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Slow Cooker Clam Puttanesca
Ingredients
Method
- Combine olive oil, garlic, shallots, red pepper flakes, anchovies, capers, tomatoes, and olives in the slow cooker. Cook on high for 1 hour.
- Add clams and cook for another 45 minutes.
- Serve with bread or pasta.
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I love clams. And the Italian Puttanesca is one of, if not my favorite pasta dish. I really loved this dish. I knew I would.
The simple fresh flavors in this dish are what won me over. Beginning with the clams – they just have a naturally sweet briny juice that could not come from any other ingredient. It's amazing how flavorful clam stock can be despite its delicate taste.
Always work with fresh clams, period. Exquisite as they may taste while fresh, they can otherwise turn really awful. Some quick tips when looking for and working with fresh clams:
- They should have a very light ocean-like smell to them and should not stink at all.
- Their shells should be shut tight. An open shell indicates that a clam has gone bad and should be discarded.
- Leave live clams to soak in a bowl of cold clean water for a few hours to extract any sediments from their guts.
- You may refrigerate them for 2-3 days in a bowl of water though it would be better to cook them prior to storage.
Get all your ingredients ready and minced as fine as possible. You want these ingredients to come together evenly into a homogenous sauce that would get into each of the clam's shells for more flavor.
That's all to it! Get everything into the slow cooker to melt off for about an hour on a high heat setting. Let the olives, shallots, tomatoes, capers, garlic, anchovies, red pepper, and parsley release all their flavors into your olive oil. It will later combine with the natural stock from the clams to produce a very flavorful broth.
After your base sauce has cooked enough, it's time to add the clams. Drain them out of the soaking water and dump them all into the pot. Try to work quickly, having the lid open for the shortest time possible. You don't want too much heat to escape out of your slow cooker so the clams won't take too long to steam.
For the same reason, do not choose a low heat setting on your cooker. Cooking the clams low and slow would get them to an overcooked state making them tough and rubbery.
You'll easily know that your clams are done when all the shells have opened fully. One or two shells that remain shut are actually ‘bad' clams and must be discarded.
Serve the dish immediately. Leaving those clams resting inside the pot with all that residual heat will definitely overcook them. Cooking clams spot-on makes them really sweet and juicy. Going even so slightly beyond the needed cooking time would make a really big difference.
Aside from the clams, the broth may unquestionably be the star of this dish. Be sure that all those flavors don't go to waste. Have some bread ready that you could use for mopping all those juices.
Ladle it over hot rice. Or what I find best, have some cooked pasta as you may have just prepared one of the best pasta sauces without consciously trying.
Slow Cooker Clam Puttanesca
Ingredients
Method
- Combine olive oil, garlic, shallots, red pepper flakes, anchovies, capers, tomatoes, and olives in the slow cooker. Cook on high for 1 hour.
- Add clams and cook for another 45 minutes.
- Serve with bread or pasta.
Slow Cooker Fish Curry
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