THE NAME OF THIS SOUP IS A LITTLE MISLEADING:
‘impepata’ means ‘peppered’ yet in fact this recipe has no pepper at all. Like many recipes that evolve, the name now refers to the style of cooking the light broth rather than its principal ingredient. The original dish, which you do still fi nd in some places in Puglia, is quite overpowering – garlic and pepper are both very strong flavours, so the broth here has milder, more fragrant ingredients, such as herbs and fennel seeds, which don’t overpower the delicate mussels and clams.
The broth is poured into each dish over thin, crispy, dome-shaped breads called ‘puccia’ – ‘little cheeks’, which once you’ve made them needs no explanation. Puccia are usually stuffed and eaten like sandwiches – they were originally conceived as food for peasants working in the fi elds as they were easily transportable. Here the bread soaks up all the delicious fl avours of the broth andgoes soggy, and as with so many frugal southern recipes, they are a canny way of stretching a simple soup so that nobody goes hungry. The dough quantities can easily be doubled so you could make four extra for lunch the next day – pile them high with mozzarella, olives, tomatoes and fi nish with a drizzle of olive oil.
SERVES 4
1 garlic clove, smashed with the back of a knife 5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil ½ small shallot, chopped 30g n’duja 50g Basil Sauce 500g clams, cleaned 500g mussels, cleaned 4 tbsp Marsala wine handful of fl at-leaf parsley, roughly chopped handful of chives, roughly chopped 1 green chilli, halved, deseeded and roughly chopped ½ tsp fennel seeds
Preheat the oven to 220.C /fan 200.C /gas 7. First make the breads. Make up the dough, following the recipe for pizza dough. Divide the dough in half and using a rolling pin fl atten each piece to a round shape of about 20cm in diameter. Place on a fl oured baking tray and bake for 10 minutes, until bubbling. Remove from the oven and lower the oven temperature to 120.C /fan 100.C /gas .. Slice each bread in half horizontally using a serrated bread knife, then put each disc over a lightly fl oured upside-down ovenproof bowl, ramekin or baking tin and put back in the oven for about 15 minutes until nice and crispy. In a large saucepan over a low heat, sweat the garlic in 2 tablespoons of the oil with the shallot until soft but not coloured. Add the n’duja, basil sauce, clams, mussels and Marsala and immediately cover the pan with a lid. Cook on a high heat for about 4 – 6 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally, until the clams and mussels all open (discard any that don’t), then remove from the heat.
