Easy dinner recipe: Shrimp Scampi Pasta

All too often, shrimp are thought of as diet food. It’s logical; they are naturally low in fat and taste pretty good when they’re poached or steamed, so they translate well to salads and the like.

But they also taste even better when bathed in garlic butter. (Doesn’t everything?)

Butter is, after all, the basis of one of the greatest shrimp dishes: scampi. And you needn’t head to an Italian joint to enjoy the dish. It’s easy enough to prepare at home on a weeknight, and makes for a deliciously indulgent dinner when served atop tender tagliatelle pasta.

The technique below has been modified slightly from a recipe published in the 2016 restaurant cookbook, “Rich Table” (full disclosure: I helped write the book). The technique is too clever not to share. The key is to slowly cook a mess of thinly sliced garlic in a stick of melted butter, to make a quick confit, if you will. Next, use the butter — sans garlic — to cook the shrimp. You’ll get all of that nutty umami from the cloves without the risk of burning them.

Once the shrimp and pasta are cooked, you add all of the tender garlic back to the pan, along with more butter — it is scampi, after all — and a bit of pasta cooking water to form a creamy sauce.

The original recipe was developed to use with fresh tagliatelle pasta, which, if you can get your hands on it (or you want to make it yourself) is excellent. However, it’ll work just fine with any dry, wide pasta you’d like. Add a flurry of fresh herbs or a few pinches of red pepper flakes for a final, if optional, flourish.