Saturday, November 22, 2008

Zuppa di clams - redux

So after boat loads of iterations I've finally come to a recipe that I think will be THE recipe for clams from me - it's essentially using a tip from America's Test Kitchen for the tomato sauce:

24 Clams
1/4 cup red wine
12 olives (or more or less depending how much you like them)
3 tablespoons olive juice (the stuff the olives have been sitting in... I pretty much take as much juice as I can from the bottle so that there's still enough left to leave the rest of the olives submerged)
1 tablespoon capers (I didn't rinse these.)
1 28oz can whole tomatoes
1 Shallot - minced
2 cloves garlic - minced

Preparing the tomatoes - seed and strain the tomatoes and remove center green parts. Leaving too many seeds in there can make it bitter. Try to leave the tomato meat in as whole a piece as possible. Diced seeded tomatoes may work just as well but I didn't like the texture as much. Reserve about 1/2 cup of the tomato juice.

Big deep stainless steel skillet (or anything... just not nonstick.): sweat the shallots, garlic, and capers. No need for salt.

Turn the heat up to medium-high to high. Add the tomatoes. They should be strained enough so that they start leaving a fond (brown bits) on the skillet. After a tomatoes stop steaming up for a while, add the red wine to scrape up all the brown bits until the tomatoes are getting sticky.

Dump in the clams, olives, olive juice, and tomato juice. Cover.

Stir periodically to let clams open. It's done when all the clams are open. Serve with bread for dipping.