Nick Bramham’s Crab Tagliatelle with Butter, Pepper, and Garlic
A recipe in which there’s no such thing as too much butter. Text and photographs by Nick Bramham.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this new weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists will share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Nick Bramham. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
Nick Bramham’s Crab Tagliatelle with Butter, Pepper, and Garlic
Thoughts on defining a restaurant’s identity, and a recipe in which there’s no such thing as too much butter. Text and photographs by Nick Bramham.
I have a confession. At work I cook traditional, often pedantically regionally specific European food – mostly Mediterranean, sometimes in dialogue with North Africa. I established strict rules at the outset about where my influences could be drawn from. I think it’s important for a restaurant to have guidelines, boundaries, a framework within which you can iterate; they provide coherence, a tangible sense of identity.
One of these ground rules was ‘stay out of Asia’ – I wanted to focus on the food of old-world wine-making regions, celebrating the rustic fare of tavernas, caves à vin, osteria, pintxos bars, and felt it appropriate to stick to cuisine relevant to my area of expertise, sensitive as I am to the discourse around cultural appropriation. But last month I put a dish on the menu inspired by something that I’d eaten many years ago in India, and no one noticed.
Trishna in Mumbai is an iconic no-frills restaurant specialising in South Indian seafood. It is perhaps best known for its signature dish, butter pepper garlic crab, in which a jumbo crab is cooked with – and then buried under – a mound of chopped garlic, cracked black pepper, and copious amounts of butter. My not-necessarily 100%-reliable memory of eating it is of a ritualistic, quasi-religious experience, quietly working my way through the crab in the hushed, dimly lit dining room: crack open the shell, smear a spoonful of tomalley on your naan, wrap it around a piece of sweet claw meat, drag the lot through the islands of fragrant garlic and pepper swimming in the molten caramelised butter, and repeat, hoping that it never ends.
I was reminiscing about this incredible dish with a lucky friend who had experienced it himself recently when it struck me. Butter, pepper, garlic, and crab are in pretty much constant rotation at work – and actually, to my mind at least, very Northern Italian. We’ve had several crab pasta dishes on the menu throughout the years – typically leaning more Southern Italian, all bright Amalfi lemon and handfuls of wild fennel – so why not something a bit more gutsy? How good would it be to take picked crab meat, fold it though the garlic and pepper butter sauce, and then toss fresh pasta through it?
Very good, it turns out.
The recipe itself was surprisingly easy to pull together despite being based on a fifteen-year-old memory. Slightly more white crab meat than brown is the ideal ratio. The garlic should be meticulously selected to ensure that it smells fresh, pungent, and deeply savoury – do check that it isn’t ‘corked’ (see notes) – and then cooked carefully and gently in the butter to ensure it doesn’t burn. The pepper should be of the highest quality. Fat, fragrant Tellicherry peppercorns from the Malabar coast in Kerala make the most sense gastronomically and poetically: Malabar was the birthplace of the Western pepper trade over two millennia ago, furnishing Greek and Roman mariners with sacks of what would later become a staple of European tables in exchange for gold coins and amphorae of wine.
This is an extremely decadent dish – here, as in most cases, I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much butter – but one that can be tailored to all occasions. It can involve either quite a bit of work or not much work at all, and is just as suited to a show-offy dinner party project involving hand-made egg-yolk pasta and whole crabs tossed into pots, as to a lazy lunch using pre-picked crab and De Cecco tagliatelle.
It’s the type of thing I can imagine Nigella nonchalantly throwing together at 1am after returning home from an awards bash – a dish of heightened deliciousness, luscious in texture, and featuring just a handful of different ingredients (admittedly each used with absolutely wild abandon), a steaming plateful of pure sensory pleasure.
Crab tagliatelle with butter, pepper, and garlic
Serves 4 as a generous meal
Time 30 mins–3 hrs (depending on whether you make fresh pasta and use live crabs, go down the off-the-shelf route, or opt for a combination thereof)
Ingredients
fine sea salt
100g garlic cloves (2–3 large garlic bulbs)
8g whole black Tellicherry or Sarawak peppercorns (or the best you can find)
250g salted butter
250g white crab meat
150g brown crab meat
500g tagliatelle or fettuccine, either freshly made (see recipe below) or dried all’uovo
Method
Fill a large saucepan with 5L of water. Add 60g salt and bring to a boil.
Finely chop the garlic with a sharp knife. A diversity of sizes is good – it leads to varying levels of doneness when you cook it, which in turn leads to a more complex flavour profile – but no piece should be larger than 3mm. Try not to turn it into mush, which will catch, stick, burn, and generally not fry well.
Use a pepper grinder or a pestle and mortar to coarsely crack the peppercorns. No piece should be larger than a quarter of a peppercorn, but you certainly don’t want a fine powder either.
In a heavy-bottomed pan large enough to contain all the cooked pasta and the sauce, gently heat half the butter. Add the garlic and a pinch of salt. Then, over a moderate heat, swirl the garlic around in the butter until it’s threatening to lightly caramelise – it should be just about starting to turn a light golden colour in places. Take your time with this step, and taste the garlic. It should be punchy, savoury, and aromatic, but the raw bite should be pretty much gone.
When the garlic looks and tastes ready, add the pepper and swirl around for a couple more minutes, then turn off the heat, add the crab meat and the rest of the butter, and stir to combine.
Cook the pasta for 2 mins if you’re using fresh or according to packet instructions, being sure to set a timer so as not to overcook it. When it’s ready, use tongs to lift the pasta into the crab sauce. Stir everything together, adding more pasta water if necessary, until the sauce is glossy and coating all the tagliatelle. Taste for seasoning, then serve and eat quickly.
Notes
Corked garlic: The bane of bottle botherers everywhere, corked wine is caused by contamination via the cork with the molecule 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), which makes the wine smell and taste like mildew (think old cellars and damp cardboard). Some drinkers are more sensitive to TCA than others, and I have a particular intolerance – so much so that I pick up on it in a range of things, including carrots, pineapple, and especially garlic that have been poorly stored. Corked garlic will seriously ruin any dish in which it is used raw or in abundance. So, smell your garlic before you use it; it should smell brightly pungent and savoury. If the bulb smells musty or damp, pick up another one.
Fresh egg yolk tagliatelle
Note that you will need both a stand mixer and a pasta maker for this recipe.
Makes 500g
Time 30 mins plus at least 1 hr resting
Ingredients
330g 00 flour
250g egg yolks (from about 15 eggs; see notes)
semolina, for dusting
Method
Add the flour and egg yolks to the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix with the dough hook attachment on low for 10 mins. Turn out the dough, which should feel bouncy and pliable but not sticky, and work it into a rough rectangle approximately 2cm thick. Wrap the dough in cling film and leave to rest for at least an hour at room temperature – the dough should feel even more relaxed and pliable.
Run the dough through a pasta machine set to the thickest setting, then fold one-third of the dough into the middle and the other third on top of that. Repeat this process six times.
Continue to run the dough through the pasta machine, decreasing the thickness setting each time, until your dough is around 1mm thick.
Cut the rolled-out dough into 30cm-long tagliatelle approximately 1cm wide, then toss in semolina to ensure they don’t stick to one another.
Notes
The pasta will keep at room temperature for a couple of hours, or in the fridge in a sealed contained for a few days, so you can make it in advance if you want to.
If you’re looking for a way to use up the leftover egg white, try making Chloe-Rose Crabtree’s egg-white cookies.
Credits
Nick Bramham is a cook based in London. You can find him at Quality Wines in Farringdon, London, where he is head chef, and on Instagram: @nick_bramham.
Vittles Recipes is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak, Jonathan Nunn, and Odhran O’Donoghueand proofed and subedited by Odhran O’Donoghue. These recipes are tested by Georgia Rudd.
This sounds so delicious, but also so interesting. I never think of crab as particularly Italian, but blue swimmer crabs have started to appear in huge numbers in the Mediterranean, and because they are an invasive species they are wreaking havoc in the Venetian lagoon among other places. There are chefs - Chiara Pavan from Venissa in particular - responding by buying the swimmer carbs from local fishermen and putting them on their menus. Do you think the blue swimmers would work here? Aside from being small and damn fiddly they are super tasty, and cheap, and I could feel good about eating 200 g of butter because helping cut the numbers of an ecological invader....
Excellent cooking as always Nick