Using Live Vongole
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Terry from Theo and Son's Seafood shares his hints and tips on storing, preparing and cooking Live Vongole.
Terry from Theo and Sons Seafood currently has live Vongole in stock.
Here are his hints and tips on these delightful seafood morsels.
De-sanded or not de-sanded?
Firstly, Terry says, you need to find out from your fishmonger if your live Vongole have been ‘de-sanded’. If they haven’t, they will last up to a week from the morning of harvest, and you will need de-sand them yourselves, prior to cooking
If they have already been de-sanded, you will need to cook them relatively soon.
Storing live Vongole (if they haven’t been de-sanded)
To keep your Vongole alive and fresh, put them in a bowl with a damp cloth over the top and place in the fridge. They will last a few days- even up to a week if they were harvested the morning you bought them.
De-sanding live Vongole:
You need to de-sand live Vongole, but only just before you are ready to cook them.
To de-sand, put them in a bowl of cold salty water and leave them for about an hour, two at the most. Within that time, the Vongole will ‘spit out’ any sand within them. Once this is done, just rinse them and then they are ready to cook!
Cooking live Vongole:
Vongole is delicious with pasta. To cook them, Terry puts them straight into a pot with the lid on, on the stovetop, without any water. He lets them cook for a couple of minutes until the shells open.
You can let them cool and then remove from the shells, however Terry prefers to leave them within their shells for decoration.
After frying up some oil and garlic in a pot, he puts the clams back into the pot and adds some wine. When the wine has evaporated he removes the pot from the heat and adds some garlic, parsley and salt and pepper.
He then combines the Vongole mixture with spaghetti that has been cooked ‘al dente’- mixes it all up together, adds some more olive oil, sprinkles some fresh parsley on top with a little lemon juice and enjoys!
