The Essential Seafood Cookbook

As a beginner seafood cook, I found this book very useful! TONS of pictures throughout, and pics of how to prepare many types of seafood. If you eat gluten and/or diary free there are many recipes one can use in this book. Every recipe I've tried has turned out great, I highly recommend it.

Can any seafood lover have too many great seafood cookbooks? I don't think so! This is one to add to the collection or start one with. It has all the basics such as how to buy, prepare, from soups to dips to pates to frying to poaching to casseroles to grilling. One can have specialty books on each of these, but here combined in very nice color layout with over 300 pages of wealth of seafood info. The glossary which has color photo os each variety is worth the purchase alone, but don't stop there. Recipes range from standard fare which are valuable to have including multiple variations of each, e.g. New England Clam Chowder; However, there is even some knockout unique recipes here, e.g. Prawn Burgers with Cocktail Sauce; or "Salmon and Pasta Frittata'. Other nice features of this are its excellent layout and photos, each recipe has difficulty rating as well as prep and total cooking time and serving listings. The interested seafood beginner or lover will find much too delight one's tastebuds with in this excellent seafood compendium cookbook. And at $20, makes a great gift!

This is currently my favorite cookbook and I believe the entire "The Essential .... Cookbook" series is magnificent for beginning cooks and more experienced ones alike. Pros: 1) Every recipe includes a very high quality photo. 2) Every recipe has a 1 to 3 star rating indicating the difficulty and includes the preparation and total cooking time alone with the total servings. 3) It is very diverse in the recipe styles, from stir fry to southwest to Mediterranean and from soups to grilling to casseroles. 4) It offers a number of brief special feature sections: Seafood sauces, coating & batters, seafood platters, etc. Cons: 1) If you enjoy this cookbook as much as I do and begin to expand your "The Essential ... Cookbook" collection you will find that many of the recipes are repetitive. For example, The Essential Wok Cookbook and The Essential Seafood Cookbook have some of the same seafood stir fry recipes. 2) There is no nutritional information section. 3) In connection to my earlier comment # 3 in Pros, since it is so diverse, some of the recipes will clearly never make it into my kitchen. Anyone for Garfish with Rice Stuffing? (If you are even considering this, wait until you see the picture!) I listed the Cons for informational purposes, but I clearly think they are dwarfed by the Pros that I have outlined above. FYI - The Chilli Crab and Tomato Dip on pg. 59 is a definite crowd pleaser!

I own this book and every time I open it I always get impressed by the amount of work in it.No wonder since this is a book by KONEMANN.All their books are "CREME DE LA CREME"!!!It has virtually hundreds of recipies ,all with beautiful full colour photographs about every living thing in the sea.There are loads of information on techniques and ingredients and the recipies are delicious and diverse.Don't be fooled by the price, there are lots of books costing twice as much as this and they are not even worth looking at.KONEMANN'S books are always underpriced!It's worth buying this book even if you never cook a single recipe from it.The richness and beauty of it alone are worth the price.