As anybody who has enjoyed Italian wine will be able to tell you, the drink is at its best when it is combined with food. The right food and wine pairing can make a great night even more special, but you need to know which foods go well with what types of wine.
Of course, with so many great Italian dishes available it’s often tough to make the right match between food and wine. That’s why we’re here to help. If you check the Xtrawine blog you’ll see a few articles where we’ve spoken about different foods and the types of wines that go well with them.
Today, we are going to do the same for Spaghetti Allo Scoglio.
So what is Spaghetti Allo Scoglio? The best way to describe it is that it is a form of seafood pasta. That means you need to consider several different ingredients when making a wine pairing.
What we’ll do today is take a look at a great Spaghetti Allo Scoglio recipe and then recommend a wine or two that we think will go great with the dish. Are you ready to get started? Here’s the recipe.
The Recipe
Before we crack on we should make a quick note that the following recipe serves four people. You may need to scale the ingredients down a touch if you want to make the same meal for fewer people.
So what do you need? Make sure you have all of the following ingredients to hand:
- A collection of shellfish weighing approximately three pounds. This collection can include clams, mussels, scallops, and prawns.
- Four cloves of garlic, which you should dice finely.
- Your spaghetti. About 125 grams of spaghetti should be more than enough for four servings.
- A couple of tomatoes that you have diced before hand.
- About a handful of Italian parsley that you have chopped ready for use.
- Some white wine.
With your ingredients to hand you’re ready to get cracking. Follow these steps to prepare the dish for your family.
Step 1 – Spend some time scrubbing the shells of the shellfish that you will use for the dish. A good potato brush should do the job nicely.
Step 2 – Prepare a large pot with water that you will bring to the boil for cooking your spaghetti.
Step 3 – Place your shellfish into a medium sized pot that has about an inch or so of water inside. Spend about five minutes steaming the shellfish on a high heat as you carry out the following steps. You can tell when the step is complete when the shells on your shellfish start to open up.
Step 4 – Put some olive oil in a frying pan and start frying your cloves of garlic.
Step 5 – Add the scallops and prawns to the frying pan while your shellfish steam in the boiling pot. You can pour a small amount of the liquid from the boiling pot into your frying pan for more flavour. Pour a little bit of your white wine into the pan as well and chuck your diced tomatoes into the pan as well.
Step 6 – Simmer the ingredients in the pan for about five minutes on a medium heat. This should coincide with the shells of your shellfish finishing their steaming session. When the steaming is done, add the shells into the pan with a small splash of the water. Get rid of any shells that haven’t opened following the steaming session.
Step 7 – Mix the ingredients in the pan and place a cover on it. Pull the heat down so the ingredients don’t overcook.
Step 8 – It’s time to cook your pasta. Add the spaghetti to the boiling water in the pot and follow the instructions on the packaging. It’s a good idea to take the pot off the hob about a minute before the spaghetti finishes cooking. This allows you to drain the spaghetti before it gets all soggy.
Step 9 – Pour the sauce in your frying pan into the pot with the spaghetti and mix it all together.
Step 10 – Voila. You have Spaghetti Allo Scoglio. Now all you need to do is serve the spaghetti out onto four plates and garnish it with a bit of parsley. Add any leftover prawns or scallops onto the plate as a nice little aside from the main dish.
The Wine Pairings
That all sounds really tasty, right? Of course, you need to hit the right notes with your wine pairings if you are going to get the most out of the dish. Pasta with shellfish is a fairly reserved dish in terms of richness of flavour, so the general idea is that you should pair the dish with a white wine, as a red could completely overpower it. We’d also shy away from sparkling wines, as those are better as aperitifs or as palette cleansers before moving on from the dish and into your dessert.
So what should you pick? Obviously, we’d recommend going the Italian route. After all, Spaghetti Allo Scoglio is an Italian dish so you can feel almost certain that there are plenty of good Italian wines to go with it.
One of our first picks is a good Vermentino. The wine goes particularly well with both spaghetti and clams, making it an excellent choice for Spaghetti Allo Scoglio.
If you want to experiment a little further, we’d recommend trying any white wines from the Elba island. A Gavi is a god starting point, but practically any white wine from that region will do. We also think that white wines from the Puglia and Campania regions tend to go really well with Spaghetti Allo Scoglio. A nice Greco di Tufo or Salice Salento should get the job done nicely.
We really do recommend you avid pairing any red wines with the dish. Even less complex examples of red wine will likely prove a little too rich for the food. It’s white wine all the way and you can’t go wrong with the recommendations we’ve made here.
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