Seafood tagliatelle is a classic in italian cuisine. Despite how complicated it looks, it can really adapt to the amount of time (and willpower) you’ve got on your hands. If you want to do everything from scratch, then it’s a quite tiring (but rewarding) challenge. If you can give it very little effort, will still turn out great and yummy, but it won’t consume your weekend and your dish soap as much. But once you have this lovely dish in front of you, trust me, you will not be able to avoid smiling.
As you can imagine, I went all in, and I made everything from scratch, even the fish stock… Well, almost everything; I did not fish my seafood!!
There’s a lovely recipe for seafood stock here, which is the one I used for this recipe. You can use your own or buy it at your local fishmonger. Either is equally fine.
Let’s start cooking.
List of Ingredients
For the pasta:
eggs, 2 medium (preferably rich yolk type)
pasta flour (“00”), 200gr
water, as needed
For the salsa:
yellow onion, 1/2 (around 70gr)
garlic clove, 2 small
olive oil, 1tbsp
smoked paprika, 1/4 tsp
tomato paste, 1tbsp
fish stock, 300gr
seafood mix, frozen, 500gr
parsley, 10gr
chives, 10 gr
Servings
3 people, as a main
Method
First off, start preparing your pasta dough (skip this process if you have fresh store-bought pasta on hand). In a bowl combine flour and eggs and start mixing them. When it starts coming together, transfer onto a working surface and knead to form a smooth dough ball. Add a little water at a time if the mix looks dry or it’s difficult to work properly. Set aside in the fridge, covered, for 15-20 minutes.
Heat up a heavy-bottom pan on a medium heat, and add the oil. Finely dice the onion and garlic and add to the pan. Cook on a low heat for 5-10 minutes until the mix softens and becomes translucent. Add the paprika and the tomato paste and cook for another 2-3 minutes. Add the stock to stop the sauce from catching at the bottom, and switch off the heat. Why? After this, the cooking process it’s going to be rather fast, and the timing needs to be just right, so you need to make sure you got all your components ready before proceeding.
Roll the pasta dough on a lightly floured surface into a 2mm thick sheet. If you have the pasta machine with a tagliatelle attachment (like I do), then go ahead, now it’s the time to use it. Otherwise, dust some flour over the pasta sheet, roll it lengthwise, and slice it up into 0.5-1cm strips. Unroll the strips, fluff them up with a generous dust of flour so they don’t stick together and set aside.
Bring a pot of water to a boil, and in the meantime start the heat on the sauce as well. When it starts to simmer, toss in the seafood mix (defrosted), and cook for 2-3 minutes, until the seafood looks opaque, but it’s still soft to the touch (seafood can overcook and get tough easily, so be careful!)
When the water comes to a boil, gently pour in the tagliatelle, and cook for 1 minute or even less. Immediately transfer into the pan with the sauce, and take off the heat. Let it stew for a couple of minutes, so the tagliatelle can finish cooking and absorb the juices of the sauce. Garnish with finely chopped chives and parsley, serve and…
BON APPÉTIT!