Today’s recipe for a main course: pasta with lemon tuna.

A creamy, fresh, and fragrant dish, very simple and quick to prepare, that often saves my lunch or dinner.

With a few ingredients that we almost always have at home, we can enjoy a delicious plate of spaghetti to lick your lips, with a tasty and fragrant lemon cream and many pieces of tuna.

I usually prepare it as a single dish, serving afterwards only an excellent vegetable side dish, like gratinated fennel without béchamel or sautéed kale. However, sometimes everyone comes home super hungry, so I also prepare fish balls. And at the end of the meal, there’s always a citrus dessert like the angel cake.

Let’s see together, step by step, how to make this recipe.

Ingredients for pasta with lemon tuna

14 oz pasta
8.5 oz tuna in oil
1 lemon (medium size, zest and juice)
1/4 onion
3 fillets anchovies
to taste salt
1/4 cup olive oil

Tools

1 Scale
1 Frying Pan
1 Pot
1 Juicer
1 Grater

Let’s Get Started!

First, let’s boil the water for cooking the pasta, a nice tall pot with at least 4 liters, then focus on the sauce.
In a non-stick pan with high sides, put olive oil, a piece of finely chopped onion, and three fillets of anchovies in oil coarsely chopped, let them sauté slightly and let the anchovies melt, then add the canned tuna, also adding some oil from the package. (I used 3 cans of 80 grams, 2 I put with the oil and 1 I drained.) Let it cook for a couple of minutes.
In the meantime, cook the pasta. Take the lemon, which should be with edible peel, grate the zest onto a little plate and squeeze it to get the juice.
In the sauce pan, pour the lemon juice with a ladle of pasta cooking water and let it reduce for a minute. Adjust with salt.
When there are about 4 minutes left to finish cooking the pasta, drain it into the pan with the tuna and add two ladles of cooking water and continue cooking in the pan to obtain a nice creamy sauce. Add the grated zest and complete the cooking, adding more cooking water if necessary.
Serve our lemon tuna pasta still hot. Before finishing it, take a photo and post it on social media tagging me (una riccia che pasticcia instagram and facebook) and let me know which pasta shape you used; I always make it with spaghetti or linguine!