Cioppino

After we made the poached sea bass the other night and had a fantastic tomato broth that we cooked and served the fish in, we simply could not bear to throw the rest of the liquid down the drain. Certainly not. So we reserved it and attempted to find another use for the flavorful broth. Then it came to me - Cioppino! I've been wanting to have this for such a long time now. Being in San Francisco, it seems like an injustice that I have not had this dish since I moved here over a year and a half ago. As the dish is typically made with a crab (along with a variety of other fish and shellfish), it has never been on Derek's must-order list given his allergy to crab and shrimp and fear of combining multiple sea creatures. That's not to say I can't order it, but perhaps it is the typically hefty price tag that deters me from doing so or maybe we just haven't been going to the restaurants that have this San Francisco treat on the menu! So I brought it home - at a price of $20 for the seafood with a $3 crusty ciabatta loaf - a big savings from the typical restaurant offering.

For two people I selected:

2 squid
6 clams
4 dayboat scallops
1/2 lb. grouper

This seems to be a good amount - though I should have bought more clams just in case some either opened prematurely (which one did) or did not open at all. In both cases, the clams should be thrown away so Derek was kind and fore fitted his third clam and claimed a larger piece of the grouper.

The preparation for this meal was relatively simple given that we already had prepared the fantastic tomato broth base. However, given that the broth was, well just that, we decided to add some ingredients to beef it up a little bit and make it a little more substantive as a typical cioppino broth/liquid would be. This beefing up process involved the addition of the following (in various unknown quantities - but I'm doing my best guess):

3 tomatoes, skins removed by blanching and peeling, diced
1 onion, diced
2 garlic cloves
2 thyme sprigs
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes
1 Tbsp. tomato paste
EVOO
leftover tomato broth (about 4 cups)

We sauteed the onion and garlic until the onion was translucent and then added in the rest of the ingredient. Brought it to a boil and then turned down the heat, covered the pot, and let the flavors meld for 30 minutes.

Before adding the fish to the broth for cooking, we pan seared the scallops, just enough to brown each side, maybe 1 minute on each side. We didn't want to completely cook them since they would be going into the hot broth.

The cooking process for the various seafood is a bit tricky - something we didn't quite perfectly accomplish. At a rolling simmer, we added the clams, which took about 3 minutes to cook - a bit less time than we anticipated so we removed them from the liquid so that they didn't overcook. Next we put in the grouper (6 min), followed by the scallops and squid (1 min) - approximately. We overcooked the grouper - and the squid wasn't super tender - but the scallops were perfect and clams were fine.

We served this with a nice slab of garlic ciabatta bread made by heating the garlic cloves in a little bit of water to tenderize them. Then I mashed it up and added EVOO and salt and brushed that on the bread. Then I baked the bread in the oven at 400 degrees until it began to brown - it was a great compliment to the soup.