Does Adding Mayo to Pasta Make a Quick-Fix Carbonara? Here's What Our Test Kitchen Says

This New York food influencer is promoting mayo in pasta as a late-night hangover cure.

Is there one particular ingredient that makes a carbonara a carbonara? What makes drunken noodles drunken noodles? Is midnight pasta the ultimate hangover cure? These are the questions flooding one food influencer's comments on an Instagram Reel featuring her "perfect drunk food."

New York City recipe developer Emily Eggers, aka @legallyhealthyblonde, posted a video sharing her go-to recipe for a "big bowl of salty, carby noodles" to make after a night out with her 100,000 followers—and people have thoughts.

"This midnight pasta is perfect for when you’ve had a few too many drinks, and it might be midnight, and you need to sober up," she says in the voiceover of her video as she tosses some noodles into a bowl of salted boiling water. "It’s so easy. You don’t have to chop anything at all. It’s just boxed pasta, soy sauce, kewpie mayonnaise, a little bit of parmesan cheese, butter, salt, and pepper. So freaking good.”

Related: 16 Easy Pasta Recipes You’ll Have on the Table in Just 20 Minutes

Can you guess the ingredient that's creating a bit of a controversy? That’s right: the Kewpie mayonnaise. The comments are full of people arguing over whether or not using mayo basically makes the dish into a carbonara.

“People who are hating on the mayo don’t know what mayo is made of," one user commented. "Mayo is actually a genius addition to this, it’s drunk girl carbonara."

“Y’all realize mayo is literally just egg, oil and vinegar…. Which are all pretty much aspects of a carbonara,” another said.

But other commenters weren’t fully buying it: “Italy is not ok with that. Sorry,” one wrote.

Eggers said she was “prepared to defend the mayo in the pasta” in the comments, and Better Homes & Gardens Test Kitchen culinary specialist Emily Neinhaus said while she originally thought it was “wild,” she’s “kind of into it.”

Related: Cozy Spaghetti Noodle Recipes You’ll Want to Make On Repeat

“On principle, this is similar to carbonara, but flavor-wise what she made will be quite different,” Neinhaus says. “The main difference is that the soy sauce adds a level of umami to the dish, and one of the main elements in carbonara is the pancetta or bacon flavor. This mayo pasta seems much easier to stir together as well. As far as eating this goes, it sounds pretty good; the amount of saltiness works great for nursing a hangover.”

If you can't decide if this is a genius idea or kind of gross, it could be your newest drunken snack craving—and finding that is worth taking a risk.

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