It’s time for another pasta recipe! Do you know conchiglie? That’s the pasta with a seashell shape. Conchiglie are firm and they also keep their shape through the cooking process. By the way, each pasta shape goes with certain pasta sauce. The seashell shape is perfect for all the sauces, especially for the tomato sauce and meat sauce. They are also great at catching a thick sauce. However, I made it as simple as possible. I made pasta with aglio, olio, peperoncino. The simplest home-cooked pasta dish. A quick Italian lesson; aglio is garlic, olio is oil and peperoncino is chili.
I know I know, Italians and almost everyone else would always make spaghetti with aglio, olio, peperoncino. But I felt like trying it with conchiglie. Since pasta is considered a very serious thing for the Italians and since I like to “break the rules” some times, they must be screaming up to the sky while reading this recipe. However, the dish is done. Take it or leave it. Take it and you will eat “conchiglie” again and again.
I kept it simple with the recipe, but I still wanted something special. I used the coloured variety rather than a plain white pasta. There were four colours; black with squid ink, pink with beetroot, green with spinach, yellow with egg yolk.
Ingredients for 4 portions of conchiglie:
- 400 g of pasta conchiglie (do not confuse them with the little conchigliette or the big cochiglioni)
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 2 chilis
- 50 ml of olive oil
- salt
Start with cooking the pasta. Put ca 4 litres of water to boil (1 litre per 100 g pasta). Only when the water starts to boil add some salt and the colourful conchiglie. Cooking time for conchiglie is ca 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, clean and chop the garlic, wash the chili and slice it thinly. Add both to the preheated olive oil in a large pan. Sauté them until the garlic starts getting some colour and then remove the pan from the stove. You don’t want the garlic to burn.
Drain the conchiglie when they just start to turn “al dente” (neither too hard nor too soft but firm and slightly chewy) and transfer them to the large pan with oil, garlic and chili. Put the pan back on the stove and toss the conchiglie for a couple more minutes on a high heat.
In addition here is another “Italian food rule”. You are not supposed to serve this pasta dish with cheese (any kind of cheese). But here, I must say, the Italians are right. You have to taste the purity of the three ingredients.
Serve conchiglie aglio, olio, peperoncino with some white wine.
Enjoy! Buon appetito!
