flax egg'. This is a binding agent that sees one tablespoon flax meal mixed with 2.5 tablespoons of water. Cover and place in fridge for 30 minutes, then simply mix into anything which requires an egg to bind. Works a treat."

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