Seafood in the kitchen is almost like French pastry—it is quite a challenge to many

cooks. While creating French pastries is difficult and it takes enormous experience and know-

how, preparing good seafood is easy. It takes only some basic knowledge and a little experience.

You need some skill of not only how to cook it to perfection, but also how to buy it, how to store

it and how to keep it safe. No wonder cooks are uneasy when it comes to preparing fish. Even

the term seafood is ambiguous. Do you include edible fresh-water creatures in the seafood

category? And if you call it fish, can you include shellfish? In this chapter, for the sake of

simplicity, I'll refer to all fish and shellfish, whether from the ocean or fresh water, caught in the

wild or raised on fish-farms, with the friendly term, seafood.

More than half of all the seafood we consume in the United States and Canada we eat in

restaurants. That's a sure indication that people are either afraid to or don't know how to prepare

it at home. Seafood cookery is a love-hate affair for the inexperienced cook—one can quickly

ruin it in the cooking process. But with understanding it can be the easiest, most satisfying and

most user-friendly entrée in a cook’s repertoire.

The Seafood Story

Fish and shellfish in America have gone through more profound changes than any other

meat in recent years. Not many decades ago, only those who could not afford real meat ate fish.

Almost everyone else ate it on Fridays as a penance, and ignored it the rest of the week. When

the cook served it, seafood appeared in the least offensive way possible, virtually disguising it as

fish sticks or fish and chips, preferably with least trace of fish flavor or fish smell.

Here is a story to illustrate what I mean. I met a camper on an early morning in New

Mexico's Cimmaron Canyon State Park, smiling proudly as his two young grandsons handed him

four freshly-caught cutthroat trout that looked to weigh at least a pound (half a kilo) each. Very

few foods are worth dying for, but properly-cooked freshly-caught trout comes close, so I asked

him with envy how he intended to cook them. "I fillet them first," he explained, "then I heat up

the charcoal and grill two boneless sirloin steaks for each fillet then grill the fillets. I pop one fish

fillet between two steaks and there you have it—a fish sandwich."

Fortunately, the attitude of many of us toward seafood has improved, mostly because of

better knowledge of how to handle seafood to keep it at its peak, better and quicker distribution,

more information on how best to cook it, and a shift in focus to foods with health benefits. This

all boils down to one fact—today seafood on your plate tastes good. Finding seafood that is

fresh, nutritious and good-flavored is not problem-free, especially at the retail level, but we have

come a long way, and packers and processors introduce improvements all the time (some of

which even benefit the consumer).

Commercial fishing has been a booming industry for years, but the modern version has

moved from small and medium-sized operations to 300-foot-long factory ships. Half-a-dozen

smaller boats catch fish around the clock and deliver them to the factory ship in enormous

quantities where they clean and flash-freeze or ice the seafood, seemingly before the tails stop

twitching. We may have some negative feelings about such changes, but there is no denying the

wider availability of good-quality fish at reasonable prices in most parts of the U.S. as a result.

The quality of the seafood processed on large factory ships is far better than those caught by

smaller fishing operators under conditions not necessarily optimal for storing the catch.

Distribution has also improved rapidly since the 1980s. Today's distributors handle both

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