An ideal dish for autumn evenings. Fresh clams make this dish superior but also raise cost and preparation time
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 3 € pp)
- Salt
- 320 g spaghetti
- 8 roasted cherry tomatoes, cut in halves
- 8 roasted unpeeled garlic cloves
- EV olive oil
- 1 pepperoncino
- 1 tin of clams
- 16 capers
- 1 slice of stale bread
- Fresh thyme or fresh mint
- Lemon zest
I will NEVER, NEVER, NEVER stop saying that every time you turn on your oven and you use gas or electricity, you must take advantage of the existing heat and roast garlic, fresh onions, cherry tomatoes, leeks, or whatever you want and then conserve it in your fridge.
This way you will always have some vegetables ALREADY made and available for a quick pasta or risotto.
That´s what I do. Whenever, I use my oven to bake bread, I also roast some veggies.
Clams in tins are a dignified solution for quick pasta sauces. OK, they don´t have the taste of fresh clams, they also do not have valves, which make the dish visually more attractive, but with just 4 euros (that’s the cost of a good quality tin) we can add some shellfish in our dish and give to it an umami “push”.
If we have the veggies already roasted, the dish can be prepared very quickly.
First of all we put the clams and the capper flowers for 15 min in fresh water to remove the “industrial” taste of their brine.
During this time we boil the spaghetti, al dente of course, we toast the bread and when cold we turn it to very fine crumbs. Meanwhile, in a pan we heat the oil with the pepperoncino.
One minute before the spaghetti boiling time expiration, we discard the pepperoncino and we add the clams and the capers without their liquid or water, the cherry tomatoes and the garlic cloves.
We add the pasta in the pan, we “mantecate” for a while with some boiling water and then we put in plates decorating with the breadcrumbs, the fresh herbs and the lemon rind.
