Colatura di alici (“anchovy drippings”) is a fish sauce, much like the Thai-style fish sauce that I was more familiar with. That said, colatura is very different from Thai fish sauce. I wouldn’t recommend a swap.
I usually plan for 50 g of dried pasta per person as a starter and 100 g if you wanted this to be a main. This is for 200 g of pasta, or enough for four as a starter. It’s easy enough to scale this up or down.
This comes together very quickly. I usually start cooking the pasta before I start making the sauce. Because starchy cooking water is essential to making the sauce work, you really want to use the absolute minimum amount of water possible to concentrate the cooking liquid. It’s also a good idea to avoid overly salting the water, as you’ll use quite a bit of it to make the sauce and the colatura itself is pretty salty.
Ingredients
- 200 g linguine
- Salt
- Olive oil
- 1 clove garlic, peeled
- 20 g colatura di alici
- Flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped
- Crushed pepper flakes
Method
Bring a pot of salted water to a boil over high heat for the pasta.
Start cooking the linguine. The pasta should cook until it’s just al dente.
In a frying pan, heat a thick film of olive oil over medium low heat. Add the clove of garlic, and let it perfume the oil for 1-2 minutes. Then discard the garlic.
Directly transfer the linguine into the olive oil along with a generous amount of the starchy salty water used to cook the pasta. Bring the heat up to medium high and cook the pasta and sauce together. Reduce the sauce until it’s thick and coats the pasta.
Remove the pan from heat and add the colatura along with a generous amount of parsley and a pinch of crushed pepper flakes. Toss everything together to warm the colatura through and combine everything together. Serve the pasta immediately.