Calamarata with canned tuna, cherry tomatoes, garlic, salted anchovies, arugula, dried chillies, lemon juice, cracked black pepper and olive oil

One of our firm favourites.

An explosion of flavors.

Usually we would make it with long pasta. Something like spaghetti or even linguine.

This time we opted for calamarata and it works beautifully with the rest of the ingredients.

Soupier or drier is the question here. We went for the soupier version because the "sauce" was incredibly delicious.

Risottato as the cooking technique of choice today. Of course you can cook it the classic way with pasta in a separate pot and combine with the rest ar the last stage.

What that means (risottato) is you cook the pasta in a little bit of boiling water and add additional amounts of water when the pasta takes it in, ladle by ladle. Like you would do when preparing a risotto. That way you keep ALL THE STARCH INSIDE and make a great "sughetto". It produces IMHO a superior effect compared to just adding a few spoons of pasta cooking water to loosen up the sauce, right in the end.

Risottato works great with robust pasta shapes. It doesn't perform well with delicate pasta types from our experience (it just overwhelms it). Rigatoni, tortiglioni, mezze maniche or today's calamarata is the way to go about things while doing risottato. Just make sure the pasta doesn't stick to the bottom of the cooking pot because there isn't a lot of water in the pot at any time. Moderate heat and a silicon spatula to gently work the pasta. Or a classic wooden cooking spoon. We use both, interchangeably.

YouTube offers a lot of italian cooking videos that deal with cooking pasta risottato style, a technique born out of necessity where water wasn't abundent and is slowly growing in popularity the last 25 years.

A link from a roman cook, Luciano Monosilio, in the comment section will provide further information about this and other pasta cooking techniques. Five of them, all in all.

Used INGREDIENTS were:

– 250 g of calamarata pasta

– 1 can of tuna in olive oil

– 1 very small bulb of garlic

– 2 tiny african dried chillies, very potent

– 4 salted anchovy fillets

– 100 g of fresh arugula

– 4 spoons of olive oil

– a drizzle of fresh lemon juice

– 200 g of cherry tomatoes

– cracked black pepper (provides a different kind of heat to chillies)

PREPARATION while utilising risottato pasta cooking style:

1st cooking pot -> high heat -> bring 1 liter of water to a rolling boil

2nd bowl (not for cooking) -> add fresh arugula -> add the caned tuna, flake it out a bit with a fork

3rd cooking pot -> low heat -> add anchovies -> add garlic cloves sliced lengthwise -> let the anchovies melt and fry the garlic WITHOUT color for a couple of minutes -> add dried crumbled chillies -> add the pasta -> add boiling water from the 1st pot, laddle by laddle until it evaporates -> add some salt (be careful with salt because of the anchovies) -> add the halved cherry tomatoes -> when the pasta is al dente add it to the contents of the 2nd bowl -> mix gently -> add a drizzle of fresh lemon juice -> toss everything in the bowl -> plate up (2nd picture)

So delicious and rich in aromas!😋