Fish and Seafood

Appears in
Peace, Love, and Pasta: Simple and Elegant Recipes from a Chef's Home Kitchen
Peace, Love, and Pasta

By Scott Conant

Published 2021

  • About
Pasta may be what I’m best known for, but fish is also close to my heart. As mentioned previously, my first cooking job was at a restaurant in my hometown called the Sea Loft, where I made vats of chowder, fried endless clam strips, and fell in love with kitchen life. Later, when I finally made it to Italy and visited the beach kiosks in seaside towns along the Adriatic coast, one of my greatest revelations there was how simply you could treat a fish and still produce stunning results.

Fish is intimidating for some home cooks, but it really shouldn’t be. It’s satisfying, healthy, and doesn’t need fancy ingredients, a lot of time, or complicated cooking techniques as long as you are working with high-quality protein. Which is not to say that some of the more elaborate preparations in this chapter, inspired by my Sea Loft days, aren’t a blast to pull off. (When we were testing the recipes for this book, I texted a picture of the Stuffed Lobster to my friend Mo Collins, who worked at the Sea Loft with me. He wrote back saying that he still makes them all the time and people go crazy for them!)