Rick Stein's Seafood Odyssey - Rick Stein

Rick Steins Seafood is a hardback recipe book, which explains step by step how to prepare and cook fish.

-INTRODUCTION (of book)-
The initial introduction of the book includes:
a) Buying the fish – it explains how to check to see if the fish is fresh, this includes checking that the eyes are clear and bright, checking the skin to make sure it is shiny and that slime is a good sign! It also tell how fresh fish smell of ...
...it tells of how they shouldn’t really be kept for long in your normal fridge, as it’s not cold enough.
c) Buying Crustaceans – this includes buying crabs, lobsters and prawns, they can be bought live or cooked, and it also tells you how to see if they are good quality.
d) Useful equipment for fish cooking – this part gives you an idea of the equipment you might use, including knives, a fish kettle (for poaching), a deep fat fryer, a ... more

Rick Steins Seafood is a hardback recipe book, which explains step by step how to prepare and cook fish.

-INTRODUCTION (of book)-
The initial introduction of the book includes:
a) Buying the fish – it explains how to check to see if the fish is fresh, this includes checking that the eyes are clear and bright, checking the skin to make sure it is shiny and that slime is a good sign! It also tell how fresh fish smell of the sea and not of fish.
b) Storing Fish – it tells of how they shouldn’t really be kept for long in your normal fridge, as it’s not cold enough.
c) Buying Crustaceans – this includes buying crabs, lobsters and prawns, they can be bought live or cooked, and it also tells you how to see if they are good quality.
d) Useful equipment for fish cooking – this part gives you an idea of the equipment you might use, including knives, a fish kettle (for poaching), a deep fat fryer, a fish slice, a pestle and mortar, kitchen scissors, tweezers (for picking out bones), and many more, which frankly if you were to buy all of them you would be bankrupt and you would probably only use them once every six months, if that.

This section also includes a “few handy store cupboard ingredients”.

This recipe book is divided into three sections:

-TECHNIQUES-

**Chapter 1: Preparing Fish**
This show you show to scale and gut small round fish for the barbecue, preparing small oily fish for grilling, skinning and pan-frying a whole flat fish, filleting a large round fish and grilling thick fish fillets, others includes details for filleting, poaching, stuffing, deep frying, cutting the fish into steaks and escalopes.

There are also special techniques shown for preparing gurnard, whiting, skate and freshwater eel.

**Chapter 2: Cooking Fish**
This shows how to poach fish in court bouillon, milk, and oil, braising a fish, steaming fish, roasting fish, baking fish, making stews, deep-frying fish and making quenelles.

**Chapter 3: Preparing Raw, Smoked and Cured Fish**
This shows you how to make sushi, using caviar, and sauteeing.

**Chapter 4: Preparing and Cooking Seafood**
This includes cooking prawns, marinating prawns, removing the meat from a lobster, generally preparing a lobster, preparing a crab, preparing clams/mussels etc. There are also techniques for preparing squid, octopus, cuttlefish, sea urchins and other general things that I didn’t even know that you could eat!

The techniques section is well laid out. All the steps are set out in numerical order and there are detailed notes and pictures accompanying each step.

-RECIPES-
The recipe section is separated into chapters:
Chapter 5 – has soups, stews and mixed seafood.
Chapter 6 – has large meaty fish, skate and eels (tuna, shark, swordfish etc).
Chapter 7 – has large round fish (cod, haddock, hake, salmon, etc).
Chapter 8 – has small round fish (mackerel, herrings, anchovies etc).
Chapter 9 - has flat fish (plaice, flounder, lemon sole, etc).
Chapter 10 – has crustaceans (lobsters, crab, prawns etc).
Chapter 11 – molluscs and other seafood (chowder, clams etc.)
Chapter 12 – stocks, sauces and basic recipes.

Both the recipes and the stocks, sauces and basic recipes include a comprehensive ingredient list and detailed step-by-step instructions; sometimes there is also an alternative fish to use in most of the recipes. I would like to say that some of the titles of the recipes could be simplified as most of the time you don’t know what they are!

-INFORMATION-
This section provides the reader with detailed information on all the fish in the book plus others; it details what the fish looks like and how the fish should be cooked.

There is a part of this section which allows the reader to see what the fish looks like, the fish are grouped into there particular groups, some of which include cod and cod-like fish, crustaceans, deep sea fish, and sea creatures.

There is also a section called classifying seafood, this includes a table and includes the fish’s common name, the region it cam from, the Latin name, the family it comes from and the Latin family name.

-THE VERDICT-
This book is an excellent book for those who love fish, and want to do something different. Sometimes I feel that the recipes are very elaborate, but the recipes that I have made are excellent and the book is well laid out and easy to follow. The book itself is a nice book, the pages are thick and substantial, and it’s a hard back and very durable.

I would not recommend this book if you only eat fish once in a blue moon, but if you regularly eat fish and fancy something different then this is the book for you.

-OTHER INFO-
The RRP is £25.00 but you can get it cheaper if you look around, but £25.00 for a recipe book of this quality is not expensive.

For information of the book go to: www.bbcshop.com
 

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