11 Pescatarian Recipes That'll Have You Cruising the Seafood Aisle

Fresh seafood, particularly whole fish, was a staple on our dining table growing up, with my dad taking two buses to Chinatown to handpick the fish himself. And while I love fresh seafood, I don't cook it often in my kitchen. Sure, I'll sometimes buy sashimi-grade fish for poke rice bowls and sushi or whip up a quick pasta or casserole with canned wild Alaskan salmon, but I rarely hit up the fish market for a whole fish or fresh shellfish. This is partly due to laziness, but also the costliness that sometimes comes with seafood.

This year, however, one of my New Year's resolutions is to eat and cook more seafood—starting with these 11 pescatarian recipes. Many are one-pot meals, like our Argentinian fish stew, shrimp risotto, and doejang jjiae, or Korean fermented bean paste stew—perfect for a weeknight dinner. If you're out to impress, we also have recipes for cioppino and lobster fra diavolo. We guarantee you'll be cooking these recipes all season...and beyond!

Real Bouillabaisse

Our rendition of the Provençal classic bouillabaisse honors the spirit and rustic origins of the poor fisherman's soup, using fish that's readily available where you live—cod, snapper, monkfish, porgy, turbot, or seabream—ideally a mixture of lean, oily, and firm varieties. You can even throw in some shellfish if you want. Serve the seafood piled onto a platter family-style with a tureen of steaming aromatic tomato- and saffron-infused soup on the side, and let each person build their own bowl with rouille and toasted baguette.

Cioppino (San Francisco Seafood Stew)

This heartier cousin of bouillabaisse, brought to the San Francisco Bay Area by Genoese immigrants, is chock full of shrimp, mussels, clams, squid, fish, and crab—since it's winter, the latter would be the highly prized Dungeness variety in my neck of the woods. A rich seafood stock made with browned aromatics, tomato paste, and a roasted red pepper salsa gives the stew a robust flavor, while sequenced poaching of each type of seafood guarantees perfect results.

Chupín de Pescado (Argentine Fish and Tomato Stew)

Although this fish and tomato stew is often made in the heat of summer in Argentina when fish is most active and plentiful, it's also the kind of simple, rib-sticking one-pot fare you want to warm you up in the winter. Pieces of meaty, firm-fleshed fish are lightly coated in flour and fried to develop more flavor before they're poached in the slow-simmered aromatic vegetable stew to finish.

Baccalà alla Napoletana (Neapolitan-Style Braised Salt Cod With Tomatoes, Olives, and Capers)

With winter being the prime season for baccalà, or salted cod, you may think that salt-curing cod at home wouldn't be worth the time and effort when you can just as easily buy it pre-cured. Well, this recipe, which uses home-cured center-cut cod fillets, will change your mind...and blow regular baccalà out of the water. What's more, its perfect texture means you can skip flouring and pan-frying the fish and simply nestle the fillets in a puttanesca-like sauce before finishing in the oven.

Malaysian Fish Head Curry

A pot of spicy Malaysian fish head curry, served family-style with plenty of hot steamed rice, makes a warming and memorable finger-licking feast. Fish head, eggplant, and okra simmered in bright vermillion gravy are gently infused with a homemade blend of curry spices, toasted whole to accentuate its flavors.

Lobster Fra Diavolo

Lobster fra diavolo is typically a showy restaurant dish, sometimes presented with a split lobster tail or lobster head-and-tail garnish—making it a popular menu item on special occasions like New Year's Eve or Valentine's Day. It's not exactly something I'd ever think to make at home...that is until Daniel came up with this recipe which streamlines the process to create a pasta dish that truly shines with lobster flavor. No crustacean shell garnishes are necessary to impress your significant other—or anyone else for that matter.

Risotto ai Gamberi (Shrimp Risotto)

The key to a great shrimp risotto is to cook the rice in a deeply flavorful shrimp stock, quickly made by simmering shrimp shells with aromatics. Stirring the raw shrimp into the rice just before serving ensures a perfect texture, and loosening the risotto with a splash of stock right before serving ensures that it will set up to the proper consistency when plated.

Seafood-Stuffed Shells

Ready to change up your stuffed pasta game? These decadent jumbo pasta shells are packed with crabmeat, shrimp, and scallops, blanketed in a creamy sauce, and baked with a buttery breadcrumb topping. One bite and you might just forget about the ricotta and tomato sauce variety.

Doenjang Jjigae (Korean Fermented Bean Paste Stew)

This comforting stew is a mainstay of Korean cuisine, flavored with doenjang, a fermented soybean paste that gives the broth its signature umami depth and funk. Adding the doenjang after the vegetables and clams simmer in the anchovy stock makes it easier to adjust the flavor to your preferred taste. Serve the stew with bowls of hot rice and kimchi on the side.

Cullen Skink (Scottish Smoked Fish Chowder)

On a cold night, a big steaming bowl of this seafood chowder is just the ticket to warm you inside and out. The main ingredient—smoked Scottish haddock, or finnan haddie, as the locals call it—combines savory smokiness with marine elements to give you a flavor profile that's as equally complex and layered as a classic fish chowder made with bacon, making it ideal for pescatarians. You can buy smoked haddock, or try our method of cold-smoking fish at home.

Salmon Head Soup

It may seem like more work (or a labor of love) to use whole fish heads for soup, but they offer a diversity of textures and flavors that you can't get from a whole fish or meaty fillets. Once you've separated the tender morsels of salmon from the carcass, all that's left to do is savor them in a rich, creamy dill-scented soup. Now who wouldn't want that on a chilly winter's night?