• Clams cooking time varies depending on what cooking vessel you use, but typically takes anywhere from 5-8 minutes total for them all to open up.
• The easiest way to avoid overcooking the clams (which make them tough and chewy) is to remove them one by one to a separate bowl as they open. This is especially helpful for people who may be new to cooking this dish and are concerned about timing everything perfectly.  Not only does this technique keep you from overcooking the clams, but it allows you to have more control over the timing of the dish. Since the spaghetti is cooked for the last two minutes directly in the clam sauce, it’s important to ensure all of the clams are placed in a separate container which makes cooking the noodles in the sauce easier and more effective. If you left the clamshells in the sauce and then added the spaghetti to finish cooking them, it would make it really hard for the noodles to finish cooking properly.
• If the clam sauce is too salty before you add the spaghetti, be sure to add a bit more of the very lightly salted pasta cooking water to the clam sauce.  This will not only help reduce the natural saltiness which comes from the clam liquor, but it will also help the sauce bind better to the noodles because of the additional starch in this cooking water.
• Do not over-salt this pasta cooking water or you may end up with pasta that’s too salty.  Traditionally, I use a lot less salt for the pasta cooking water in this clam-centric pasta dish. Because the addition of the pasta cooking water is vital to the success of the final sauce (and authenticity of the dish), I want to make sure that I avoid adding overly salted pasta water to an already salty clam sauce. Less is more here and allows you to be able to have a higher success rate with the final dish because you can always add more salt, but you can never take it away!
• If you’re really hungry, you can get away with using an additional 25-50 more grams of pasta in this recipe.
• How much olive oil is enough? I personally like to use a little less than 4 tablespoons of EVOO (50g) for every 2 pounds (1kg) of clams that I use, but if you’re trying to cut down on calories, feel free to use less.

How to Properly Soak Clams to Get Them to Release Maximum Amount of Sand & Grit

The salty ocean flavor of this pasta depends mostly on the clams’ great-tasting “clam liquor” (the juices inside the shell). But along with this delicious liquid comes sand and grit that needs to be removed so you don’t end up eating it. The solution is soaking the clams. Clams should soak before being cooked which helps them expel as much of the grit as possible. During the soaking period, they’ll purge most of the residual grit they have inside. Here are a couple of ways to ensure you end up with grit-free spaghetti and clams every time.

• The Italian way. Soak clams for an hour in seawater (or salted water) and bang the clams on the side of the sink when rinsing them.
• My way + the Italian way.  Soak clams for an hour in a mixture of flour and sea-salted water. It’s a great trick to get clams (and mussels) to release the most sand. Bang them gently on the side of the sink when rinsing them. And lastly, after doing all of this, if you still see sandy bits in your cooked clam liquid, use a sieve (fine mesh strainer) or cheesecloth to strain the sauce before reducing it a bit and adding it to the spaghetti.