In Rome several years ago, at the all-fish restaurant Quinzi and Gabrieli, I was served a lobster pasta as a first course that haunts me still. Somehow the dish was simultaneously delicate and robust — wide, silky pappardelle noodles napped with a creamy yet intensely piquant sauce. On another trip that took me high into the Italian Alps, an unlikely setting for shellfish, I ate at the rustic restaurant Châlet Etoile, run by a talented chef of Swedish origin. She makes a kicky spaghetti with lobster that’s rather addictive, served with half a lobster on top. A plate of this pasta is fortifying fare after a day of skiing.
My recipe for spicy lobster pasta is an amalgam of these, with a slight nod to fra diavolo, the spicy Italian-American tomato sauce often used with shellfish and pasta. It has a spicy, rust-colored tomato-based sauce heightened by a concentrated lobster broth, flecked with peperoncino and enriched with cream.
The fra diavolo technique calls for cutting a raw lobster into pieces with the shell still attached, then sautéing and simmering them in the sauce. It’s a lovely way to infuse the sauce with flavor, but the diner is then burdened with the task of prizing the meat from the shell while attempting to twirl spaghetti on a fork.
With my method, the lobsters are par-cooked first. The shells and heads are used to make a concentrated broth, which is added to the sauce. The final dish contains bits of tender lobster throughout, and only one cracked claw for a person to contend with.
If you prepare the majority of the recipe a couple of hours ahead and finish the assembly just before dinner, you will find it’s quite manageable. And though I think of it as a winter pasta, there’s really no reason not to make it year-round.
Recipe: Spicy Lobster Pasta
