Rick Stein's Seafood - Hardcover

Stein, Rick

4.29

150 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0563534176 ISBN 13: 9780563534174

Publisher: BBC Books, 2001

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Over the years, through his television programmes and cookbooks, Rick Stein has done much to inform us about fish and to encourage us to cook it for ourselves, however, many of us still feel nervous about cooking it at home. Rick Stein's Seafood brings together his knowledge and expertise, and includes 200 of his tried-and-tested recipes.

The book is divided into three separate sections: Techniques; Recipes and, finally, an A to Z of Fish. The techniques section covers all the main preparation methods – including how to fillet, scale and gut fish – as well as the cooking methods for each type of fish (round, flat, shellfish etc), while the A-Z of fish is a comprehensive encyclopedia of fish and seafood including US, Australian and European fish. The recipe section includes all the essential basic recipes, such as stocks, sauces, batters etc. Useful cross references link all sections.

Rick Stein's Seafood has been an international bestseller and was awarded the highly coveted James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year Award in 2005.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Product Description:

Edition BBC Worldwide Ltd., New edition, 2002. ISBN: 0-563-53417-6. Beautifully designed book with numerous colourful illustrations. HARDBACK. 264 pages, large size: 26 x 28.5 x 2.5 cm. Just light tan to paper edges. Other than that, the book remains in excellent condition: dust cover intact; cloth bound hard cover bright with gilt lettering on spine; text all clean, neat and tight. Prompt dispatch from UK.

Review:

Hitherto, the contents of Rick Stein's Seafood have been accessible only to students of the Padstow Seafood School, as course notes in a loose-leaf binder. Now the teachings of this remarkable establishment are made available to a wider public, in amply illustrated form at once lucid and sumptuous. This is both a technical manual and an extraordinarily comprehensive collection of recipes; and the tone throughout is correspondingly sober and professional. The first hundred pages cover technique--not just cooking seafood, but buying and preparing it, too--in great thoroughness, from scaling and gutting fish, skinning eels (requiring a butcher's hook and a pair of pliers, if you can face it), through deep-frying, poaching, steaming, grilling, to opening oysters and tenderising octopus (not, as you might suppose, by bashing it repeatedly against a rock, but in the oven).

The recipes group fish not just by species, but by shape: large fleshy fish, flat fish, small round fish, crustaceans and so on--a sensible approach, since within these categories the fish are to an extent interchangeable. Austerely, the recipes are neither prefaced with an introductory blurb nor sourced, but they are of the most distinguished provenance. Salmon en Croute with Currants and Ginger, for example is a famous George Perry-Smith recipe; the neighbouring Escalopes of Salmon with Sorrel Sauce derives from the Triosgros brother; while the interestingly strange Pernod and olive oil dressing with which Stein anoints grilled Dublin Bay prawns comes from Alexandre Dumas by way of Elizabeth David (it also includes mustard, soy sauce and tarragon). This is not to accuse Stein of plagiarism: he has simply collected the very finest seafood recipes and filtered everything through his characteristic simplicity and emphasis on freshness, quality and flavour. The result is a book of quite exceptional quality and usefulness. One hesitates to use the word bible, but if seafood can have one, this may be it. --Robin Davidson

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.