Fra diavolo pasta showcases a spicy red sauce classic that feels like a true Italian-American staple. It’s not typically found in Italy, but it lives in so many of our restaurants and family kitchens here in the United States. The sauce is a bold, comforting mixture of garlic and spice that’s almost always paired with seafood like shrimp or lobster. Every spoonful bursts with delightful flavor.
Scungilli, also known as conch, has its own long history in Italian-American cooking, especially around the New York and New Jersey coast, where immigrant communities embraced what was available. The treasured scungilli salad that shines on menus and family tables is where this ingredient typically comes out to play.
If you aren’t able to get fresh shrimp or lobster to recreate the nostalgic recipe, here’s how you can try a fun twist. In this recipe, I share an approachable way to get creative with other available ingredients in your pantry, in this case, canned sliced conch, known as scungilli to many. It has a similar firm texture and sweetness to what you can find in shrimp or lobster, making it a suitable fit for a dish like this.
Like other tinned fish or seafood items, canned conch is already cooked and tender. When incorporating ingredients like these into a cooked recipe, remember to fold them in at the end to keep the texture perfect, giving them just enough time to soak in the flavor. Resourceful cooking is making the most of what you have and reducing waste. In a recipe like this, you can take pantry items like pasta, crushed tomatoes, and canned seafood and turn them into a bold, restaurant-style dish at home.
Scungilli Fra Diavolo Pasta
4
servings30
minutes30
minutesIngredients
1 can (28 oz) 1 sliced scungilli (conch), drained
3 tbsp. 3 olive oil
3 cloves 3 garlic, sliced
1-2 tsp. 1-2 Calabrian chili paste/oil (or red pepper flakes)
1/2 cup 1/2 white wine or seafood stock
1 can (28 oz) 1 crushed tomatoes
1 lb 1 linguine or penne
Salt Salt to taste
1-2 handfuls 1-2 fresh chopped parsley
Directions
- Heat olive oil in a large pan.
- Add garlic and chili, sauté until fragrant on low heat just to let the oil infuse with the flavor. Be sure not to burn the garlic. You can add and cook the chili peppers first for a minute to help not burn the garlic.
- Deglaze the pan with white wine and simmer for two minutes.
- Stir in the tomatoes, season with a couple pinches of salt, and let simmer for 15 minutes.
- In the meantime, boil water and cook the pasta until al dente.
- Once the sauce is done simmering, taste it; you can always add more salt now if needed. Fold in the drained scungilli (if the slices are too big for your liking, you can always give them a rough chop before adding to your sauce).
- Let this simmer for a couple of minutes to warm it through and marry all the flavors together.
- Add the cooked pasta and continue to toss everything together over low heat, allowing the sauce to coat the pasta and everything to be well combined.
- Finish with a lot of Italian parsley and serve immediately.
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