Recipe by Mitch Tonks
Baked shellfish with bucatini, whole roasted garlic and thyme.
Pasta and shellfish are wonderful partners in this lovely summer recipe by Festival Advocate Mitch Tonks.
The bucatini is fun and a bit different and you can get it in good deli’s.
©Mitch Tonks
Ingredients
Serves 4
- 8 large cloves of garlic, unpeeled
- 100ml olive oil
- Salt
- A splash of good white wine
- A selection of seafood, get whatever is in season and cheap, things like a handful of mussels, squid, prawns, clams
- Enough cooked pasta for 4, I’ve used bucatini for this as the long thick tubes seem to work really well but any pasta will do
- A pinch of chilli flakes, or 2 very tiny hot red, dried chillies
- 250ml home-made tomato sauce or passata (use the rustic, chunky variety)
- 3-4 sprigs thyme
Method
Preheat the oven to 150C/300F/Gas 2.
Put the cloves of garlic into a roasting tray with the olive oil and a pinch of salt, and roast in the preheated oven until softened, about 10-12 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool. Raise the oven temperature to 200C/400F/Gas 6.
Lay out a square of tinfoil, large enough to hold all the ingredients and to be folded and sealed tightly into a parcel. Cut a piece of baking parchment the same size as the foil and lay it on top so you have a double layer. Add a
splash of wine to the garlic in the roasting tray and add the shellfish, pasta and chillies. Toss everything together, place in a heap on the baking parchment, pour over the passata or tomato sauce, and lay the thyme sprigs on top. Fold it up to make a tightly sealed parcel, place on a roasting tray and bake in the oven for 25 minutes.
To serve, place the whole thing in the middle of the table, get your noses round the top of the parcel as you open it up, pull the sides of the foil apart, give it a mix around, put a few wedges of lemon ton top and get stuck in.
