Seafood & Fish
2025 recipes found
Spicy Saltfish Cakes
Baked Codfish With Spinach and Cheese Sauce
Sweet and Sour Fish
Gemma Lin, a chef and co-owner of the restaurant Bad Mama Keelung, in Taiwan, was taught from a very early age that a proper meal should always contain some form of seafood. For special occasions, her mother liked to pan-fry a whole sea bass and then blanket it with a sour, savory sauce. This recipe is Ms. Lin’s spin on that family classic. Here, a whole sea bass or other white-fleshed fish is marinated with rice wine, then rubbed with sweet potato starch and shallow-fried. It’s topped with a hearty portion of fresh vegetables and a delectable sweet-and-sour dressing made with tomato paste, mirin, vinegar and a gentle splash of soy sauce.
Pancit Palabok (Rice Noodles With Chicken Ragout and Shrimp)
We eat pancit, or noodles, always — but especially at birthday celebrations, where the length of the noodles is seen as a promise for an equally long life. Among our many pancit dishes, palabok is the richest. The sauce almost takes on the texture of an Italian ragù, with the meat slowly disintegrating into a thick gravy that’s stained reddish-gold by achuete (annatto). The toppings aren’t decorative, but a crucial part of the dish: a whole regiment of hard-boiled eggs and poached shrimp, plus a tumble of fried garlic and crumbled chicharron (puffed-up crispy pork skins).
Tuna and Cheese Souffle
Shu Mai-Style Burgers
These burgers are inspired by the pork and shrimp filling of a shu mai dumpling. This gives you uncommon flavor in a burger — not only from the shrimp, but also from the combination of Asian ingredients — with adequate fat.
Shrimp in Yellow Curry
Many Thai dishes are not unlike what we call curries, but although they may contain curry powder, they are more often based on a combination of herbs and aromatic vegetables, rather than dried spices. A typical curry might feature a mixture of garlic, shallots, chiles, lime leaf, sugar and galangal (or ginger). This simplified version leaves out the lime leaf and sugar, but benefits from the addition of a couple spoonfuls of fish sauce at the end of cooking. It is brightly flavored, but blessedly easy to toss together on a weeknight.
Smashed Potatoes With Thai-Style Chile and Herb Sauce
This recipe is inspired by suea rong hai, or “crying tiger,” a Thai dish of grilled beef served with a fiery sauce of crushed Thai chile, fish sauce, lime juice, toasted rice powder and cilantro. Here, the bright and punchy sauce is the perfect foil to crispy roasted potatoes, but it would be just as welcome spooned over fried brussels sprouts, sautéed shrimp or grilled steak. Finally, while the sauce in this recipe is equal parts acidic and spicy, feel free to add more chile — including the seeds and ribs — to take the heat up a notch.
Blanquette of Scallops
Spring for me means discarding dark sauces and turning toward ingredients that are light and green. Here I’m inspired by the French blanquette, a stew, usually veal, in a creamy white sauce. I replaced the veal with plump sea scallops and brightened the whole thing with verdant, seasonal asparagus. Traditionally a blanquette is thickened with egg yolks and has pearl onions and often button mushrooms in the mix. The onion is in my version, but minced. I also omitted the mushrooms and used new potatoes that, unlike the mushrooms, help thicken a sauce made without the egg yolks. The result is a dish that’s fancy enough for guests yet easy enough for a weeknight.
Steamed Clams With Jalapeño Butter
Recipes do not come easier, though you will want to make sure that you take the time to scrub the shells before steaming. There’s nothing worse than sand in your clams. The bacon is optional, but I like the smokiness it adds to the broth. As for the jalapeño butter, it provides a zip against the brine and sweetness. You can heat it to make a brown butter, adding nuttiness to the mix, but it's not necessary.
Seafood and Fish Mousse Sausage
Steamed Blue Crabs
For steamed crabs, that beach-town summer standby, the Chesapeake catechism teaches plenty: buy more crabs than you think you need, use more spice, a larger pot. Get wooden mallets. Prepare to eat for a while. If you don’t have a crab pot, and most of us don’t, fiddle with the largest stockpot or pasta boiler you have. Set a few clean, empty metal cans upside down on the bottom or invert a colander in there, anything that allows you to have a boiling liquid at the bottom and crabs above it, with none of them swimming around in the soup.
Shrimp With Hot Fennel Sausage and Polenta
Shrimp with hominy grits is a favorite in the American South. Polenta stands in for this spicy Italianate version, fortified with hot fennel sausage and tomatoes. For the best-tasting results, be sure to cook the polenta slowly for at least 45 minutes, and try to get freshly made sausages from an Italian deli or butcher shop.
Tuna-Stuffed Piquillo Peppers
Bright red piquillo peppers from Spain come packed in a tin or jar. The little peppers are roasted and peeled, ready to be used. They can have any number of fillings, but tuna (high-quality tinned tuna) is a clear favorite. Tapas bars often have them stuffed with garlicky salt cod or slices of sheep’s milk cheese.
Smoky and Spicy Roasted Salmon
Inspired by the smoke, spice and sweetness that characterize classic dry barbecue rubs, this super easy salmon recipe skips the grill, making for easy cleanup and a dinner that’s doable any night of the week. While a fragrant rub like this one might overpower a milder fish, salmon stands up to strong flavors beautifully. This dish works well with summer picnic sides like coleslaw and potato salad, but it is equally good with roasted potatoes and a simple green salad. The rub is only mildly spicy as written, so add a pinch of cayenne if you’d like a little more kick.
Shrimp With Peppers
Sinigang (Tamarind Broth With Pork and Vegetables)
This is the soup that made me like vegetables when I was growing up. You always measure sinigang by sourness, which is so much a part of our cuisine — layers of acid coming from vinegar, fresh citrus, tamarind and unripe fruits. Here, sour is a power move, hitting you all the way at the back of your tongue. Whole serrano chiles bring a low-frequency spicy hum, adding not so much heat as depth. The daikon should be left in big, juicy chunks, so when you bite into them, you get an unexpected touch of coolness in the hot broth.
Moqueca (Brazilian Fish Stew)
This Brazilian dish may contain a few unexpected or even unfamiliar ingredients, but they are easy to find online and worth the search. The result is a tropical fish stew mellowed by slices of plantain and coconut milk and accompanied by the traditional hot sauce called piri-piri and farofa, the toasted cassava-meal accompaniment. Farofa is served all over South America with all kinds of dishes; this version, with caramelized onions adapted from Felipe Amaral in Rio de Janeiro, was my favorite. You can serve the moqueca without the farofa, if you prefer, but it helps to sop up the soupy liquid from the stew.
Arroz Gordo
Arroz gordo, or fat rice from Macau, is reminiscent of paella, which is no surprise considering that Macau was a colony of Portugal, a country that shares many culinary traditions with its Iberian neighbor, Spain. Here, deliciously seasoned rice is studded with bits of duck and sausage and a host of other savory ingredients, all seasoned with a nod to Asia. Many of the components of this recipe can be prepared separately ahead of time and refrigerated, and in the case of the chicken, up to a week in advance and frozen. All that is needed is a quick reheat and last-minute assembly. This recipe calls for chicken, pork, sausage, clams and shrimp, but feel free to make substitutions. Plump mussels would be a fine stand-in for the clams, and you could even purchase Chinese roast pork to skip the step of roasting your own.
Mark Bittman’s Bouillabaisse
You can make any soup with water instead of stock, but the soups that drive you wild usually have a beautiful stock as their base. This is doubly true of bouillabaisse, which should start with a stock so delicious that you can barely imagine improving on it. There are a few ways to do this: Grab fish bones when you see them, and make the stock incrementally. Another is to use shrimp shells. A third is to accumulate lobster bodies, which make fantastic stock. In any case, you combine whatever you have with some aromatics (thyme branches, onion, celery, carrot, garlic, peppercorns) add water and simmer for 15 to 30 minutes. Cool, strain and freeze if you like. When you're ready to make the soup, procure your seafood – pretty much any combination of fish and shellfish will do, but avoid dark-fleshed fish – and go forth. From there, it's no more difficult than making a pot of vegetable soup.
Tuna Salad Sandwiches
Inspired by Iranians’ love affair with pickles and fresh herbs, this tuna salad combines the crunch and tang of dill pickles with a mix of herbs. The cheerful addition of potato chips celebrates relaxed summer lunches — and tastes great any time of year. Ciabatta rolls and classic salted chips are especially good here, but you can use your favorite loaves and chips, or skip the bread and just serve the tuna salad with chips for scooping.
Grilled Sea Scallops With Yellow Beets, Cucumbers and Lime
Here’s a simple bright dish that’s nearly effortless to put together. You make a sort of salad-like relish with onion, cucumber and golden beet, seasoned with ginger and lime juice. Once the scallops are grilled, you spoon the relish over and drizzle with fruity olive oil, along with a shower of chopped sweet herbs. Done and done. If sea scallops are not available, use wild shrimp or halibut or salmon fillets. It is best to cook and cool the beets in advance (even a day ahead).
Nuoc Cham Dipping Sauce
