Seafood

You’ve heard of one-pot dinners? These are one-sheet-pan dinners, which means easier cleanup with the added bonus of concentrated, roasted flavors. Here I use a traditional salade Nicoise as the starting point for a pan of roasted potatoes, green beans, and fish. Ham, squash, and apples are gratifying flavors of a New England autumn, and roasted chicken with fennel, bell peppers, and herbes de Provence gives you a little detour toward the south of France (if you shut your eyes tight and stand by the warm oven!).

This isn’t exactly a safety tip, but why ruin shrimp’s healthfulness by serving it up with sugary sauces? A quarter cup of McCormick Original Cocktail Sauce for Seafood, for example, packs 16g of sugar—that’s four teaspoons of the white stuff. Instead, Consumer Reports in-house chef Claudia Gallo has masterminded this delicious, no-sugar recipe that will look festive on any holiday spread.

A dusty, flavorless sprinkling of bread crumbs often serves as the crust of herb-crusted salmon. We layer delicate tarragon under a toasted panko crust to protect the fresh herb flavor that can be driven away while the fish cooks in the oven. Our crust is bound with a couple of tablespoons of beaten egg, ensuring that it stays in place. And a quick brine keeps the salmon fillets moist and ensures that they are perfectly seasoned.

Fish is a breakfast staple all over the world, from the grilled fish and rice of Japan, to kippers and eggs in England, to bagels-and-lox brunches. But here, fresh flounder for breakfast is exotic and unexpected. This recipe puts the fish and the eggs in one pan and adds a pungent green garnish.

In Normandy, this richly flavored stew would be served with a composed salad of watercress, shallots, and roasted beets. What to drink: Muscadet, Chablis, or unoaked Chardonnay.

Pan-roasted fish seems like a simple dish, but in reality it is usually only well executed by practiced chefs. At home, the dish often results in dry, overbaked fillets. We set out to develop a foolproof recipe for producing succulent, well-browned fillets.

We can think of few examples where the unlikely combination of seafood and cheese marry as well as in Greece’s shrimp saganaki. In this dish, sweet, briny shrimp are covered with a garlic-and-herb accented tomato sauce and topped with crumbles of creamy, salty feta cheese. Ordering this dish at a restaurant, however, can be a gamble. The shrimp can be tough and rubbery, the tomato sauce can turn out dull or overwhelming, and the feta lackluster.

Smoked salmon recipes, with their smoky, rich taste and silky, supple texture benefit from some contrasting flavors. Our "Smoked Salmon Platter" sauce recipe uses a base of homemade mayonnaise and incorporates many of the garnishes that are commonly served on a smoked salmon platter, such as hard-cooked egg, capers, and dill.

Our smoked salmon recipe combines the best elements of cold-smoked salmon (it’s cooked very slowly over a low fire to yield supple, moist fish) and hot-smoked salmon (it’s cooked over a hotter fire to yield a flaky, drier fish with tons of smoke flavor). To prepare the salmon for smoking, we quick-cure the fish with a mixture of salt and sugar to draw moisture from the flesh, which firms it up, and we season it inside and out. We then cook the fish indirectly over a gentle fire with ample smoke to produce salmon that is sweet, smoky, and tender.

A bit of spice and a hint of sweetness enhance this shrimp and cabbage stir-fry. A chili pepper adds heat, a bell pepper some heft. One tip for chili lovers: Omit the seeds if you’re looking for a mild dish, and add the seeds (and an extra chili) if you like food on the spicier side.