A summer dish, fresh with very little cooking, we need crock fish or sea gurnards, Genoese pesto, some cherry tomatoes and chopped pistachios.
The crock fish, this unknown one. We have all seen this strange fish with a large head at the fish market, but few know its versatility and its many uses in tasty recipes.
It is perhaps the fish that has the most names and depending on the Italian region it is called crock, Mazzola (mace), lucerna (oil lamp) o cappone di mare (sea gurnard), and is famous for emitting a particular sound when it is caught.
It lives on the sandy bottoms of the Mediterranean (but also of other seas) and is found in all Italian fishmongers. With its tender and delicate meat, it is perfect for fish soups, but it can also be enjoyed in other ways and today we will try it with pasta.
A fresh dish that combines the symbolic scents of summer such as basil and capers, which grow on all the walls of our wonderful cities of art and which someone begins to collect by creating local products.
Rigatoni recipe with crock fish, pesto and cherry tomatoes
We start by cleaning the fish, filleting it, carefully removing all the bones and putting it aside.
In a pan with garlic and oil, put the fish carcasses to brown then add white wine and let it evaporate. After this step, let's move on to the actual cooking of the fish: remove the fishbone and heads and the garlic clove and add the fish pulp.
We fix the salt and add a little pepper and cook for a few minutes.
In a bowl, cut the cherry tomatoes into 4 parts and season them with salt, pepper and oil. Add a little pesto and mix everything, leaving it to infuse.
Let's cook the pasta, I used rigatoni from an artisan pasta factory in Gragnano which cooks in 15 minutes, and then I sautéed the pasta in the fish, letting it take a little heat. I poured everything into the salad bowl with the pesto and tomatoes, mixed and then served on the plate adding some crumbled pistachios.
In the glass I taste the pinot gris with which I blended the fish.
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