If you love to eat seafood, chances are you enjoy cooking with it too. Many people find that seafood is one of their all-time top kinds of ingredients to cook with, and part of the reason for that is that it just goes in so many kinds of meals. However, few people know how to really make a plate of seafood sing. In this article, we are going to discuss how you can massively improve any seafood meal you might care to prepare. These tips are going to turn you into a veritable Rick Stein in no time.
Choose Ingredients For Their Freshness
When it comes to picking ingredients for seafood dishes, it’s all about availability. What you can get in your local area will vary massively from what other people can get in theirs, and it’s really important that you are using only the freshest ingredients around. So you need to make use of whatever is available, rather than trying for frozen ingredients just for the sake of it. Whatever has most recently come out of the sea, cook with that - and your meals are going to be so much more satisfying.
Don’t Be Afraid Of A Little Spice
Here’s something that people don’t often realize right away: seafood actually tends to pair really well with spicy ingredients. If you think about it, it’s obvious: mussels in a white wine sauce with chillies sprinkled through it, lobster with plenty of hot ginger and lime. And there's a tasty shrimp taco recipe at theendlessmeal.com that uses jalapenos. In fact, spice turns out to be a wonderful way to get more out of your seafood ingredients, so that’s something to bear in mind here if you want to make the most of them.
The Less You Do, The Better
This applies more generally to a lot of natural ingredients, but it is especially pertinent for seafood ingredients. The less you do to them, the better. That doesn’t mean not cooking them when they need to be cooked. But in general, you should opt for the less-cooked side of things. Mussels should just barely have opened; salmon should still be more or less raw through the middle; cod should just be flaking off the fork. In fact, one of the best ways to cook a fish is not to cook it at all, but to cure it and then eat it as it is.
You Can’t Go Wrong With Pasta
In general, a lot of seafood goes very well with pasta, and this kind of Mediterranean dish is something that a lot of people are often going to enjoy a great deal, especially when you put the effort into making the pasta from scratch yourself. Think of it: linguine with prawns and chili and garlic. So simple, but so delicious, and the kind of meal that people will ask you to make again and again.
If you remember those simple things when you are cooking seafood, the results will be astounding.
