Olive and Harissa Pasta With Tuna

Method

1. Bring a large pot of water to the boil and salt it hard, about a tablespoon per four litres. This is the only salt the dish gets from you: the sauce brings its own, and so do the olives.
2. Open both tins of tuna and tip them, oil included, into a small bowl. Break the loins into large flakes with a fork, nothing smaller than a thumbnail, then leave them alone.
3. Put the spaghetti in and cook it two minutes short of the time on the packet. It finishes in the sauce, and pasta that goes into the pan already soft has nowhere left to go.
4. While it cooks, warm the olive oil and the sliced garlic in a wide frying pan over a low heat for a minute, until the garlic smells sweet and is still pale. Browned garlic turns bitter under a chilli sauce.
5. Spoon in half the jar of sauce, about 175g, and stir it over a low heat for a minute. Keep it warm rather than bubbling. A hard boil drives off the top notes of the harissa and leaves you with salt and tomato.
6. Lift a mugful of pasta water out of the pot with a heatproof jug, then drain the spaghetti. Once it is down the sink there is no getting it back.
7. Pour 100ml of the pasta water into the pan and stir until the sauce goes from thick and clinging to glossy and loose. This is the step that turns half a jar into dinner for four.
8. Tip the drained spaghetti into the pan and toss it hard over a medium heat for a minute, adding more pasta water a splash at a time, until every strand is coated and a little sauce still moves in the pan.
9. Take the pan off the heat. Add the tuna with its oil, the tapenade if you are using it, the torn olives, the lemon zest and most of the parsley, and fold it through twice. No more than twice.
10. Taste it, add a squeeze of lemon and a good grind of black pepper, then serve straight from the pan with the rest of the parsley scattered over.

The day after

Dressed pasta does not keep well, so cook what you will eat. Cold the next day it is better than reheated: loosen it with olive oil and lemon and eat it at room temperature as a lunchbox salad. If you do reheat it, use a pan with a splash of water rather than the microwave, which dries the surface and cooks the tuna twice.

Common questions

What is the difference between harissa paste and harissa sauce?

Concentration. Paste is chilli, garlic, salt and spice ground thick, and it behaves as a seasoning: bloom it in oil, dose it by the teaspoon. Sauce has already been loosened and carried, usually on tomato, and it goes straight onto pasta. Swap one for the other at the same quantity and it fails in both directions, bland or brutal. Our guide to cooking with harissa paste covers the concentrate side.

How much jarred sauce do you need for 500g of pasta?

Roughly 165g to 200g of finished sauce, plus 100ml of pasta water to loosen it. For this jar that is half of the 350g, which is why one jar is two dinners for four rather than one. If what you have is a paste rather than a sauce, the dose drops to about two tablespoons for the same 500g.

Can you use olive and harissa sauce on anything other than pasta?

Yes, and the second half of the jar is where it earns its keep. Pour it over chicken thighs or sausages in a roasting tin and bake at 200°C until the edges catch. Spoon it over roast cauliflower or pumpkin for the last ten minutes. Make wells in it in a frying pan and crack eggs in for a fast shakshuka. Warm it over a split baked potato, or over rice with a spoonful of yoghurt.

Does jarred harissa sauce keep once opened?

Refrigerate it as soon as it is open and go by the days stated on the label, which is the only figure that counts. This is a cooked tomato sauce, not a paste sitting under oil, so it will not last for weeks the way the unopened jar does. Use a clean dry spoon, and press the surface flat then pour a thin film of olive oil over it before the lid goes back on. If you will not get to the rest in time, freeze it in an ice cube tray and drop the cubes straight into a hot pan.

Ordering the jar

The sauce, the pastes and the rest of the Ottolenghi range sit on one page, and the tuna, the spaghetti and the olives go in the same order. Shipping is free Australia-wide over $100, and orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post. If it is a gift rather than your own cupboard, the Ottolenghi hampers put the same range in a box.