Main Lunch

Mitch Tonks’ Baked Shellfish with Bucatini, Whole Roasted Garlic & Thyme

We love this classy, elegant seafood recipe from Mitch Tonks. It's a sharing pasta dish with the pasta and delicious seasonal seafood roasted together in a tin foil parcel, with garlic, thyme and tomatoes infusing the wonderful shellfish juices.

10 minutes prep, 35 minutes cook

Serves 3-4

Ingredients

8 large cloves of garlic, unpeeled

100ml olive oil

Salt

A splash of good white wine

A handful of mussels

6 raw shell-on prawns

3-4 langoustines

50g squid

A handful of clams

A handful of cooked bucatini pasta

A pinch of chilli flakes, or 2 very tiny hot red, dried chillies

250ml home-made tomato sauce or passata (use the rustic, chunky variety)

3-4 sprigs thyme

Method

Preheat the oven to 150°C/Fan 130 °C /Gas 2. Put the cloves of garlic into a roasting tray with the olive oil and a pinch of salt, and roast in the preheated oven until softened, about 10-12 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool. Raise the oven temperature to 200°C /Fan 180°C/Gas 6.

Lay out a square of tinfoil, large enough to hold all the ingredients and to be folded and sealed tightly into a parcel. Cut a piece of baking parchment the same size as the foil and lay it on top so you have a double layer. Add a splash of wine to the garlic in the roasting tray and add the shellfish, pasta and chillies. Toss everything together, place in a heap on the baking parchment, pour over the passata or tomato sauce, and lay the thyme sprigs on top. Fold it up to make a tightly sealed parcel, place on a roasting tray and bake in the oven for 25 minutes.

To serve, place the whole thing in the middle of the table, get your noses round the top of the parcel as you open it up, pull the sides of the foil apart, give it a mix around, put a few wedges of lemon ton top and get stuck in.