This creamy shrimp pasta recipe makes a quick and easy prawn spaghetti with parsley and sumac that comes together in 15-20 minutes. It can be made with fresh or frozen shrimp or prawns and is super versatile. Add fish or clams, canned seafood such as smoked mussels, and use smoky or sweet paprika or chilli flakes. Serve with a simple salad, crusty bread and a bottle of white.
If you’re a lover of pasta dishes and prawn dishesm or shrimp dishes to our American readers, and you’re especially a fan of quick and easy pastas, you’ll love this creamy shrimp pasta recipe. It makes a speedy prawn spaghetti with fresh parsley and sumac that you can get on the table in 15-20 minutes, depending on whether you need to peel and devein the prawns or not.
This shrimp spaghetti recipe is super versatile. Use fresh or frozen shrimp or prawns. I’ve made it with both. I prefer fresh prawns but I know not everyone is a fan of peeling and deveining prawns and it will add 5-10 minutes to your prep, depending on how experienced a prawn-peeler you are.
We get really good quality frozen Australian prawns here, they’re readily available, whereas I can’t always source fresh prawns aren’t. My mum adores creamy pastas, but this is also fantastic just with extra virgin olive oil. I’ve used sumac for its earthy citrus flavours and paprika for warmth, but chilli flakes add more spice, and parsley gives the dish freshness.
Before I tell you more about this creamy shrimp pasta recipe for a prawn spaghetti with parsley and sumac, if you’re looking for more speedy pasta recipes, try my creamy tomato pasta sauce with gnocchi, penne Bolognese recipe for a ‘cheat’s Bol’, this asparagus, mushrooms and bacon gnocchi, cherry tomato feta pasta, my bacon and mushroom pasta, canned tuna pasta with scallions, capers and fresh herbs, and lemon pasta recipe for pasta al limone.
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And if you’re looking for more cooking inspiration, we have many hundreds of recipes from around the world in our archives, and note that you can save your favourites by clicking on the heart on the right of any post to create your own private account. Now let me tell you more about this prawn pasta recipe for a shrimp spaghetti with parsley and sumac.
Shrimp Pasta Recipe for Prawn Spaghetti with Parsley and Sumac
Before I share some tips to making this creamy shrimp pasta recipe for a quick and easy prawn spaghetti, I want to tell you what it’s not. This recipe does not make the popular American-Italian pasta dish called ‘shrimp scampi’, which when my mum and dad made it when I was a child, I grew up knowing as garlic prawns with spaghetti.
Shrimp scampi is often translated as ‘shrimp shrimp’, which I’ve never really understood, because scampi in Italy are not shrimp (that’s gamberi), but are actually langoustines with hard shells and long claws – which are wonderful, but more fiddly and messy than prawns or shrimps.
Although having said that, one of my favourite food memories is making scampi with Terence in the tiny kitchen of a little studio apartment in a palazzo in Venice that we rented one summer a long time ago. We bought the scampi from the nearby Rialto market, on the advice of an elderly Venetian lady, and went straight back home and cooked it up for lunch. Heaven.
My shrimp spaghetti recipe was actually inspired by a rather different recipe by a Florentine cook, Lorenza de’Medici, from the noble Italian family, from her cookbook The de’Medici Kitchen. The recipe is nothing like my creamy prawn pasta. It’s called spaghetti ai piselli e scampi – spaghetti with peas and shrimp.
But what I found inspiring was that Lorenza used non traditional ingredients in her prawn and pea spaghetti recipe – curry powder and ketchup – which she notes in her introduction are “now commonly used in Italian homes”, and that was in 1992 when the cookbook was published. I could not have imagined an Italian cook using curry powder or ketchup, but there you go.
Terence and I have spent a lot of time in Italy over the years, both for pleasure and work – we wrote and updated loads of Italy guidebooks on Northern Italy, Milan, the Italian Lakes, Calabria, Sicily etc – and when we’ve cooked Italian food we’ve always tried to remain faithful to traditional recipes we’ve eaten in Italy.
But this year I’ve been cooking from a lot of older cookbooks my mother had that I was planning to donate to charity shops but ending up keeping, and I’ve discovered recipes by cooks getting creative with traditional cuisines in ways I wasn’t aware of before. Curry powder didn’t quite work for me but it inspired me to experiment – hence the use of the Middle Eastern spice sumac in this shrimp pasta recipe.
Tips to Making this Shrimp Pasta Recipe for Prawn Spaghetti with Parsley and Sumac
Just a few tips to making this creamy shrimp pasta recipe for a quick and easy creamy prawn spaghetti with parsley and sumac, as it couldn’t be easier and comes together quickly. You can easily get it on the table in 15-20 minutes.
The Pasta
I love spaghetti with seafood. I think it’s the perfect pasta for shrimps/prawns and any kind of seafood or fish. But any long dried pasta will work, especially bucatini and linguini.
The Prawns or Shrimps
Prawns and shrimps are the same thing. We Australians say prawns but we have a lot of American readers, so I use both ‘prawns’ and ‘shrimps’ to be inclusive as much as wanting you to find this recipe when you’re searching for recipes.
You can use fresh or frozen shrimp or prawns. I make this recipe with whatever I can get hold of on the day. If you’re using frozen shrimp or frozen prawns, buy peeled deveined shrimps/prawns without tails and follow the defrosting instructions on the packet.
If you’re using fresh prawns/shrimps, you’ll need to peel them and devein them. If you haven’t done that before, the easiest way is to break the head off first, then pull the legs off, which will make it easy to remove the shell from the body, then break the tail off.
Lastly, run a small sharp knife down the centre of the back to ‘devein’ all the prawn/shrimp. Although worth noting that black thing is not really a ‘vein’, but what we call a ‘poop shoot’ in Australia.
I like to do all my de-shelling first then do the deveining. If you’re a seafood lover and cook fish and crustaceans a lot, it’s worth keeping the prawn heads, shells and tails and freezing them in a bag to make a stock or soup. I’ll share a recipe soon.
As I also mentioned above, this is a versatile recipe: you could also add fish (make sure to remove any bones and cook it for a minute or two first), clams, cockles or fresh mussels, or even canned seafood such as smoked mussels, which I add to this dish from time to time (mussels and oil) to add richness, smokiness and more depth of flavour.
Spices
Sumac is a Middle Eastern spice and one of my favourite spices and I first started to use sumac in this prawn spaghetti as my mum can no longer handle the heat of chilli flakes. I use some ground smoky paprika or sweet paprika to give warmth, but I use a little more sumac as I love what it brings to this dish.
Sumac, while a deep red colour, isn’t necessarily a substitute for ground chilli, because while sumac also adds warmth, its flavour notes are citrusy, fruity, tangy, and earthy, and it can also lend a little sweetness.
I have to confess that I use double the amount of spice that my recipe calls for, but I’ve been told that some of my recipes are too spicy – we all have different palates – and it’s easier to add more spice but impossible to take it away. You’d need to add more cream…
So always taste as you go and adjust the seasoning to suit your palate. If you’re entertaining and not familiar with your guests’ palates, less is best, and serve with a dish of chilli flakes on the table.
To Serve
This shrimp spaghetti is fantastic as a standalone main distributed between serving bowls or plates, but it’s also a brilliant sharing style dish presented on a serving platter with tongs at the centre of the table for guests to help themselves.
Sprinkle on a little more sumac and fresh parsley, and serve immediately with a salad and crusty bread for soaking up the sauce. Of course, Italians serve pasta as a ‘primi’ or first course, and you can do that, especially if you’re feeding a crowd.
Shrimp Pasta Recipe for Prawn Spaghetti with Parsley and Sumac
Equipment
Ingredients
- 250 g spaghetti - or liguini or bucatini
- 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil - divided
- 250 g prawns - peeled, tail off, deveined, fresh or frozen,
- 150 ml double cream
- 1 tsp tomato paste
- ½ tsp salt
- ½ tsp ground paprika
- 1 tsp sumac - more to sprinkle on before serving, or a squeeze of lemon juice
- 1 cup fresh parsley - roughly chopped, divided
Instructions
- Put a large pot of salted water on the stove to boil. When it’s on a rolling boil, add the spaghetti and cook until almost al dente, according to the packet instructions; probably around 8-9 minutes, so cook for 7-8 minutes.
- Five minutes before the pasta is ready: in a deep frying pan or large skillet over medium heat, heat 3 the olive oil until shimmering, add the shrimps/prawns and sauté for two minutes.
- Add the cream, tomato paste, salt, ground paprika, and sumac, stir to well combine, and increase the heat to reduce the sauce.
- Use tongs or a pasta fork to transfer the spaghetti to the frying pan, along with a few tablespoons of the pasta water and stir to combine.
- Taste the sauce and adjust the seasoning to suit your palate. Shower the shrimp spaghetti with half the fresh parsley and stir it through.
- Use tongs to transfer the prawn spaghetti to a serving plate for the centre of the table or distribute between serving bowls or plates, sprinkle on a little more sumac and fresh parsley, and serve immediately with a salad and crusty bread.
Notes
- If you can't source sumac, squeeze fresh lemon juice into the pasta and serve with lemon wedges.
Italians don't traditionally serve cheese with seafood, but do as you like and serve with a dish of grated quality parmesan or pecorino.
Nutrition
Please do let us know in the comments below if you make this creamy shrimp pasta recipe for a quick and easy prawn spaghetti with parsley and sumac as we love hearing how our recipes turn out for you.
