Cooking: Cioppino

Cioppino is an Alaskan seafood stew, for whatever reason my family got into the habit of having it around the winter holiday, and I have continued with my own variation on it, it makes enough for six people or so, but like many stews it does get better left over as the flavors blend. Cioppino is a fun dish, it  looks really fancy and stuff, but it really requires very little effort and no challenging techniques.

You will need:

2 14.5oz cans of stewed tomatos
1 bottle clam juice, I forget the size, it's like 8oz I think
1 cup red wine, remember if you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it, but you don't need to spend a lot either.
3 cups beef broth, I wouldn't recommend using a bouillon mix for this, too much salt in those and the recipe is salty enough.
2 cans spicy V8 or other vegetable juice
1 onion, chopped
4-5 cloves garlic, chopped
1 large red bell pepper, chopped, you can use green here, but I like the red better.
1 large dungeoness crab or 1lb canned crab meat, get the actual crab if you can, the canned stuff is of indifferent quality.
1 lb cod or other white fish of you choice, I have made this with tilapia, cod, and various others, basically white and flaky is what you are looking for.
1 pound clams or mussels in shell, you can use canned again, but I like having the fresh ones, also the shells please me for some reason
1/2 pound bay scallops, the little ones.
1/2 pound of them little shrimps


Prepare your ingredients, open cans, chop vegetables, ready your fish.

For your shellfish, they often will have sand in them, a thorough rinse helps, but if you can leave them in a large bowl of water for twenty minutes it will extract a great deal of grit as the critters breath it out. Dump the water and rinse.

Extract the meat from your crab, if you can have your seafood department person clean it for you, otherwise pry the shell off and using fingers and running water, remove the yucky stuff, basically you want to be seeing white or at worst, slightly yellow flesh, nothing green! I don't bother with nutcrackers and those weird little picks, use kitchen shears, they can crack shells and they can cut them, make sure you have a towel nearby as the crab will leak.

Cut the fish into smaller than bite size chunks.

In your largest pot soften the onion in your choice of cooking fat, I use butter for preference, but if you use olive oil the recipe becomes paleo, which is relevant for my household. Have patience here, use low to medium heat you need the onions to do the majority of their softening at this stage because this stew doesn't cook for hours like many others do.

Add the garlic and the pepper, give them a couple minutes as well, stirring a bit.

Apply all the liquid ingredients and the tomatoes, cover and allow to come to a boil.

Add the fish and clams, cover again and cook on low for fifteen minutes or so.

Add the crab, cook for ten minutes

Add the shrimp and scallops, cook for five to ten minutes.

Done!

Timing like this is due to rawness mostly, you want the fish to be at the falling apart at a touch phase, so it goes in first, you want to not poison yourself with undercooked shellfish, so the clams go in early too. The crab should already be cooked if you bought it at the usual grocery store, if you bought a live one you will need to boil it first. It gets a little less time, but still long enough to blend with everything else.
I like tasting shrimp, and the tiny ones get really tough if they are in for too long. The scallops are delicate and you want to actually taste them too, so they only get a little time.

The recipe keeps pretty reliably for up to a week in the fridge, but don't tempt fate and wait longer.

There are several cioppino mixes you can find in the seafood and frozen food sections of the supermarket, shun these, they are basically bags of salt and nothing else, they will have no complexity of flavors and are generally terrible. Similarly I have found little to like about cioppino served in restaurants as well, they just aren't right, and if you are gonna invest in a recipe, do it right.

It is an investment too, you don't need to buy the most expensive fish in the world, but if you are buying fresh fish for this, you should expect to spend fifty bucks or so on ingredients, it's totally worth it once in a while though.