How To Make Garlic Clams Spaghetti

Let’s take out some time to appreciate working moms. These women not only work but at the same time tend to their families. Motherly love is something different. They can easily cook for large families and parties. We can never know how they have such organizational skills. Today we have the perfect recipe for all types of moms. Working or not working.

The delicious garlic clam spaghetti is something you’ll find in a top-notch restaurant’s seafood menu. This recipe is perfect for forgetful people. If you are someone who starts to prep dinner when you start getting hungry. And you always keep your pantry stocked up. Then this recipe is for you.

This mouthwatering clam dish hardly takes 30 minutes to prep. Depending upon how quickly you can make the pot of water, boil. The main ingredients to this dish are olive oil, canned minced clams, its juice, parsley, white wine, lemon zest. Remember to add a hearty helping of garlic for the sauce. A smart trick is to prep the ingredients while you let the water come to a boil. And you prep the sauce while the spaghetti is cooking. Finally, you’ll be tossing everything in together to serve. Do you like your dishes fancy? Throw in some marinated artichokes or chopped olives.

How to Buy and Clean the Clams

We suggest that leaving the clams with their shells on doesn’t improve the dish. Not taste-wise at least. A simple way out of this is plucking the cooked clams from their shells and adding them to the pasta. Remember to keep a few clams with their shells on aside. This will later help you in the garnishing. Besides looking good, it also tells your guests that they’re eating real fresh clams. Just like the clams they’d get on any seafood menu. Not just some sauce out of a can. The process of shelling the clams makes this recipe longer. But once you know the taste difference between using shelled and unshelled clams. You would definitely consider shelling them for dishes.

To start off, you need to know your clams. Not in the context of befriending them but knowing about clams. You can try this recipe yourself using three different clams as we did. And choose the right one for yourself. Our suggestions are to use manila clams, cockles, or littlenecks. The two, manila clams and cockles are smaller than their littleneck versions. So, if you decide to remove the shells then smaller clams aren’t that big of a problem. As no one would be seeing their shells anyways. If you decide to keep the clams in their shells, then littlenecks are your way to go. All three of the species are pretty similar taste-wise. It’s just about your preference.

Secondly, another important step of cooking clams is to clean them thoroughly. This is to make sure that the clams are free from all sand and dirt that might be stuck in their shells. Never doubt the necessity of cleaning the clams. There is always dirt and sand hiding somewhere in them. And imagine, all that sand ending up in your pasta if you don’t clean them in the first place.

Cleaning the clams isn’t that difficult. Firstly, you have to let the clams stay in cold, salty water. The water should be salty enough like the sea which is approx. 3%. Take the clams out every 30 minutes. Change the water. Do this till there is no more sand or dirt seen in the bowl. This instance can be after the first cleaning or the fifth. It solely depends on the clams.

The last thing to make sure of is to discard dead clams. They are easy to identify. Just prod the open clams and the ones that don’t close even after consistent prodding. These are either dead or about to die. So it’s best to avoid such clams.

Garlic Clams with Spaghetti

While you cook this dish, almost all the alcohol will boil away leaving just the taste of it behind. If you still want to substitute the wine then you can use water along with a teaspoon of lemon juice. It would do it trick.

Put the water to boil and begin the preparation work while it’s coming to a boil.

The approximate cooking time of this dish is 30 minutes. This recipe serves 3 to 4 servings.

Ingredients

Salt for pasta water

8 ounces spaghetti (approx. ¾ pounds of pasta)

Pinch red chili pepper flakes

3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

3 – 4 cloves of garlic, minced

½ cup dry white wine

2 six-ounce cans of clams, minced, along with the liquid

2 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped

1 tsp lemon zest

Pinch freshly ground black pepper

Method

Firstly, place a large pot filled with salted water on the heat. Salted means one tbsp of salt for every quarter of water. Bring it to boil. While it is heating, prepare the parsley, garlic, and lemon zest.

Cook the spaghetti

First, add the spaghetti to the boiling water. Remember to set your timer 2 minutes less than the time of the recommendation. This is to ensure that your spaghetti remains firm.

Let the spaghetti cook in boiling water, uncovered. During the cooking of the spaghetti. You can prepare the clam sauce.

Sauté garlic, chili flakes

Now, heat the olive oil in a pan over medium flame. Next, add the red chili pepper flakes and the garlic that you minced earlier. Cook these for one minute to 30 seconds. Look for the garlic just about to brown and that’s when it’s ready.

Add wine, clam juice, reduce

Now it’s time to add the white wine to the pan. Following, open the cans of clams. Add the clams to the pan along with the clam juice in the cans.

Then, turn the flame up to high. This will cause the sauce to boil and reduce as the spaghetti cooks. To increase the speed of reduction, place the pan on the largest burner and turn up the heat.

Add chopped clams, parsley, lemon zest

As soon as the spaghetti is finishing its cooking, the sauce reduction should make it 2/3rds. The way to identify is that a quarter or one-third cup of liquid will be in the pan.

Now it’s time to throw in the chopped clams and bring it back to a simmer. Then add the chopped parsley and lemon zest and stir.

Toss cooked spaghetti with the clam sauce

Finally, when the pasta is cooked to firmness. Drain it and drop it in a serving bowl. Now, pour the sauce we prepared, over the spaghetti and toss it to mix. Sprinkle the dish with freshly ground black pepper and fresh chopped parsley. Bring home the taste of any restaurant’s seafood menu clams with our special dish.