Shrimp and Linguine Fra Diavolo - The Easiest (and Best) Seafood Pasta You'll Ever Make

Today, we're going to make my favorite seafood pasta dish, shrimp fra diablo. It is excellent with linguine. Here are all the ingredients. Let's get into it right now. Okay. I always like to go over the ingredients. It helps me, but more importantly, it helps you. That's what it's all about. It's about helping you who is looking at me and I'm looking at you right now. Okay. Start with the shrimp. We want to make the shrimp like a brine for them. All we're going to do with the brine is we're going to use this half a teaspoon of baking soda. We're going to use one teaspoon of diamond crystal kosher salt. We're going to use one teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes. It's going to make it nice and spicy. Then, I have one teaspoon of paprika, boring paprika. That's it, but that's going to make it redder, which is nice. It's going to make it look better. Jim, what does the baking soda do for this dish? It makes the shrimp a little plumper. It supposedly changes the alkaline balance, all this sciencey stuff. I don't even know if that's true. I just think that it does make it a little bit better. Can you take it out and we'll be fine? Yes, it will. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. We're going to wait 10 to 15 minutes before we saute them. Then, after we saute them, we're going to make a sauce right in that same pan. For that sauce, I have extra virgin olive oil, but you can use regular olive oil. I have 28 ounces of plum tomatoes. These are good tomatoes. You just use any quality brand. We'll hand crush them. Garlic, about eight cloves, big cloves, sliced. It's going to make it nice. Three anchovy fillets, going to make it really nice. Then, the anchovy fillets will add, will boost the flavor a lot, make it a little bit more seafood-y, give it a little bit more body. Another teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes. I'm using crushed red pepper flakes. Shrimp Fra Diablo, actually, believe it or not, this dish, one of the most popular Italian-American dishes in the United States, specifically New York. It actually was created on Long Island. If you look back at the history of this dish, it's always with crushed red pepper. Modern interpretations now will use Calabrian chili paste. If you want to use that, totally fine. It will change the characteristics of the taste of the dish somewhat. I think you're better off, if you want it to taste like most Italian restaurants, you're better off sticking with crushed red pepper flakes. In addition to those crushed red pepper, we have a half a teaspoon of dried oregano, half a cup of dry white wine. That's going to give a little bit more zing to this. Then, about a quarter cup. You can back it off, if you want, a little bit of brandy right at the end into the sauce. If you don't want to use this, you could use lemon juice. The best pasta in the world to have with Shrimp Fra Diablo is linguine. Linguine. My choice is the Checco Linguine, because it's affordable and it's a great brand. You don't need to buy Giuseppe Coco or whatever the other brands that are like $19 a pound. This is perfect for this dish. Parsley will make it fresh at the end. Let's get the shrimp brining right now. Start this right away. Start it 10 minutes before. Give it 10 minutes before you saute the shrimp. This is the baking soda. It's just a half a teaspoon. That's it. Remember, one and a half pounds of U26 or larger shrimp. Here's my salt. One teaspoon of that. Tara, I'm feeling bro gloves today. What do you think? Normally, I would say use your hands, but you are using the red pepper flakes, so you don't know how spicy it's going to be. Jim, you mentioned the paprika. You said like boring paprika. Is that as opposed to like the smoked paprika? Yeah, I wouldn't use smoked paprika in this, but I think that you could. It would just really change the characteristic of the dish, which is kind of the Calabrian chilies are also a little smoky too, you know? All right, so I put two tablespoons also of extra virgin olive oil in here, and now let's just get this very well distributed. I'll tell you, I am eating my words every episode I make that I use these gloves, and they are becoming more and more a part of the repertoire. By the way, these shrimp were drained overnight. They were well drained. Make sure you do that. It'll help you get a little bit better sear later on on your shrimp, so I just want to set these off to the side for 10 minutes. You can cover them or leave them open, so it's been about 10 minutes. We're going to sear the shrimp. I'm using this nonstick pan. This is a big pan. It's about four quarts. It's going to be able to hold the whole pound of pasta, a pound of linguine, our sauce, and one and a half pounds of shrimp. It's nice to do everything in the same pan here, and it's going to work fine. What I'm doing here is I'm heating this pan up to a touch more than medium heat. Because we have this much shrimp, we're probably going to have to do it in two batches, but it's not a big deal because this only takes like a minute per side on the shrimp. I'm going to just coat the bottom with olive oil, probably a couple tablespoons, and let's just let it get hot, like shimmering, before we put our shrimp down so we get nice color. Just put down about half of them, or if you have really big ones, you might be able to fit them all. Just spread them out. They all make contact with the pan. They don't have to be cooked all the way through because they're going to go back in the sauce at the end. At this time, even now, start boiling your water for your pasta. I just boil it, and I turn it off, I put the cover on. Okay, I'm going to start turning them. See how beautiful those look? And then let's just put them off to the side and get our second batch in. Our pan is hot, ready to go. Okay, same thing, just spread them out. Okay, so look, here's all the shrimp. Just tent these with foil. I turned off the pan because it was very hot. Okay, so the pan is fine. I'm going to turn it just back to about maybe like a 4 out of 10, so less than medium. Quarter cup olive oil, extra virgin olive oil or olive oil. Garlic, anchovies. Anchovies, garlic. If you watch this channel for a long time, you might say, Jim, you already made this. That was like video number four, and it was really, really rough. So I said, you know what? This is such an iconic dish, I got to redo it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the anchovies, and I'm just going to mash them up in that oil. I'm going to back that heat off even a tiny bit more. You just want everything to like meld here and just really delicious flavor. So I'm going to show you these tomatoes here. So these are Bianco del Denapoli. So hands, make sure you got some clean hands. Okay, shield hand and a crush hand. Honestly, these tomatoes have a lot of structure. They're a lot harder to do this with than Chento or really any other brand I've ever used. This is looking nice, but we see like we kept the heat really low. So the anchovies melted. Our garlic is getting really fragrant, but we can let the garlic go even a little bit longer than that. Trick is to get it golden, but not burnt. You want to get the color out of there, because then it's going to flavor the oil, and then it's going to flavor your delicious sauce, and it's going to make everything really good. At this time, you get that water close to a boil, and you know, you can pretty much start boiling it. You got about 10-12 minutes on linguine. This sauce only comes together in about 8-10 minutes, too. You always want to have your sauce like waiting for pasta, though. So don't boil your pasta far like in advance. That's looking nice now. We have the other teaspoon of, if you, listen, if you don't like hot stuff, don't do this. We're not playing around here now. This is hot. This will be hot. You know, two whole teaspoons of crushed red pepper in here. Let it go for like 20 seconds to permeate, and then we're going to put in a half a cup of white wine. You can measure if you want. You know, it doesn't matter. Turn the heat up to high. Okay, so that's reduced by about half. We're going to put in our tomatoes, and I just put a little bit of water on the bottom of the can to remove the rest of that tomato residue. I'm going to try to crush these a little bit more with the best tool in the world. It's meant to mash meat, like when you're browning beef, but it works great for tomatoes, too. All right, I have it on high, so you can just go like this, just so it doesn't splatter everywhere. So what I'm doing now is I'm turning it down to about a four out of ten. I'm just going to simmer this sauce, maybe medium heat, just to get away some of the water. Put in the half a teaspoon of oregano. I'm just going really light on the oregano, but you know, this dish will normally have oregano in it. Just will, and honestly, this dish is almost always served with cheese, too, which is supposedly a no- no. Things changed. You know, the use of cheese on this. Cheese will be in like a shrimp oreganata, too. They'll often get into baked clams. You know, things change, and they're still great. They're great where they originate, but the interpretations are great, too. That is looking really nice. So listen, keep it low, low simmer, and let's boil the pasta. I'm going to boil it. I have my water boiling. Two tablespoons of kosher salt. Morton's, you know, maybe three if you're using diamond crystal, and then per gallon of water, okay? You want like a one, 1.5% salinity, and then cook it till it's about two minutes less than al dente, maybe one minute less, because we'll finish it in the sauce. Okay, so a couple minutes from the pasta being done. You can taste your sauce now. Oh man, that is spicy and delicious. Salt, maybe a touch, but it's pretty good. Okay, brandy. I have Hennessy here, but you could use the real cheap stuff, too. It doesn't matter. It says quarter cup. I would say start with two tablespoons, mix it in, see how it tastes. You can always go up, but you can't take away. A lot of restaurants will finish with the brandy, and they'll add a little bit of butter in there, too, to like richen it up more. Definitely when you're doing like a lobster fried diablo, they would do that, but you taste it, see how you like it, and you could always add more. You could also use that little squeeze of lemon juice, too, at this point, at this time. All right, this is ready for pasta. So right away, I said the recipe says hold two cups of pasta water, reserve it. You're not going to need it all, but you're going to need a little bit. I'm just putting in one ladle right now, which is about one third, okay, one third of a cup. Pasta is not done yet. It's about maybe a minute and a half from done. I'm just going to pull it. Now, you can do this from a colander, too. Just, again, make sure you just save your pasta water. So let's finish this in here, and we can add the shrimp in, too, because it's going to all take about two minutes, so that'll warm those shrimp right back up. Anyways, I have my heat pretty, you know, about four, four out of ten. So what's going to happen is the pasta will absorb some of the liquid as it's finishing up, and if it gets a little dry, you have your pasta water right here that you can add into it. Put some of that in there, and then you can put more on when you serve. Tara, thank you for being the taste tester. No problem. This is one of my favorite Italian-American foods ever. Essentially, it's an Italian dish, but they call it fra diavolo here, call it arrabbiata in Italy. Arrabbiata means enraged. Fra diavolo means from the devil. Exactly. So basically, it's hot. The first time I ever had this was at Don Nico. Don Nico? In Little Italy. Is that place still there or not? I believe it is. I'm going to try shrimp first. I'm going to try this one. It looks nicely. It looks a little overcooked, maybe, that one. I think you can grab it, the whole thing. Spice? The spice, but I can taste the garlic on it. Good. There you go. All right. How's the spice level? Too spicy or just right? I mean, it is hot. I definitely thought it was a little bit on the spicy side. It's not that hot. It definitely has heat. I can feel it in the back of my throat, but the flavor is perfect, I think. I said in the first video, which I actually am going to leave up for posterity. It's number four, but I think I actually said in that one, and I'll say it again here. When I was a kid, this was the dish, the first dish that my parents let me order from the grown-up menu. So I always loved this dish. And I think it was a little bit of a mystique to it because my dad would be like, it's going to be too spicy for you. You can't handle it. And I always wanted to order it. This is really, really fantastic. I like how the sauce is sticking perfectly to the pasta. The tomatoes are really good. We've never had this brand before, but they're really good. Honestly, I know you put parsley in here. I think it would be good with basil. Basil, yeah. Do you taste the brandy or do you think I should have used more? I think you could have used more, but I always think you can use a little bit more of the alcohol for the flavor. But all in all, I think it's delicious. What does it get? I'm going to give it a nine. A nine. I will take it. Yeah, it's delicious. I will take it. Good job. We will see you next time on the Not So Much Pasta channel anymore, right? We haven't done pasta in a long time. Yeah, we haven't been doing pasta that much. And that's what everybody started watching. I will say, I think this is, if you're going to make this, you definitely want to make it with linguine. Linguine is the best. Yeah. I would not make this with a different pasta. Yeah. Say no to spaghetti.