I’m glad that you shared this useful info with us. Please stay us informed like this. Thanks for sharing.

Good pork jowl bacon is cured and smoked. It has a briny taste similar to what you get from pancetta and guanciale. But more importantly, it renders all of that gooey cheek fat that flavors the pasta noodles so well.

I recommend using jowl bacon because it’s in every grocery store, at least in the south. It can be prohibitively difficult to find guanciale. And in the absence of pancetta, most people will rely on regular bacon as a substitute. So much supermarket bacon is flavored with sweet maple and sage flavors that don’t belong anywhere near carbonara.

Carbonara should be easy; pork jowl bacon makes it easy. I actually keep some square-trimmed jowl bacon in my freezer at all times and cut off frozen chunks whenever I need to season green beans, asparagus, potatoes, etc.

You can’t go wrong with pancetta or pork jowl bacon as a substitute for guanciale. There’s just not a very big difference. Plus, I think it’s as pretentious as you can get to run around an American grocery asking for meats in Italian.

If you want to get serious about authenticity/provenance, then the dish would be made with regular smoked bacon. Carbonara is a dish that came from American G.I.s selling their rations to Italians at the end of WWII and during the rebuilding process. The Italians claim the dish is representative of some mining tradition, but the facts don’t support that. After the war, when the Italian economy began to recover and regional trade resumed, they substituted guanciale for American-style bacon.

But like I said earlier, it doesn’t really make a difference whether you use pork jowl bacon, pancetta or guanciale. Carbonara is all about the marriage of egg and fat. And when in doubt, add more pepper and cheese.