Episode 107 - Frutti di Mare Fra Diavolo (The Devil's Seafood)

Today we take you to Southern Italy for a classic dish, Frutti di Mare Fra Diavolo, or the Devil’s Seafood, so called because it is red & hot (spicy). This is a dish we would traditionally have on Christmas Eve because back in the day Catholics were not supposed to eat meat on Christmas Eve, however it is great anytime. The ingredients for the sauce are: • Olive Oil • 1/2 Head Chopped Garlic • ~12 Leaves Chopped Fresh Basil • 2 Cans Whole San Marzano Tomato, Hand Crushed (About 3.5 Pounds). (You really want to use San Marzano, because they are very fleshy and perfect for sauce, and you want the whole ones and to crush them by hand so that you get little chunks of tomato in the sauce.) • 2 Tsp Chili Flakes (We use the medium hot for better control. If you use the very hot, cut this in half as your starting point.) • 1/4 Cup Red Wine • 1 Tsp Salt (Start low, because you don’t know salt content of the seafood) The seafood is whatever you want. Today I have • A Small Lobster, 1+ pound, broken down o Split down the middle and rinsed out o Remove the two halves of the tail from the body o Remove the two claws from the body o Put a cut in each claw • 3 Dozen Littleneck Clams • 2 Dozen Mussels • 1/2 Pound Large Shrimp, peeled and deveined • 1/2 Pound Calamari, bodies and tentacles, in bite sized pieces You could add or substitute scallops, crab, or even monkfish, which has a consistency similar to lobster tail. We wouldn’t typically use any other fish because it would just fall apart, but if that’s what you want to do then go for it. Heat up a large, wide pan. Add the olive oil, garlic, and basil. Simmer briefly. Add the tomato, chili flakes, wine, and salt and bring to a heavy simmer. Add the body of the lobster and cook for a minute or so. Then add the lobster claws and the clams. These will take the longest to cook. Cover the pan. When the clams are just starting to think about opening, which will be about 7-8 minutes after you added them, you will want to remove the lobster body (which has by now given its all to flavor the sauce) and add the lobster tail and shrimp. You will see some of the clams just a little bit open, and that will be your cue. This is also the time to check the spice level and add more chili flakes if you want. This would also be when you would add monkfish or crab if you had them. Cover the pan again. At this point you should also have a boiling pot of salted water, to which you will add however much linguine you want to serve. After about four minutes, you will finally add the mussels and calamari. Calamari cooks very quickly and will become tough and chewy if you cook it too long (unless you stew it a really long time). Mussels cook and open in about a minute, and this is plenty of time for the calamari (and also for scallops if you have them). Cover and finish the cooking. Remove the seafood from the pan to a bowl and put them in a very low oven to keep warm. Check the salt and add some if it needs it. This will depend on how salty your seafood was. Put some of the sauce in another pan at a simmer and add the linguine (which will have been cooking for about 6-7 minutes and still be too hard) to finish the cooking and absorb the flavor of the sauce, which will bring it to that perfect al dente doneness. Take a serving platter and pour out the linguine across it. Arrange the seafood on top in some esthetically pleasing way (or not) and serve. You can put extra sauce in a gravy boat on the side in case people want more. If there is sauce and seafood left over, pull everything out of the shells, add to the sauce, and package it up. All you need to do when you want to have some again is to cook some pasta and very quickly heat up the sauce and seafood (very quickly is because you want it hot but want the seafood to cook as little as possible since it has already been cooked). In the words of my ancestors, buon gusto, buon appetito, e Buon Natale.