We’re madly in love with puttanesca pasta at The Stay At Home Chef, but that wasn’t always the case. You see, anchovies always feel outside our culinary confines. What do you even do with those teeny tiny fillets? Well, we finally got over our fear of anchovies, and now we’re here to take you by the hand through the process. We promise, it’s worth trying a new ingredient when the end result is this good.
Salt content:
Due to the salt content in capers and olives, pasta needs hardly any added salt. Just be sure to taste your sauce before adding salt to this dish, don’t put more.
Anchovy:
Trust us, you won’t want to leave out the anchovies. You’ll want to chop up your anchovies since they’re full of tiny bones. These bones are soft due to the oil coating and you don’t need to remove them.
If you want to reduce the waste of unused anchovy fillets, you can also substitute 3 tablespoons of anchovy paste.
Olive options:
We love kalamata olives, but you can really use any black olives in this recipe. To make this as quick and easy as possible, make sure you buy pitted olives. Otherwise, you can always remove the pit yourself. You can use cherry pits or simply push the pits out with chopsticks.
Pasta Options:
We call for linguine in this recipe, but you can really use any long pasta: spaghetti, angel hair, and fettuccine are all excellent in spaghetti puttanesca.
Fresh tomatoes for pasta puttanesca?
You can definitely use fresh tomatoes! Since a lot of tomatoes are needed, we found canned diced tomatoes in our pasta puttanesca! 28 ounces of diced tomatoes is a lot of work. If you choose to use fresh tomatoes, you will need 10-12 whole tomatoes, diced, or about 2 lbs.
Note in advance:
To save time at night, you can make the sauce up to 24 hours in advance. Just follow the written instructions in Step 3. After the sauce has simmered for 15 minutes, remove from heat and let cool slightly, then store in an airtight container in the refrigerator. When you’re ready to prepare dinner, heat the sauce on the stovetop over medium-low heat, then proceed to step 4 of the recipe.