I was in the lovely town of Praiano on the Amalfi Coast recently for a family wedding. There I discovered a rather thick semi-long fresh pasta called scialatielli, served with a delicious sauce of lobster simmered in fresh tomato. It was a most memorable meal, made even more special by the gorgeous view…

Scialatielli are the brain child of chef Enrico Cosentino of Il Buco restaurant in Sorrento back in the 1970s. In recent years they’ve become a mainstay on restaurant menus throughout the Sorrentine Peninsula and popular in the wider Naples area. In typical southern Italian style they’re made with durum wheat flour but, very atypically, the flour is mixed not with water but with milk and egg, and flecked with minced basil.

Scialatielli have an appealing tender yet chewy texture and a rather unique flavor. They lend themselves to all sorts of sauces, but classically you serve them con frutti di mare—with mixed seafood sauce—which you can make “red” or “white” (with or without tomato) or as here, something in between, with a few fresh cherry tomatoes.

Do be aware that, like bucatini, scialatielli are a messy pasta. Since they’re thick and not quite long enough to twirl properly with a fork, the sauce tends to splatter on you when you eat them. According to a Neapolitan friend of mine, that’s what makes them fun to eat.

I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. Do take care and be prepared to do some extra laundry. And don’t let that deter you. if you ask me, the mess is well worth it.

Ingredients

For the scialatielli:

400g (14 oz) semola rimacinata, finely ground semolina flour
30 g (1 oz) grated pecorino or parmigiano-reggiano cheese, or 50:50 mix of both
2 eggs
150ml (5 fl oz) milk, or as much as you need to form a soft, pliable dough
2 Tbs olive oil
Salt and pepper
3-4 basil leaves, finely minced

For the seafood sauce:

350 g (12 oz) shrimp, shelled
500g (1 lb) unshelled mussels
12 unshelled clams
350g (12 oz) cherry or grape tomatoes, cut in half
2-3 cloves of garlic, peeled and slightly crushed
olive oil
salt
A few sprigs of parsley, finely minced and reserving the stems

Optional:

A hot red pepper

Directions

Make your scialatielli

In a standing mixer, add the flour, forming a well in the middle. Then add the rest of the dough ingredients except for milk into the well. Mix at a medium-high speed, drizzling in enough milk until the mixture forms a ball. Continue for another 5 minutes to knead the dough.

Remove the dough from the bowl of the standing mixer and place it on a well floured board. Using well floured hands, knead the dough ball by hand until perfectly smooth, elastic dough. It should be soft but not sticky.

Cover the dough tightly with plastic wrap and let it rest for 30 minutes.

Divide the dough into halves and roll out each half into a sheet about 3 mm (1/6 inch) thick. [NB: This corresponds to Setting 2 or 3 on most pasta machines.] Cut the sheets into roughly 12-15 cm (5-6 inch) lengths, then cut each resulting sheet into strips no wider than 1 cm (1/3 inch).

Flour the strips well and set on a floured surface until needed.

Prepare the seafood sauce

Place your clams and mussels in a pot, along with a splash of white wine. Cover and simmer over a lively flame just until their shells have opened.

Remove the clams and mussels from the pot and, when they are cool enough to handle, shell them. (You can leave a few unshelled for decoration.)

In a large skillet, sauté the garlic along with the parsley stems (and, if using, the hot red pepper) gently in abundant olive oil until fragrant and just beginning to brown around the edges. Remove and discard the garlic and parsley stems, along with red pepper if used.

Pour in the juices from the clams and mussels, making sure to leave any sediment in the pot. Let the juices cook off until well reduced.

Now add the tomatoes and simmer for a couple of minutes, until they’ve softened. Add the shrimp and toss just until they cooked through, then add the shelled clams and mussels. Turn off the heat but keep warm.

Cook and dress the pasta

Bring a large pot of well salted water to the boil. Add the scialatelli and cook until ever so slightly undercooked, 3-4 minutes depending on their thickness.

Transfer the scialatelli to the skillet with the seafood and mix over gentle heat until the sauce clings to the pasta.

Serve immediately, sprinkled with more finely minced parsley and, if using, topped with the reserved unshelled clams and mussels.

Notes

To make your scialatielli, all the tips in our post on making fresh egg pasta apply. I’d just add that in my recipe testing, perhaps due to the unusual dough mixture, I found the dough had a tendency to break.

The way to avoid this is to make sure your dough is well kneaded, which will develop the gluten in the flour and strengthen the dough. Also, make sure that the dough is well hydrated, erring on the side of more liquid rather than less. While this may produce a slightly stickier dough, that shouldn’t be a problem so long as you keep the dough well dusted with flour as you roll it and cut it into strips. NB: Tell tale signs your dough is too dry: if it’s hard to knead (the dough should be quite soft to the touch) and develops ragged edges when you roll it out.

And now, here’s a special treat. Chef Cosentino himself showing you how to prepare scialatielli:

Scialatielli are one of the easier fresh pastas to make at home. That said, if you don’t feel up to it, there are alternatives. In Italy, in particular in the Naples area, you can easily find scialatielli, both fresh and dry, in supermarkets. Elsewhere, you can find them online. In the US, they’re sold on amazon.com. But be aware that commercially sold scialatielli are just your basic durum wheat pasta in the shape of scialatielli. Nice but not the same.

Choosing and prepping your seafood

For this dish—and pasta dishes in general—you want to use the smallest round clams you can find. In Italy the clams used for pasta are quite small, with thin shells. Large clams make for awkward eating on pasta if left unshelled, and their flesh is less sweet and tender than smaller ones. Here in the US, the smallest clams you will find most places are called ‘littlenecks’. Even if they’re larger and heavier than Italian clams, go with them.

Both clams and mussels can contain sediment. There are two schools of thought for dealing with it. The one I’m following in this recipe is to steam the clams and mussels in a separate pot and leave their sediment behind as you remove them and their juices. This works fine if your mollusks are relatively sediment free.

The other, which I’d recommend if your mollusks have heavy sediment, is to purge them of their sediment by soaking them in water which you’ve salted generously, preferably with sea salt. Recommended soaking times vary enormously, but 20-30 minutes would be an absolute minimum, with many recipes calling for an hour and some even 2-3 hours, with changes of water.

All depends, of course, on just how much sediment is inside. This is hard to tell without opening your mollusks, but heaviness is a tell-tale sign.

Of course, if you have the time, you could use a ‘belt and suspenders’ approach and do both.

Mussels, especially the wild ones, sometimes come with a ‘beard’. There is the cluster of filaments the mussel used to cling to whatever surface they lived on. They are easily trimmed off with a paring knife.

Variations

Take the dimensions for scialatielli given here—3mm thick, 1 cm wide and 12-15 cm long—as a guide. There’s no need to stress too much. Chef Cosentino himself says you play around with the dimensions of scialatielli to suit your own tastes. The thickness in particular can vary from recipe to recipe, anywhere from 3mm to 5mm. In my own recipe testing, I found 4-5mm (which corresponds to Setting 1 on my pasta machine) just a bit too thick and chewy for my taste. Setting 2 or even 3 turned out scialatielli much more pleasing—and closer to the scialatielli I enjoyed so much in Italy,

The ingredients for the dough don’t vary much, but most recipes you’ll find call for only 1 egg for 400g of flour. As you can see in the video Chef Consentino uses 2 eggs, so I’m going with the master.

As mentioned at the top, like many seafood pasta dishes, scialatielli ai frutti di mare can be made with or without tomato. The dish I enjoyed in Praiano was dressed with a full on tomato sauce in which the lobster was simmered. If you want to go that route, just substitute peeled canned tomatoes or passata for the cherry tomatoes, and double the measurement given here.

You can also add calamari to the seafood mix—in which case you can call your dish scialatielli allo scoglio. Add the cut up calamari to the pot right after you’ve sautéed the garlic. Let them simmer along with the juice from the clams and mussels until they are tender. If you are using baby calamari, this should only take perhaps 5-10 minutes, older calamari can take up to 15-30 minutes. Add water or white wine as needed to keep things moist. Then proceed with the cherry tomatoes.

Using a seafood mix

Admittedly the seafood sauce is a bit of a production. If you want to save yourself time and effort, feel free to use one of those seafood mixes you often find in the frozen foods section. Add the mix to the garlic-scented olive oil, let it simmer for a minute or two, then add a splash of white wine along with the tomatoes and simmer until done, following the timing instructions on the package. The texture and flavor won’t be as fine as if you had used fresh ingredients, of course, but your scialatielli will still be quite tasty indeed.

Other ways to dress scialatielli

While seafood is the most classic way to dress scialatielli, as mentioned at the top, they take to just about any sauce you might use to dress other long pastas. Among the summer sauces I enjoy are lightly sautéed fresh tomato and basil, a mix of tomato and zucchini or a mix of sautéed peppers and tuna. They are all delicious.

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