petepete

I used this advice from Reddit, but also cooked it in a big skillet so the water would be extra starchy. OK! after ages of trying to make this correctly, and running into every problem in the book, i finally made it perfectly a couple days ago. here's what i did! maybe it will help you troubleshoot.
grate some cheese fine with your microplane into a big bowl and set aside.
almost cook your pasta but not quite all the way. reserve some of the water, you don't need a lot. for one person you only need maybe 1/4-1/2 of a cup.
add pepper and butter to the pasta pan, cook until pepper is fragrant. dump the pasta back in with some of the water, and cook it a bit more until the pasta is basically done. if it needs more water, add some more.
take the pasta and dump it into that bowl w/ the cheese. stir it a bunch really fast, and add in more cheese slowly in small amounts while continuing to vigorously stir.
it can hold quite a bit of cheese, but i've found that adding it all at once is di