Seafood salad can be served as an appetizer or a main course. Fresh and lite, it’s excellent in the summer but also perfect all year round, particularly for special occasions.
The ingredients
The great thing about this salad is how it melds multiple flavors, all from the sea. You’ll find mussels, clams, squid, shrimp, and octopus, along with a variety of herbs that make it all fresh and delicious. If you prefer, you can give the mussels and clams a miss and use only squid, octopus, and shrimp, but it just won’t be the same.
Seafood salad recipe
Preparing a seafood salad is very simple, but you need to have a bit of patience with the different cooking times and make sure to clean all of the ingredients well. To speed things up, you can, of course, buy everything already cleaned from your fishmonger.
Otherwise, the first thing you should do is clean the squid and octopus and cook them separately in boiling water (the squid for 15 minutes and the octopus for 40 minutes). Then chop them both into pieces.
While the squid and octopus are cooking, you can clean the mussels, pulling off the hairy “beard,” and soak the clams in cold water to let them purge.
Then cook the mussels and clams separately to let them open. Use two pans and add in just a bit of water. Cover with a lid and they will be ready in a few minutes. Let them cool for a bit, then shuck them.
Parboil the shrimp after deveining them (removing the small grey vein along the back) and let them cool.
Combine all of the ingredients and dress with oil, salt, and pepper. Let the salad chill in the refrigerator for one hour. Serve with salsa verde.
Salsa verde recipe
Salsa verde is the perfect sauce for many cold seafood-based dishes and is an absolute must when serving seafood salad.
Making it is super simple. Just blend together fresh parsley with oil, anchovies, capers, lemon juice, and salt. You can also add in a clove of garlic, depending on your tastes.
All you need is a teaspoon of salsa verde for each serving of salad.
As you can see, making seafood salad isn’t all that difficult, but you should be careful not to make any inexcusable mistakes, like the ones in the gallery above.
5 mistakes to avoid
Say no to surimi (imitation crab meat). Some recipes will call for it, but we advise against it.
Don’t use frozen seafood. Fresh ingredients are a must with this dish.
Don’t underestimate the importance of herbs.
Don’t cook everything together. Each ingredient has its own individual cooking time and method. The recipe requires a bit of patience, but it’s worth it in the end.
Don’t forget to clean all of your ingredients well, from removing the beards on the mussels to deveining the shrimp.