Seafood Without Fear: A Practical Guide to Fish, Shellfish, and Better Cooking

Seafood gets easier when you stop treating it as fragile and start understanding what is actually happening.Seafood Without Fear is a practical guide to buying, handling, preparing, and cooking fish and shellfish with better judgment and more confidence. Chef Freddy MacKenzie moves past rigid recipes and familiar rules of thumb to explain the systems underneath good seafood cooking: freshness and quality, freezing and thawing, temperature, moisture, texture, heat transfer, carryover cooking, seasoning, and the differences that make one species behave differently from another.The book covers fish, shellfish, crustaceans, mollusks, whole fish, fillets, steaks, and other common forms of seafood while showing how cooking methods change the result. Readers learn how to roast, sear, grill, poach, steam, fry, and otherwise cook seafood by paying attention to what is happening in the pan, on the grill, and inside the food.Just as important, MacKenzie separates culinary quality from food safety. Freshness is not the same thing as safety, color is not a reliable guarantee of quality, and properly frozen seafood can sometimes be a better choice than fish sold as fresh. The goal is not to memorize another collection of rules. It is to understand enough to make good decisions when the fish, equipment, timing, or circumstances change.Written for home cooks who want practical answers without being talked down to, Seafood Without Fear teaches you how to choose seafood more intelligently, handle it with greater care, recognize what heat is doing, correct problems before they become failures, and cook fish and shellfish with confidence.