Linguine with Clams

One night in Aruba we ate at an Italian restaurant called Gianni's with some of our friends who attended the wedding.  I ended up ordering a shrimp scampi pasta instead of their fettucine with clams, but I have been thinking about pasta with a white clam sauce ever since.  I actually went grocery shopping at Zabar's yesterday and came home with a pound of fresh linguine and told Alex that I demanded linguine with clams one night for dinner next week.  Today we went out to lunch at Mad for Chicken with some friends of ours in K-town (aka Koreatown) where I introduced everyone to Korean fried chicken.  For those of you who haven't had it, you are really missing out.  The skin is light and incredibly crispy, without all of the extra breading that Americans use.  And they serve it in one of two sauces - a sweet soy & garlic soy and a hot & spicy sauce.  Both sauces are delicious.  Anyway, back to the linguine.  So after we went to lunch we went grocery shopping at H-Mart (a Korean grocery store) and I saw some gorgeous little neck clams.  And the light said "linguine with clams for dinner tonight!"  Actually, these clams were so little that I was almost convinced they were cockles, but they would have been pretty huge for cockles and they were clearly clam shells.  Moving on.

I bought Mario Batali's Molto Gusto cookbook a few months ago and I have been rather obsessed with it ever since.  As I was explaining to Alex, this cookbook is so much more approachable than his other cookbooks, which often require esoteric ingredients and very labor-intensive preparations.  We made one of his pasta recipes from the Babbo Cookbook a few years ago and it took us about 4 hours to make the ragu, make the homemade pasta, and serve dinner.  Don't get me wrong - the meal was delicious.  But 4 hours?  Anyway, I have been eying the recipe for Linguine with Clams in Molto Gusto ever since I bought it.  We finally made it this evening and it was everything I hoped it would be.  One of the beauties of a good white clam sauce is that it is incredibly simple - you mix evoo, garlic, white wine, red pepper flakes, and parsley with some clams and some pasta and it's just wonderful.  The pasta is light and fresh, but very flavorful.  The linguine itself soaks up so much flavor from the sauce, and the clams remain nice and sweet, with a kick from the red pepper flakes.  Better yet?  Dinner was on in the table in 20-30 minutes!  And that included a quick salad of cherry tomatoes, fresh basil, sea salt and balsamic vinegar that I threw together, which incidentally was a perfect accompaniment to the pasta.

Recipe after the jump!

Linguine with Red Clam Sauce

Maybe pasta with red clam sauce isn't the classiest and most complicated of Italian dishes, but I have always had a thing for clam sauce - either white or red.  I actually prefer white clam sauce to red, but Alex requested pasta with red clam sauce this evening.  Then he dug up this recipe from Food & Wine, which I find mildly ironic after my post with the Carrot-Ginger soup where I blathered on for an entire paragraph about how we never make recipes from Food & Wine.  And here we are making a dish closely adapted from a Food & Wine recipe just a few days later.  Oh the irony.

This recipe isn't the best Linguine with Red Clam Sauce I have ever had, but it is easy and tasty.  It's also better than some restaurants' versions that I have tried.  All in all I would say this recipe is good, not great, but sometimes that is really what you are going for.  We changed the original recipe some to boost up the spice factor.  We also used one pound of fresh egg linguine, rather than using dried pasta.  In the future I might use dried pasta, rather than fresh, because it has more bite to it.  It's almost impossible to cook fresh pasta al dente, but some bite to the pasta would provide a nice textural contrast to the softness of the clams and stewed tomatoes.  I would probably also add some cockles to the pasta in addition to the canned clams, in order to increase the quantity of clams/cockles in the sauce and to give the sauce some variety.  After all, if canned clams make the sauce tasty, fresh cockles could only make it better.  Fresh cockles would obviously add another level of complexity to the dish, but a little complexity never hurt anyone. 

Recipe after the jump!