Fish Finger Spaghetti

by George Egg, featured in The Snack Hacker

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Introduction

I’d made a spaghetti dish using fancy prawns topped with a crunchy pangrattato (fried crispy breadcrumbs – miniature fried bread essentially). Mrs Egg and I were eating it and making all the right noises when I had the thought that fish fingers might tick the two boxes of seafood and crunchy breadcrumbs at the same time, while simultaneously delivering a roundhouse kick to the target marked Snack Hacker. To keep it simple, I’ve employed the use of my beloved frozen garlic briquettes. However, if you want more of a garlicky injection, I’d make the added effort of slicing up some fresh cloves, because they do have a bit more punch.

As featured in

The Snack Hacker

Image of George Egg's Fish Finger Spaghetti — Photo by Matt Lincoln

Ingredients

Serves: 4

10 frozen fish fingers
8 tablespoons olive oil (plus extra for the fish fingers)
3 frozen garlic briquettes - frozen rectangular cubes of crushed garlic - or 9 cloves of garlic (sliced thinly)
2 fat red chillies sliced (check that they’re hot ones by nibbling the end)
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1 star anise
400 grams dried spaghetti
2 teaspoons tomato puree
1 teaspoon fish sauce
small bunch fresh curly parsley (very finely chopped)
1 lemon

Method

Fish Finger Spaghetti is a guest recipe by George Egg so we are not able to answer questions regarding this recipe

Lightly oil the frozen fish fingers and put in the oven for about 5 minutes longer than the packet suggests. You want some colour and crunch to the crumb.
While they’re cooking, get the (well-salted) pasta water boiling and start on the sauce. Put the oil, garlic (briquettes or sliced cloves), chilli, fennel seeds and star anise into a cold shallow pan. When the fish fingers have about 10 minutes to go until they’re ready, put the spaghetti in the water and turn the heat on low underneath the shallow pan. You want the garlic, chilli and spices to fry really low and slow to get as much flavour into the oil as possible without burning the garlic. After 5 minutes or so, when the oil is sizzling and things smell fragrant, add the tomato purée and fish sauce and give it a good mix, then turn off the heat. It’ll stay hot.
Make sure that you don’t overcook the pasta. If it says 10 minutes on the packet, start checking at 8 minutes. At this point scoop out a teacup of pasta water to slacken things down later. As soon as the spaghetti is soft but still exhibits a small amount of resistance in the middle, drain it, add the pasta to the sauce and give everything a good stir to emulsify the oil with the residual water that’s clung to the spaghetti, adding a few splashes of the reserved water as you mix if it needs it.
Chop the fish fingers up quite small before scattering into the pasta, along with almost all of the parsley. The red oils coating the small bits of fish will have the vague appearance of crab meat, and the flecks of orange breadcrumb will look appealing with the green herbs. Very handsome.
Squeeze over the juice from the lemon, season generously with black pepper, and salt too but only if it needs it (you’ve salted the pasta water well, and the fish sauce is very salty). Pile onto plates and sprinkle over the rest of the parsley.
And be careful of the star anise if you didn’t fish it out.