Seafood, when prepared correctly, is one of the most satisfying meals you have ever tasted. Not everyone, however, has practice or skills in preparing seafood and there are others think they know yet they often don’t get the best results. Salmon, for instance, can be intimidating if it’s your first time because you don’t know which side should be seared first or the right color when it’s fully cooked.
You need to learn how to create the best seafood dishes at home. Here are some of the most common seafood preparation mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Crowding the Cooking Pan
Choose the right size of pan for your cooking because a small pan crowded with so much inside would mean that some food will end up being undercooked while others will be overcooked which is a disaster and not the best way for seafood preparation.
2. Stirring the Food Too Often
If you have been stirring your seafood more than once while cooking, then you’ve been doing it wrong, just leave one side to cook well then turn it just once for the other side also to cook so that the internals of the food won’t get messed up.
3. Gentle Simmering
When preparing seafood like fillet of salmon, many like to do it faster by cranking up the heat little do they know that this food needs simmering so it can cook slowly all the way through. Season it then lower your heat and bring it to a gentle simmer for about 8 minutes.
4. Not Tasting as You Cook
You do not have to wait until the food is ready or almost ready to taste whether everything has been alright because you may realize at that last minute that something was amiss, and it doesn’t taste the way you wanted? To avoid such an embarrassment, taste your food from time to time along the way.
5. Using the Wrong Ingredients
There are some ingredients that do not make seafood taste good, so, you need to experiment so that you can get the best ingredients. For example, baking powder and baking soda are not interchangeable.
6. Failing to Measure
If something needs to be measured, go ahead and measure it and don’t approximate using your hand but use a guide to seafood preparation to know what quantity of which ingredient is needed.
7. Failing to Heat The Pan Before Seafood Preparation
Failing to heat the pan will destroy the fish in the very first step because the fish will stick to the pan, no matter how much oil you use, so it is good to start by heating the pan before you do anything else. This especially applies to salmon.
8. Failing to Thaw Frozen Seafood
This is the worst thing many people do, plopping frozen food right into a hot frying pan before they thaw it, and they end up with fish that is raw in the inside but burned on the outside.
9. Cooking Your Seafood Right out of the Fridge
This is one of the most common seafood preparation mistakes. You should let your seafood sit for about 30 minutes at room temperature before you start cooking.
10. Not Knowing When to Give Up
When you know you have messed in a step, just stop and start afresh. There is no need to keep struggling with something that is already smelling like old socks and with a very awful taste.
Seafood Preparation Is Both an Art and a Science
It isn’t true that you can just wake up and get to know how to prepare wonderful seafood. Seafood preparation is something that needs to be learned and it involves both creativity and measurements.
You can contact us to learn more about the different methods of seafood preparation and how to avoid seafood preparation mistakes.
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