My wife and three friends went to a play last week and I offered to make them dinner before the show. It was opening night for the play, always a special occasion, so I thought I’d better prepare something that was equally festive. I chose cioppino.
This deluxe seafood dish was first simmered in the San Francisco Bay area in the early 1900s. Italians who emigrated to that part of the world from coastal areas of northern Italy are credited with creating it. Those immigrants brought their fondness for tomatoey seafood stews with them, and their new home provided the perfect place to keep on cooking them, rich as it was with locally caught crab, fish and other briny delicacies.
Cioppino, pronounced “chuh-PEE-noh,” became very popular and is now offered on seafood-restaurant menus all along North America’s Pacific coast, but I prefer to make it at home.
Why?
Well, it’s not particularly difficult. I can the control the quality of the seafood used to make it, and I can prepare things in advance, which means there’s not a lot of last-minute fussing.
The best part, though, is enjoying the wonderful aroma that fills my house when my cioppino is simmering and seeing how happy my guests are when they devour it.
The process of making cioppino starts by creating a base that you’ll later cook seafood in.
What goes into that base varies from recipe to recipe, but mine began by cooking chopped onions, green bell pepper and garlic in olive oil until tender. In goes some tomato paste, herbs and spices, followed by white wine, stock and chopped canned tomatoes.
This mixture is then simmered a while, until nicely flavoured and ready for the seafood.
If desired, you could make the base for the cioppino in the morning, cool it to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate it until needed. When you do need it, simply return it to a simmer, then add your seafood.
As in the base, the kinds of seafood added to the cioppino vary from recipe to recipe, but I use large shrimp, scallops, clams, cubes of fish and cooked crab.
In some cioppino recipes, you’re asked to add the seafood in stages, but I added mine all at once, as cooking times were similar.
You can cube the fish, peel and devein the shrimp and cut up the cooked crab for the cioppino a few hours before needed. Keep them refrigerated until ready to add to the pot.
When the cioppino is ready, divide it among individual serving bowls and bring them to the table — or you could do what I did: Simply set the pot of cioppino on the table and let diners fill their own bowls.
The latter is a family-style way of serving cioppino and my wife and our friends must have been pleased, because this theatre-going group gave me a round of “bravos” before digging in.
Cioppino
Serve the cioppino with picks and/or crab crackers to enable diners to get the meat out of the crab shells, and with some crusty bread for dunking into the broth.
Preparation time: 40 minutes
Cooking time: About 30 minutes
Makes: 4 servings
1 (28 oz/798 mL) can whole tomatoes
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 small to medium onion, finely diced
1/2 medium green bell pepper, finely diced
2 medium garlic cloves, minced
3 Tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp paprika
• pinch crushed chili flakes (optional)
• pinch ground fennel seed (optional)
3/4 cup white wine
2 1/2 cups seafood or chicken stock, or clam nectar (see Note 1)
• freshly ground black pepper to taste
12 large shrimp or prawns, peeled with tail portion left intact, and then deveined (see Note 2)
1 lb cooked king crab legs, cut into 2- to 3-inch long pieces, or 1 medium, cooked Dungeness crab, cleaned and cut into smaller leg and body pieces (see Note 3)
1 1/2 lbs fresh manila clams (see Note 4)
20 small scallops
3/4 lb boneless fish fillets, such as cod, snapper or halibut, cut in 2-inch cubes
2 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
Set a strainer over a bowl. Open the can of tomatoes and pour them into the strainer. Lift the drained whole tomatoes out of the strainer, set on a cutting board and chop them. Set the chopped tomatoes in the bowl you strained their juices into. Make sure any tomato juices on the cutting board also make it into the bowl.
Place the olive oil in a wide pot (mine was 11 inches wide and five inches deep) and set over medium heat. When hot, add the onion, bell pepper and garlic and cook until softened, about five to six minutes. Mix in the tomato paste, oregano, paprika and chili flakes and fennel seed, if using. Cook and stir two minutes more.
Add the wine, chopped tomatoes and seafood stock (or chicken stock or clam nectar) and bring to a gentle simmer (small bubbles should just break on the surface). Adjust the heat as needed to maintain that gentle simmer. Now cook this base for the cioppino 15 minutes.
Season the cioppino base with freshly ground black pepper (the shellfish should add enough salt to cioppino). Add the shrimp (or prawns), crab, clams, scallops and fish to the pot. Return to a simmer, cover and cook until the clams open and the other seafood is cooked or, in the case of the crab, heated through.
Sprinkle the cioppino with the parsley and basil. Set the pot on the dinning table and let diners fill their own shallow bowls with the delicious seafood and broth.
Note 1: Seafood stock is sold in the soup aisle of some supermarkets. I used Kitchen Basics brand. Clam nectar is sold in the canned seafood aisle of most supermarkets.
Note 2: To devein a shrimp or prawn, use a small paring knife to make a lengthwise slit along the back of it. Pull out, or rinse out with cold water, any dark vein material you find. Pat the shrimp or prawn dry and it’s ready to use.
Note 3: Cooked king crab legs are sold frozen, or thawed from frozen, at many supermarkets. Many seafood retailers selling Dungeness crab will cook and clean them for you, removing the top shell and innards.
Note 4: Discard any clams that do not close when squeezed before cooking, or that do not open after cooking. Both are signs the clam is dead and should not eaten.
Eric Akis is the author of the hardcover book Everyone Can Cook Everything. His columns appear in the Life section Wednesday and Sunday. eakis@timescolonist.com