Food - Drink
The Seafood Cooking Technique Even A Novice Can Master
By HEATHER LIM
Seafood is incredibly temperamental and requires more delicate handling than other meats. Fish is easy to botch, due to its shorter muscle fibers and fewer connective tissues that make it prone to drying out, but simply shortening your cooking time isn't the best solution, so try changing your cooking method.
The USDA recommends that seafood be cooked to an internal temperature of 145 degrees Fahrenheit, and a way to ensure delicious seafood that is neither overcooked nor risky to your health is to steep it in hot water. Unlike boiling, poaching, or sous vide, steeping will cook the seafood entirely while keeping it tender.
All you have to do for this method is add hot water to your fish, shrimp, squid, or whatever else and steep it like tea. You can either use hot water from a teapot or just-boiled water heated up on your stove; the only trick is to pay close attention to your steeping seafood, since some species cook much faster than others.
You can even add flavoring to your steeping liquid to make this method even more convenient. Salty water works excellently as a steeping medium for softer fish like cod, while shrimp and squid benefit from a strong broth made with salt, sugar, vinegar, and aromatics; you can even use fish broth if you have it on hand.