Seafood

Drizzling a mild, white fish with a caper-spiked browned butter is classic for a reason. The butter adds richness to the lean fish, and the tanginess of capers and lemon perks up any mellowness. In this version, adapted from the chef Danielle Alvarez’s cookbook “Always Add Lemon” (Hardie Grant, 2020), nori oil adds another layer of umami flavor. It’s both bright and deep, with a silky texture that’s easy to achieve. Serve it with rice or bread to mop up all the saline, buttery juices.—Melissa Clark

Gochugaru, a mild, fragrant red-pepper powder, bedazzles this quick salmon dinner. As a key ingredient in Korean home cooking, gochugaru proves that some chiles provide not only heat but fruity sweetness as well. Here, that’s especially true once it’s bloomed in maple syrup, vinegar and butter. If you like shiny things, you may find great pleasure in watching this pan sauce transform into a mirrored, crimson glaze. Try to get long center-cut salmon fillets for uniform thickness and even cooking. Their crispy skin tastes wonderful with white rice, which toasts in the rendered salmon fat.

The earthy sweetness of shrimp pairs with the mild heat of Fresno chilies in our take on camarão a moçambique, or shrimp Mozambique. Despite the name, the dish is in fact Portuguese — Mozambique was once a Portuguese colony and is the source of the piri piri chilies traditionally used to spice up the shrimp. For our version, we opt to use an easier-to-find fresh Fresno chili combined with sweet paprika to add color and mild heat.

Legend has it that the tuna melt was accidentally invented in the 1960s at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Charleston, S.C., when the cook didn’t notice that a bowl of tuna salad had tipped over onto a grilled cheese. We may never know if this story is true, but there’s no doubt that the tuna melt has become a classic American diner food. This recipe adds chopped cornichons and whole-grain mustard for a satisfying crunch and vinegary element.

Salmon baked at a low temperature until medium-rare delivers a silky texture that tastes special enough to make it a festive centerpiece. This easy dish works any night of the week, since it comes together in less than half an hour. Maple syrup sweetens the glaze, which gets a savory pop from whole mustard seeds in Dijon. Even though salmon is naturally fatty, a dollop of mayonnaise adds extra richness while thickening the glaze to help it seal onto the fish.

Ready in 10 minutes, this Mark Bittman recipe from 2013 is a perfect weeknight recipe. It relies heavily on garlic, oregano and black pepper as a coating for the shrimp. Serve alongside a hearty salad or with a stack of flatbread for an easy meal. In his original piece, a roundup of shrimp recipes, he suggested wild shrimp from the Pacific or Gulf of Mexico, or fresh local shrimp from Maine or the Carolinas, if they’re available to you. All, he wrote, are “preferable from a sustainability perspective.”

Salmon, gently roasted to a buttery medium-rare, stars in this make-ahead-friendly dish. Fruity citrus and dill join spicy radishes and ginger, and the result is a refreshing, jostling mix of juicy, crunchy, creamy, spicy and sweet. Both the salad and the salmon can be made two days ahead, and everything is good at room temperature or cold. To embellish further, consider baby greens, thinly sliced cucumbers or fennel, roasted beets, soba noodles, tostadas, furikake or chile oil.

The broiler's direct, intense heat is great for browning, but shrimp are so small that it's hard to get color on them before they overcook. We started by briefly salting the shrimp so that they retained moisture even as they were cooked under high heat. A coating of butter and honey added richness, boosted browning, and underscored the shrimp's sweetness. To cook, we arranged the shrimp in a single layer on a wire rack set in a rimmed baking sheet to allow for airflow, which promotes even cooking.

Summertime means bountiful gardens — but sometimes we have trouble keeping up with the bounty. Zucchini is the classic culprit. We’re here to help. We cook it into a creamy orzo pasta paired with plump shrimp, fresh mint, and briny feta cheese.

The combination of salmon, broccoli, and red potatoes makes for a wonderful meal. But how to cook them all on one pan without any one component coming out overcooked or undercooked was a puzzle we needed to solve. Our first step was to look at the roasting time for each. Since the potatoes required the most time in the oven and the salmon required the least, we started by roasting the potatoes and broccoli together for the first half of the cooking time and then swapped in the salmon for the broccoli halfway through roasting.