Review by Dana:

Absolutely loved shrimp recipie. My husband made it for our family dinner and everyone wanted to know the recipie. Other recipies were great too. Loved it!

Review by Robert J. Hammond:

This is another wonderful book to add to my collection! There are many great recipes to try – from the stove top, the oven and the grill – we can’t wait to get started! We love seafood just any way it can be fixed and this book just broadened our horizon just that much more! Thank You!!!

Review by GMO:

I bought this book after having visited several McCormick & Scmick’s restaurants, and really loved their food. The recipes are easy to follow, simple to make and are very tasty.

The reason for my rating, is that their are HUGE errors throughout the entire book. A few examples: Crab Rangoon recipe calls for yellow cornmeal in the ingredients list but makes no mention of it in the instructions. The recipe for Stuffed Salmon with Crab & Shrimp has no salmon in it! The photo on the facing page shows a stuffed salmon fillet, but the recipe calls for halibut.

This book suffers from poor editing. It smacks of being rushed for publication before the editing was completed.

This book would be a great addition to any home cooking library, but be prepared to find confusing recipes.

Review by Shirley Priscilla Johnson:

If you are a lover of seafood this is the book for you. Absolutely brimming over with detailed information about seafood, how to cook it, keep yourself safe eating it and just plain enjoying it. Chef King shares with the reader his recipes of seafood that are used in the famous “McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurants,” perhaps now you can enjoy these delicious meals at home.

We are given many recipes such as, Seafood Cocktails, Spenger’s Fish Tacos, Apple Halibut and Grilled Rainbow Trout, to name only a few. This book is not stingy with its recipes and you will be amazed how many are shared with you and the concise and easy to following instructions for you to make these dishes.

You will also find a section on some mouth-watering deserts, such as, “Three Berry Cobbles,” and “Deep-Dish Apple Pie.” Hungry yet? The photos that I saw were bright and clear and certainly brought the food to light in a very visual way. All in all, for the seafood lover who would like to enjoy these wonderful meals at home, this cookbook is for you. Very well done.

Review by Norma Chicoine:

I love this cookbook. The recipies are scrumptous, different and easy. The use of fresh ingredients such as freshly grated ginger and garlic bring aromas to the kitchen that make me melt. A very good book that I have shared with all my friends and family. Highly recommended.

Review by Andrea St George:

I am a seafood lover and it’s wonderful to have this selection of recipes. It includes a wide variety seafoods and shellfish and is organized by length of time to prepare. It is packed with great tips on everything from stocking your pantry, to storage and tips on preparing specific kinds of seafood. There are meal planning suggestions and a sample meals chart. This book will get used frequently in my kitchen.

Review by Kathy M. Tigue:

This cookbook packs in over 100 great seafood recipes and side dishes for people with diabetes, as well as those just looking to eat healthy food.

As a Registered Dietitian and Cerified Diabetes Educator I encourage my patients to include at least 2 fish meals per week. Many are intimidated to cook fish at home or are unsure of how to prepare it. I finally have a great reference to guide them to!!

You’ll find the “Cook’s Tips” packed with alternative ideas on how to prepare, purchase or serve the dish. Many of the recipes contain ingredients which are found in your pantry or fridge so it is easy to cook up a meal quickly.

All of the recipes include nutritional information in exchanges as well as the carbohydrate grams for carb counting. Calories,fat, fiber, protein and sodium values make it easy to use these recipes when following any meal plan.

I have had the pleasure of tasting many of these delicious recipes in Barbara’s cooking classes and my own home. Enjoy Kathy Tigue, RD,CDE,MPA

Review by Ann G. Lesnewich:

I am not a gourmet cook but I really enjoy these recipes because they

are simple and straightforward. You can get the ingredients at any

grocery store and the author gives great tips on short cuts and substitutes. My husband and I love the Sole Genovese.

Review by Michael Pitre:

Very good book about everything crawfish from the begining of how they are raised, the process to bring them to market and finally recipes that end their lives being consumed. Great Book. Good recipes. I found the best seasoning to use in the recipes I cooked some crawfish in. I purchased their All Purpose Seasoning which is similar to Zataran’s Creole Seasoning but much better. Their Steak seasoning cannot be beat. Check out [...]

Review by Spyce:

This book has so many good recipes in it, I don’t know where to start! My favorite is the Salmon Stuffed with Mascarpone Cheese and Spinach (use frozen). The recipe bakes it but I put mine on the grill. The Morehead City Shrimp Burgers is another favorite, as well as the Buttery Garlicky Steamed Clams. The book doesn’t have any pictures in it, but don’t let that be your deciding factor, the recipes are really good, and each recipe is accompanied by a brief description or introduction. Some of the recipes feature fish that may not be popular for all areas but in those cases, the author may mention that another type of fish can be substituted. Or substitute your favorite fish. If you are not familiar with buying and cooking fish and seafood, the author lays out the basics in the beginning of the book which covers the difference between fresh and frozen, what to look for, storing, and appropriate cooking methods.

Review by Biscuit Gal:

I admit to only eating fish at restaurants because my fish was boring and never cooked right. So I bought this book. Wow what a difference.

I made the barbecued salmon for my family for Mother’s day, and no one touched the chicken. It was cooked perfectly and had loads of flavor. Then I tried the baked filets with spinach and pine nuts, and I was hooked.

The tips are a big help and the book is fun to read. I think anyone who wants to eat more fish would love this book because it is full of ideas that simple enough to do, but full of flavor.

Review by B. Marold:

`rick stein’s complete seafood’ by, you guessed it, English restauranteur and culinary teacher, Rick Stein is the kind of book which promises great things and thereby simply invites criticism for its presumptuous title. I think I can safely say that no book that claims to be a `Bible’ or `Complete’ really does give either a total or fully authoritative treatment of its subject. But the fact that this book happens to be just a bit less than `complete’ is no reason not to buy it, because it does give a full treatment of some very important aspects of cooking seafood.

The book is divided into three great parts containing thirteen chapters. These parts and chapters are:

Part 1 – Techniques

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Preparing Fish

Chapter 2 – Cooking Fish

Chapter 3 – Preparing raw, smoked, and cured fish

Chapter 4 – Preparing and cooking seafood

Part 2 – Recipes

Chapter 5 – Soups, stews, and mixed seafood

Chapter 6 – Large meaty fish, skate, and eels

Chapter 7 – Large Round fish

Chapter 8 – Small round fish

Chapter 9 – Flatfish

Chapter 10 – Crustaceans

Chapter 11 – Mollusks and other seafood

Chapter 12 – Stocks, Sauces, and Basic Recipes

Part 3 – Information

Chapter 13 – Seafood Families

Identifying Seafood – Pictures of seafood animal groups

Classifying Seafood – Species which may be substituted for one another

Index of Recipes

The easiest way to see where this book falls short of `completeness’ is to look at Alan Davidson’s three excellent volumes on seafood of the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and southeast Asia. Davidson’s books may be more for the scholar than for the casual cook, but they do give valuable information on where to find various species, in which local cuisines they commonly occur, and hundreds of ethnically accurate recipes. Stein says very little about regionality or about specific species. Stein is a hedgehog to Davidson’s fox in that Stein concentrates on grouping things best seen in his first and third parts.

His first part covers 57 seafood preparation and cooking techniques independent of any individual recipe, although he ingeniously links each technique with a specific recipe in Part 2 so that you can embed the technique within the recipe. In comparison, the best two other books on culinary techniques, Jacques Pepin’s `Complete Techniques’ and James Peterson’s `Essentials of Cooking’ have 32 and 18 techniques respectively on fish cookery. And, while I think Pepin’s procedures are models of instruction, his pictures are in black and white, which looses a bit for the beginner. These differences become a bit less impressive for an amateur when you look at the specific techniques and realize that there are many techniques here which you are unlikely to ever use, especially those dealing with breaking down a whole fish.

The last part is also a great resource for the amateur cook in that it gives some ideas on what seafood species may be substituted for another. These sections also give some information on the regions of the world in which you are likely to find each species genus. As such, it gives some of the information you will find in Davidson, but organized `vertically’ by genus or larger biological category rather than by species and location. This section, especially the `seafood families’ chapter may take some study for those of us who slept through biology class when the aquatic phyla were being covered, as groupings are often given in unfamiliar terms such as `cephalopods’. Oddly other groupings are given in very common names such as `the herring family’ or `mackerel and tuna’. The academic in me finds this annoying, not that the author did not stick to scientific names, but that there was no parallelism in section naming. The `cephalopods’ section would have been better named `squid and its relatives’. The most entertaining section is the `identifying seafood’ sections with what I believe are scale pictures of 98 representatives of seafood species. The selection is just a bit Eurocentric, as a picture of what I would certainly call a `Maine’ lobster is named a `European Lobster’. And, while there are six crab pics, none are the primary American West Coast species generally called the Dungeness crab. The very last section, `classifying seafood’, is useful for matching up a particular fish with a method in Part 1. This tells me, for example, that the north Atlantic goosefish is a variety of monkfish and the wolfish can be treated like a sea catfish.

The middle part on recipes may be where the notion of `completeness’ may lead one to the biggest disappointments. This chapter, for example, has but one simple recipe for court bouillon while Mark Bittman’s excellent `Fish’ book has three different recipes, including one traditional French recipe and a Cajun `couboillon’ recipe. In several other examples I find Stein’s recipes to be less than the best. I compared his New England clam chowder recipe with one from Jasper White’s definitive ’50 Chowders’ and I find Stein’s recipe pretty uninspired. I say this with confidence because I have made several of White’s chowders and they are uniformly excellent dishes. Another symptom that the book is less than complete is the fact that there is no recipe for `New York’ clam chowder.

My final word on this book is that if you aspire to be a serious seafood cook, you need at least three books. This volume in addition to Mark Bittman’s book of recipes and at least Alan Davidson’s book of North Atlantic seafood. It would be best to have all three.

A superior book in many ways, but not complete!

Review by wianno:

Along with Bittman’s opus, this is the one that I turn to when cooking fish. I love the way that he describes the types of fish — it allows one to go beyond the actual text and thing of ways to prepare. But if you are a “by the list” cook, you will not at all be let down. The receipts in this book are fantastic and well worth the cover charge. I have had it since it came out in its American edition and am most glad that I bought it. This book was recently reviewed as one of the top ten cookbooks ever in the UK’s Waitrose magazine — and they know that of which they write.

Review by Ronald Partridge:

I have purchased several books on seafood hoping to find one that is devoted to the basics of buying seafood (intended for the seafood challenged). This is the book I was searching for ! It describes the various varieties of fish and shellfish, gives alternate names for them, tells something about them, gives ideas for preparation and recipes and tells what to look for in buying them. It is well organized by alphabetical listing of names and very easy to use. I have spent considerably more on other seafood books but this is my favorite.

Review by Christopher R. Travers:

I bought this book as part of a birthday present for my wife. It is a wonderful reference on the subject.

The book is largely a reference guide to fresh and prepared fish and shellfish (generally). It is in a standard field-guide format with a section of pictures, and a larger section describing the seafood, how to select it, preparation suggestions, etc.

This is not a “cookbook” as such. However, it is very helpful or people who may want to have such a handy reference.