How I Make The Best Pasta with Clams

Today, we're gonna make linguine alla vongole, linguine with clams. This is an iconic Italian dish, but also Italian-American. Here are the ingredients. There are not that many of them. It's an easy dish. It's a delicious dish. Let's make it right now. I always like to go over the ingredients here. It's important for me to set up this way, but more importantly, it will help you. If you are kind of a novice cook, I always recommend you do mise en place. That means you're just kind of getting everything in place, set up for yourself. That being said, there are not that many ingredients here. Let's start with the star of the show. These are clams. I have little neck clams. I have 36 of them. I just want to say off the bat, they're not the cheapest. I mean, this isn't too bad though. You're gonna get four to six servings out of this. So if you don't want to do the whole clams or as many, you can substitute more of canned chopped clams. And let me tell you, a lot of these cans, they're all really good. They work well. I've used a bunch of different brands. These are from Whole Foods. They're Bar Harbor chopped clams. They're good. They're great. And I make a whole dish just with the chopped clams. So it's like linguine with canned clams. It's delicious. But today we're doing the whole and we're still gonna substitute. Even with 36 of these, we're still gonna substitute about 10 ounces of these clams. And because we also want the clam juice from here too. So both of these are kind of important. This dish has a lot of fresh parsley. So I have a lot over here. I have like a half a cup, maybe even more. We'll mince it really fine. We have 12 cloves of garlic sliced. I probably used like 16. It makes it really good. Now, if you say, oh God, you know, you want less, go for less. I'm not stopping you. You know, I'm not stopping you. Some people are gonna say, that's all you're doing. That's all you're doing, Jim. You should do like 35. But I think 12 is a really good amount. We have two tablespoons of butter here. That's gonna finish the dish at the end. It's gonna give a nice richness to it. You can completely omit that if you want, and you can just stick to olive oil. And speaking of olive oil, we're gonna use extra virgin. We'll use some good oil. This is Partana, it's great stuff. Half a teaspoon of hot red pepper flakes, anchovy. Anchovy is gonna make it even more seafood-y. So I have four, maybe five fillets there. They'll just melt into nothing with the garlic. Don't even tell if your kids, if your husband, your wife, they don't, you know, they're like, they don't like anchovies. Don't even tell them. They won't even know, okay? But it's just gonna make the dish better. We're gonna use some wine, about a half a cup. If you can't have wine, just add a little bit of lemon juice. It'll give the same, you know, acidity to it. Don't obviously use a half a cup of lemon juice, but use like one or two lemons at the end. But I like the white wine in this. It's really good. And then linguine. Linguine, we're doing linguine, olive oil, I know. Is there a better pasta for this dish? The answer is no. It's just no. Like, and it's a big fat no too, okay? What about spaghetti? Spaghetti is a decent substitute, but it isn't as good. Let's get into making it right now. I wanna just talk clams for a second. Right away, what I did here is I just opened these up. I wanna save the clam juice, okay? So I'm just gonna separate it like this, okay? And just put the clams in another bowl or measuring cup or whatever. The recipe says 10 ounces. So I, you know, I think I said that because it was a 10 ounce jar. I think Chento makes it. These are six and a half, so I'm using two of them. We have about a little bit more than one cup of the liquid here and about one cup or a little bit more of the clams, the baby clams. And these clams are already, like, they're already cooked. So you can just eat them out of the jar. It's how my mom made it all the time growing up. She never used whole clams. Like, no way. So let's talk about these clams. Quahog clam, East Coast of the United States, okay? That means cherry stone, little necks, top necks, whatever, they're all the same. It's all the same clam. It's just the size. Now, they have to be under a certain size to be called a little neck. Honestly, these are kind of big. These are fairly big. So for the larger ones here, when we steam these, you can take them out of the shell and chop them up if you want. I personally love the clams. I love them whole. So this is gonna be a personal preference thing. Maybe you like a small clam and you just wanna keep these ones. Maybe you could find cockles in the store. Those are awesome to use. They're little tiny clams. These have been purged. They're purged in the store. When you get them home, rinse them off really well. If you want, you could do a little bit of salt water, okay? Like, you wanna simulate salt level in the ocean, the temperature of the water in the ocean. 30 minutes, get them, they'll open up and they'll let some of the sand go. And then you could pull the clams out and then you could do it again if you want. I'm telling you, 99.9% of the time, you don't have to do it. Just rinse them off well, okay? They're already purged. So bring a large pot of water to boil, okay? About a one to one and a half percent salinity. So about two tablespoons of salt per gallon of water. Just get it going, get it hot because this all takes place really quickly. I'm heating up my pan. This is stainless. I'm heating my pan up, touch lower than medium heat, about a four out of 10. With a stainless steel pan, always preheat it, okay? Three minutes, that's all you have to do. Okay, so our pan is heated well. Six tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil or just coat the bottom of your large pan. Now listen, if you don't have a large 14 inch pan like this, you can use a Dutch oven. You just wanna have something that'll fit everything in there. Here is the garlic. Here are the anchovies. And the anchovies, you can mash them ahead of time, but you can just mash them with your spoon now. They'll disintegrate. And there is nothing better than that smell of lots of garlic and anchovies in a pan. Unless you don't like anchovies. But again, I'm telling you, you should try it. There's nothing that I don't like. That's why I say never trust a chef that doesn't like a lot of food. There's the half teaspoon of red pepper flakes. Just let it permeate. And then we're gonna put our wine in. So about a half a cup. So we'll just measure like that. Okay, here's the clams. See, this guy's starting to open already. He's like, don't put me in there, but you're going in there, okay? Turn it up to about medium high to high. Try to find your 14-inch lid. So listen, they're gonna open up in about five, six minutes, maybe. Give it to like eight. If after that point, a bunch of them don't start opening, they're probably dead. But what I like to do, and this is what you should do, as they're opening up, just take them, open your lid and put them in here. Like if they're already open, there's no point cooking them for another four minutes. But sometimes some of them are a little stubborn. While you're waiting for these to open, this is the time now to start boiling your pasta. Cook your linguine until it is one minute less than al dente because we're gonna finish it in the sauce. So don't cook it till it's done. Cook it one minute less than al dente, or even two minutes, it doesn't matter. We'll finish it in the sauce until we get it perfect. Okay, but this is the time to do it because it takes about 10 minutes to get it to that point. Okay, so some of them are opening. We can start removing some of them if you like. See this, okay? So like this guy, just pop them over there. This guy. A lot of times, once you open the lid now, all the liquid is gonna go into some of them and then more of them are gonna wanna open. See, like these guys. It's probably been about four minutes, I'd say. Time is of the essence when you're doing this. See, these things are just gonna keep popping open. Just pour the liquid in there. No amount of heat is gonna open a dead clam. So don't think that like, oh, if I keep cooking it, I'd say about the eight minute, possibly up to the 10 minute mark is what you wanna shoot for. Look, see, both of them opened. Look at this. Tower, all 36. Let's just tent them with foil that I have right here. And then lower this to about medium. You can put in the reserved clam juice. Now, depending on your clams, you might have a lot more liquid than me, but I'll put in almost all of it. Do a ladle of pasta water. Another trick I wanna tell you, and you can do this, and I actually, I did a red clam sauce probably a few years ago on this channel. You can taste your sauce, and if for some reason you do have too much sand in it, you can strain this whole thing. You can just add more olive oil. You can even saute some more garlic. But if you think like, oh God, I let out way too much sand into my sauce, you can still salvage it. You can. That's good. Parsley. So my pasta is about one minute from al dente. The sauce is delicious. Don't add any salt. You could pull that fairly wet there. It doesn't matter. Save your pasta water. You might need it, okay? Even though it looks very liquidy here, we're gonna cook a lot in there. Oh, and let's get the clams in, those chopped clams. And I like this one to be a little bit on the wet side. You know, like most pasta dishes we do, we're always like toss into emulsify, but I feel like for this one, you just want it to be a little bit more liquidy, you know, with the clams and everything. Maybe get some nice bread to dip into it. And then what you should do is just taste the pasta as it's cooking here to make sure that you don't overcook it and I'm not gonna put them all in because they're gonna have a hard time fitting. We'll save the remainder for topping on each plate. Let's test the pasta one more time. It's close. I'm gonna turn off the heat. I'm just gonna add some butter in. I'm adding two tablespoons of butter. You don't have to do this. Kind of richens it up at the end, which I like. My heat is off, so I'm just gonna let the residual heat just melt that butter into the sauce. Let's taste the sauce one more time. You wanna do any final seasoning, but you do not need salt here. Oh, it's fantastic. It's incredible. James, thank you for being back. Let's see, James, what you think of linguine with clams? I love linguine with clams, so I'm most likely gonna give this a 10 unless if it's like not good. Clams are very good. They all opened. Pass some more sauce. You got it. And by the way, that's why you save all the pasta water. You can always just add a few more ounces if it dries out and just mix it again. Oh, God. Before I eat the whole thing, I'm gonna give this a 10. Linguine with clams is like one of my favorite things ever. It's just like such a good combination. Like, how can you not like this? But is this one good, though? Yes. Okay. I feel like the quality of the clams matter a lot, too. These ones are very good. The pasta's like, it's like, I'm pretty sure it's al dente. Perfect al dente? Almost perfect. A tiny bit soft. Oh, really? Let me see that. A tiny bit. Let's see. I disagree. I think that's perfect. I'm critiquing it exactly how it's supposed to be. I'm having a clam, James. It's like, it's delicious. Wow. Yeah. Those clams are amazing. I mean, they all opened up. You saw, I know you love the pasta, but I mean, it's a combination of both. Yeah, you can't have one without the other. All right, I mean, I don't know what else to say here. He gave it a 10. I hope you make it. I hope I showed you how easy this one is to make. There is not a lot of ingredients in this. If you ever come across a recipe that has like 38 ingredients for this, I can assure you it doesn't need it. This is all about simplicity. It's so good. It's just the clams. The clams have the flavor. I guess that's it. This was an easy one. It was easy to make this too, and easy to eat it.