Spaghetti with clams — or spaghetti alle vongole to the Italians — is one of my favorite dishes: simple, flavorful and satisfying.
That’s because it’s hard to lose with clams, which spontaneously generate their own wonderful sauce as they are cooked. All you have to do is steam them with a little liquid. When the shells part, the clam liqueur streams out, absolutely succulent and ready to glorify whatever it is added to.
In this case, I went in search of an alternative to white-flour spaghetti — something equally satisfying, but more nutritious. My first thought was whole-wheat pasta. My second was barley, which is even more healthful. A terrific source of fiber, barley is a well-known substitute for rice. I was pretty sure it’d be a fine stand-in for spaghetti, too, not least because its nutty flavor offers a pleasing contrast to the blandness of spaghetti.
The only trouble with barley (and it’s true of many of my favorite whole grains, including wheat berries and brown rice) is that it can take over 40 minutes to cook. Who has that kind of time on a weeknight?