So I tried making a recipe from Imgur for Cacio e Pepe. I haven't failed so hard in the kitchen in quite awhile. "Easy" and "simple" were some damn dirty lies.

I have an understanding of where I went wrong in the process, but I can't really undo the mistake. My cheese wasn't grated finely enough, so instead of melting into the water to form a sauce, it instead clumped together into a large gooey mass that stuck to the bottom of the pot and fused into a thick hard brown layer under the pasta. Trying to stir the pasta/cheese around and adding more water didn't really help; the cheese just glommed onto the utensils I was using. It was like swirling a stick around a cotton candy machine, if the cotton candy was a wad of cheese.

Anyway, I stood there stirring it for... oh... probably at least fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, to try to get it to melt. It never fully melted. Eventually I just gave up. Tried eating some of it, and it was edible, but not great. The poster wasn't kidding about it being filling, though. I had maybe 3/4 cup of the pasta and then I was done for the night. Or well, done eating.

It took me well over an hour to clean the pot. :( Fifteen minutes with a scrubby sponge at first, making exactly 0% progress, before I tried finding something that was abrasive to use. All I could find was dishwasher detergent powder. Figured it wouldn't hurt to try, so I poured some of that in and scrubbed more. Still no effect. Poured some white vinegar in, because that can be a good cleaner. Nope, no dice. At that point I realized that I did not have adequate tools for the job, and so I left the pot to soak and went out to the grocery store to get some steel wool. They didn't have plain steel wool, only SOS pads, so I just got some of those. Went back to the house, scrubbed with an SOS pad for twenty minutes, made some headway! I got almost half of the hardened cheese layer off. Arm was getting tired though, and the sink was covered in blue SOS soap goop. I decided to try a different tactic and poured enough vinegar into the pot to cover the cheese layer, then put it on the stove and boiled it for awhile. That actually disintegrated the majority of the cheese that was left, which was nice. I scrubbed away the last bit with a second SOS pad afterwards.

All in all, the whole thing probably took me closer to two hours, but I shaved down my time estimate because I did spend a bit of time in the grocery store looking at other things, so I figured that didn't count towards the cleaning.

Man, though, what an ordeal. On the bright side, I felt VERY accomplished when that pot was finally clean.

After I finally went back upstairs I looked up the recipe elsewhere on the internet and it seems that a lot of people have similar troubles with it, so I felt a bit less embarrassed about how badly it went. Serious Eats (which has never let me down) ran through some good tips on how to do it right and was more specific about all the steps than that random person on Imgur. Too bad I was too lazy to do more research before attempting the recipe. T_T

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