These rich stuffed shells are packed with a mixture of crabmeat, shrimp, and scallops, then baked with a creamy sauce and golden, buttery bread crumbs. It's like a crab cake stuffed into pasta.
. All. The. Same. Each one combines a type of pasta with ricotta, mozzarella, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and tomato sauce, and calls itself a unique dish. Of course, it's a winning formula—there's no argument about how delicious they all are—but you gotta admit, it gets a little tired after a while.Today, I'm again tackling shells. And I'm doing something that is fairly unusual, but also deeply, deeply obvious: I'm stuffing them with seafood.
Now, I have a weakness for shellfish, so I'll acknowledge that I'm biased, but I'm just going to go out on a limb and say it anyway. Once you eat these shells, you won't think about the ricotta-stuffed variety again.* Imagine: a dish of plump pasta shells, each one loaded with a rich mixture of crabmeat, shrimp, and scallops, baked in a creamy sauce, with buttery toasted bread crumbs on top.It's pretty easy to put the whole thing together.
Then spoon that mixture into par-cooked jumbo pasta shells. Most boxes of shells will give two cooking times: one for eating al dente, the other for par-cooking before baking. Follow that par-cooking time if your box lists it. Otherwise, just cook the pasta three minutes less than the directions say.
The sauce is just a basic béchamel, using a low ratio of flour and butter to milk—one tablespoon of flour and butter per cup of milk. That creates a relatively thin sauce, which is what we want, since it'll thicken up in the oven as it bakes.: Melt the butter in a saucepan and whisk in the flour to form a paste, cooking until its raw smell cooks off. Then whisk in milk slowly, making sure to smooth it out as you go so that lumps don't form.
Some of the sauce gets ladled into the bottom of a baking dish, then the shells are arranged on top and the remaining sauce is spooned over them. I top that with panko bread crumbs that I've tossed with melted butter and salt, then bake the whole thing in the oven until the shells are heated through and the panko is golden.Serve it up and take a bite.
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