Seafood Spaghetti or Spaghetti ai Frutti di Mare: A Step-by-Step Guide

My family favourite spaghetti dish has always made everybody to reiterate: “This is very nice. Delicious, mum!” And just after one forkful, our imagination starts traveling to those exotic places with emerald sea waters and golden sandy beaches, where we tasted this dish for the first time in our lives: Sardinia. So let your sophisticate palate enjoy and… start dreaming!

Allow me, now, to tell you something less sentimental, kind of useful to students or young independent people with no much time... or no much money! Obviously, the fresher the seafood you can find at the fishmonger, the better taste you’ll get in this Seafood Spaghetti dish, but that could be expensive! There is a solution: it can be prepared with frozen seafood (forgive me those who don’t agree). Some of the best supermarkets in the UK offer very good ones and, trust me, when you don’t have a lot of time to spend cooking, but you fancy sea food, this is a good option as you don’t have to do more than add it to the pan!

Seafood Spaghetti or spaghetti ai frutti di mare

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Good to know

Seafood in English and frutti di mare in Italian: same thing, different linguistic ways for describing it. And different thinking indeed! English language came out with a practical word: seafood, which is pretty much straightforward in the concept: the food of the sea, it grows in the sea, it's part of the Animalia Kingdom and therefore part of the food chain. Italian language thinks in a different way, in a sort of charming way, showing appreciation for the productivity of the sea: frutti di mare = fruits of the sea. It's like describing 'the labour' that the sea have producing such delicacies, just like a tree produces, with a long and hard work, its sweet and juicy fruits.

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Ingredients 4 servings

1. Spaghetti no. 3 or no.5, 500 g

2. Vongole (small clams), 200 g

3. Mussels, 200 g

4. Tiger prawns or red prawns, 200 g

5. Squids, 2

6. Scallops, cut in half,  200 g

7. Tomatos on the branch, chopped, 2 or 3

8. Dried peperoncino chilli,crushed, 2

9. Parsley, chopped, 2 tbsp

10. Garlic cloves, crushed, 2

11. White wine, 1 glass

12. Extra virgin olive oil, 2 tbsp

13. Salt and pepper

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Let’s jump to the method

1. Get ready all ingredients.

2. To clean the clams and get rid of the sand inside, rinse and put them in a sea salted cold water container. Let them purge for 6 hours or more. Rinse again and put apart.

3. Do as at point 2 for the mussels too. Then, clean the shells one by one grinding them with a knife or with a brush for food to get rid of the surface impurities. Pull out the cord trapped between the two shells. Rinse again and put apart.

4. Wash the prawns and the squids. Clean the squids completely of their interiors.

5. Cut the squids in rounds and each rounds in half.

6. Half the scallops too.

7. Put the mussels and the clams in different pots to start cooking once they’re ready and clean. Cover the pots and, without water, let both mussels and clams open. It will take roughly 5 minutes. Throw away the ones that don’t open. Discard 3/4 of the shells and put apart the mollusc: with the remaining ones, you will decorate the dish at the end. Some water will form from them while cooking: filter it and keep it for later.

8. In a wide pan, sautée the prawns in olive oil. Then, sautée the scallop. Put all apart.

9. In the same pan, add 2 more tbsp of olive oil, warm it up and add the crushed garlic.

10. Take out the garlic, then add to the pan all of the sea food you have prepared.

11. Add the chopped tomatoes, the chopped parsley, the filtered water from the clams and mussels, a glass of white wine, the crushed peperoncino chilli, salt and peper at your taste. Let the wine alcohol evaporate. Remember: you can still add salt at any time, so don’t overdo to start with.

12. Half cover with a lid and cook for 10 minutes at low heat.

13. Get ready a pot of water big enough for 500 gr of spaghetti and bring to a boil. Ideally, for every 100 g of pasta you should use 1 litre of water and 10 g of salt for each litre.

14. When boiling, add the salt and the pasta. Follow the cooking time instructions written in the package of the pasta. Don’t forget that the best pasta, should be “a lenta essicazione”, meaning slow drying when produced, which should be written in the package.

15. Once ready, transfer the pasta into a capacious serving bowl, add the seafood and all its juices and, if needed, some water of the pasta.

16. Decorate with the shells you put apart.

17. Serve and… buon appetito with Seafood Spaghetti or Spaghetti ai frutti di mare!

Seafood Spaghetti