Warm Pasta & Crab Salad with Chilli & Wild Rocket

Name: Warm Pasta & Crab Salad with Chilli & Wild Rocket
Yield: Serves 6
Cuisine: Australian
Ingredients: 2-3 fresh red chillies, seeds removed [optional], finely chopped; 1 large handful wild rocket leaves, stalks removed, washed and spin-dried; 3-4 cloves garlic, any green shoot removed, coarsely chopped; 2 kg cooked whole mudcrabs or 1.5 kg cooked whole blue swimmer crabs or 300-400 g cooked crabmeat; sea salt [optional] and freshly ground black pepper; 3 x 2 cm-thick slices day-old sourdough bread, crusts removed, torn into thin strips; ¼ cup tiny salted capers, soaked in warm water then rinsed and dried with paper towel; 2-3 tablespoons roughly chopped fennel fronds [optional]; 400 g short pasta [such as orecchiette, fusilli or strozzapreti]; 225 ml extra virgin olive oil

Preparation info

Serves
6

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Salades

By Damien Pignolet

Published 2010

About

This slightly extravagant salad is perfect offered as an entrée in summer before barbecued sirloin steaks and a mixed leaf salad. Thin fusilli or the Benedetto Cavalieri-brand orecchiette or small twirled shapes called strozzapreti [literally meaning ‘priest stranglers’] are great for this salad. Use either cooked mudcrabs or blue swimmers and pick the flesh yourself or buy the cooked and ready-picked meat, which is usually sold frozen since it is so perishable. Garlic, chilli and rocket ar