The egg yolks in this dish create a velvety sauce that coats each and every piece of pasta. Heat from the pasta cooks the yolks so that they're safe to eat, but you need to warm them up slowly or else they'll curdle and turn into scrambled eggs. How to do it? Add hot pasta cooking water to the egg yolks, a little bit at a time. This slowly raises the temperature of the yolks, gently cooking them. This technique is called "tempering".