Every year I have a Valentine’s Day party for my girlfriends. We play board games, I give them silly little gifts, we eat great food (in my opinion!), gossip, and inevitably drink too much wine. We’ve done this so many times we even had a photo book printed themed for photos with your best friends. It was quite a nice experience having it around as we browse through all the memories of the past years spending the day together. After pouring through my cookbooks, I was at a loss as to what to wow them with this year. So I e-mailed my friend Jane for advice. Her immediate response was “Cioppino!”
If any of you are scratching your heads saying “what’s Cioppino?,” here is the definition from Wikipedia – Cioppino is a fish stew originating in San Francisco. It is considered an Italian-American dish, and is related to various regional fish soups and stews of Italian cuisine. Cioppino is traditionally made from the catch of the day, which in the dish’s place of origin is typically a combination of Dungeness crab, clams, shrimp, scallops, squid, mussels and fish. The seafood is then combined with fresh tomatoes in a wine sauce, and served with toasted bread, either sourdough or baguette. San Francisco and I had a passionate love affair a few years ago, so I decided that this would be a fantastic entrée to share with the girls.
If you Google “Cioppino recipe”, there are approximately 362,000 hits. What’s a foodie to do? Create your own signature recipe, that’s what! This dish would also work great if you want to just stay at home and cook for your sweetheart. I personally dislike going to restaurants to celebrate holidays – they are generally crowded, overpriced and not as intimate as a special meal at home. Hope you enjoy!
VALENTINE’S DAY CIOPPINO
1/3 cup olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 fennel bulb, chopped
1 cup chopped celery
1/3 cup chopped fresh parsley
3 tablespoons minced fresh garlic
2 cups canned crushed tomatoes
28 ounce can diced tomatoes
2 cups dry wine, red or white, separated
2 6.5 ounce cans of chopped clams with their juices
1 teaspoon dried rosemary or 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary (chopped)
1 teaspoon dried thyme or 1 tablespoon fresh thyme
1 teaspoon dried oregano, or 1 tablespoon fresh oregano
2 bay leaves
½ teaspoon crushed red pepper (or more to taste)
Pinch of allspice (optional)
Pinch of cinnamon (optional)
2 cups water
1 cup wine
1 dozen cherrystone clams, scrubbed
½ pound shrimp, peeled & deveined
1 pound of firm flesh fish, such as cod, halibut or sea bass
1 pound crabmeat
Heat oil in a large, heavy pot over medium-high heat. Add onion, fennel, celery, parsley and garlic; sauté until tender. Add tomatoes with their juices and simmer for 10 minutes. Add 1 cup of wine, clams with their juices, rosemary, thyme, oregano, bay leaves, red pepper, allspice and cinnamon. Simmer 30 minutes.
Add water, wine and cherrystones. Simmer until the clams open, approximately 10 minutes. Discard any clams that do not open. Add crabmeat and cook for 5 minutes. Then add the fish and shrimp and simmer until everything is cooked through. Ladle into large bowls and serve with a crusty baguette and a salad. Chocolate fondue with strawberries, bananas and cut-up, storebought poundcake can be a fun dessert (check TJ Maxx, Ross or Marshalls’s for a small, inexpensive fondue pot).
Don’t be afraid to play around with the ingredients. You can use mussels if you prefer them, or add some crab legs for taste and decoration. Onion can be substituted for the fennel. As my father always says “a recipe is just a guide”.
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!
Sounds delicious!!! Can’t wait to taste it!!
Wow. I have eaten a lot if Cioppino in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay area. Always great. Your recipe is dead on. The only trick is don’t cook the fish too long or it gets tough.
Thanks for the input Keesha! Several of my readers have recommended that I give a wine pairing suggestion for each recipe.
One of my favorite wines is a California Pinot Noir called Decoy by Duckhorn Vineyards. I first discovered it in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It runs about $20 and is worth every penny. I have not tried it with this particular dish, but it is a very drinkable red wine with hints of raspberry and cherry. A little sweeter than a typical Pinot Noir in my opinion.
With cioppino I would go with a great little value priced white from Portugal called Vinho Verde. Not sweet at all and with a tiny bit of effervescence. Serve it well chilled. If you can find it locally it should come in about $8-$10. Most liquor stores don’t have it and will try to move you to a Pinot Grigio because it is an Italian white. In my opinion that is the easy choice and okay but you can do better than that and they will want you to buy it because that is what they have to sell and not because it is a great pairing. Another good wine but a little more money is Friulano. North east Italy and pairs well with seafood.
Finally, some of the great white Italian wines for fish are the whites from the Amalfi coast. Often drunk by Italians to accompany La Vigilia – the traditional Christmas Eve dinner of 7 fishes.
One thing we simply must do more of here in Harford County is to insist that our local wine shops be more creative in their offerings. Otherwise Harford County will become a ‘culinary Egypt’. If we are going to go to a lot of effort to cook a great cioppino then we should insist on something that is uniquely special to go with it. If we must go out of state then we must. And saving 9% by going to Delaware makes the trip financially worthwhile.
Alex – thanks for all of that info! I think YOU should write a food column ha ha. And I agree about the MD sales tax – thanks for sticking it to us O’Malley! My husband works in Virginia, so he has been buying all of our beer and wine at the Wegmans down there – lower prices AND lower taxes! I will put the Vinho Verde on his “grocery” list.
I made a variation of this yesterday and it was great. I skipped the crab meat because all they had was imported and my experience with the stuff from outside the USA is “no taste” so not a bargain at any price. I skipped the cinnammon and allspice then took a hint from French recipes for Bouillabaisse very similar but not quite the same dish)and added some saffron. Also, just by coincidence (see Alex’s post above), I heard Lynn Rosetto Kasper mention Vinho Verde yesterday on her Splendid Table broadcast on Public Radio so I picked up a bottle of that on the fly. Good stuff at a decent price.
BTW, the picture shows mussels but the recipe doesn’t mention them. Did you forget to list them in the recipe? All in all, everyone thought it rocked.