Introduction to Cioppino of San Francisco
I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay area of California for 8 years now. Cioppino holds its place as my favorite Seafood dish.
It’s simple, clean and really brings out the flavor and essence of the sea.
It’s halfway between soup and stew, based on a simple broth of wine, fish stock and tomatoes, seasoned with Italian herbs and a foundation of sauteed garlic, onions, carrots, and fennel. You’re sure to be pleased by its tangy, savory and slightly aromatic accents that let the seafood flavor stand out.
The seafood in Cioppino runs the gamut of mussels, clams, calamari, fin fish and crustaceans. There are no hard and fast rules for what to throw in so long as it’s not overcooked.
The recipe originates from the nineteenth century San Francisco fish market. Those unfortunate fishermen who returned without any catch would make the rounds of all the others, bucket in hand, collecting whatever the other fishermen could spare. What was in the bucket would become their meal, as cioppino. In other words, you choose a random selection of your favorite seafood for Cioppino.
San Francisco Restaurants for Cioppino and Seafood
Treat yourself to the best Cioppino San Francisco has to offer at the Anchor Oyster Bar, at 579 Castro Street, between Pacific Heights and Noe Valley. Otherwise, enjoy it at Scoma’s Seafood on Fisherman’s Wharf, 1965 Al Scoma Way. My third recommendation, which applies to San Franciscan seafood in general, is the Swan Oyster Depot, at 1517 Polk Street.
How to Make Cioppino at Home
It’s straightforward and easy to prepare in less than 45 minutes once you have all the ingredients at hand.
Ingredients for HomeMade Cioppino
3 tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Approximately 1 cup each, chopped:
- Celery
- Carrots
- Onions
- Fennel
Additional Ingredients for the Soup Base:
- Six cloves chopped garlic
- 1/4 teaspoon each of salt, fresh ground pepper, crushed chilis, dry oregano, fresh chopped thyme
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 cup red wine
- 2 cups fish stock
- 2 cups chopped tomatoes
Seafood to add 10 minutes before serving:
- 1 dozen live mussels
- 1 dozen live manila clams
- 6 ounces peeled, uncooked prawns
- 6 ounces cleaned, sliced calamari
- 1 dozen bay scallops
- 6 ounces fin fish, cubed (halibut, flounder, cod, rockfish, salmon, etc)
- 1 Dungeness crab, pre-cooked, cleaned, broken into four leg clusters
First Prepare the Soup Base for the Cioppino
Start by sauteing together the chopped onions, celery, carrots, and fennel in olive oil on medium to high heat.
Season the sauteed base with salt and pepper, chopped garlic, crushed chillies, dry crushed oregano, fresh chopped thyme, and bay leaves,
Continue cooking for another 5 minutes then add wine. I prefer a cheap Zinfandel from Lodi.
Continue to cook on high heat for an additional 5 minutes to reduce the wine, then add fish stock or clam juice. You can also crumble in a bouillon cube, either fish or vegetable stock with water.
Continue to cook on medium high heat for another 5 minutes to reduce the soup base.
Up until this point, you’ve simply prepared the foundation for the seafood stew, which you can do in advance. Now it’s time to add the key ingredients – tomatoes and seafood.
Add Chopped Tomatoes to the Cioppino Soup Base
Add chopped fresh tomatoes from your garden, or a large can of chopped tomatoes. Bring the pan back to a boil then reduce the heat to a simmer for another 15 minutes.
Add the Seafood to the Soup Base for the Cioppino
Now it’s time to add the seafood. The entire operation for cooking the seafood to serving at the table should take a maximum of 10 minutes.
First add the live mussels and the clams, which take the longest to cook. Add the prawns immediately after the mussels and clams. When the bivalves begin to open and the prawns begin to turn opaque, about three minutes after adding them, add the cubed fish and scallops. After no more than 3 additional minutes, add the pre-cooked, shelled crab to the hot mixture. Then immediately remove the pan from the heat and take it to the table.
Above all, you do not want to overcook the seafood to the point where the cubed fish falls apart. As for the Dungeness crab, note that it has already been cooked, so you’re merely warming it up to serving temperature, for a more pleasing culinary experience at the table.
At the table, sprinkle the Cioppino with chopped Italian parsley. The perfect accompaniment is garlic toast, which you can prepare well in advance and pop into a 400 F oven about twenty minutes before beginning to add the seafood to the Cioppino. You can embellish garlic bread by toasting it open face with Parmesan cheese and Italian herbs. See my post on preparing garlic bread here (coming soon).
Sourcing the Seafood for Cioppino
When you source the mussels look for the plumpest, fattest, orangest mussels you can find, which will take some trial and error.
Reliable sources of mussels on the West Coast are from British Columbia, where the combination of cold water and upwelling yields the plumpest, fattest mussels available, or from the Penn Cove on Whidbey Island, of Washington State.
In San Francisco you can source the remaining seafood at Four Star Seafood, with a retail outlet on 24th Street in Noe Valley. They sell fresh clams, Dungeness crab, both live and precooked and a wide variety of fish. For high quality, frozen scallops try Whole Foods, with a shop across the street from Four Star Seafood.
Otherwise, you can take a trip to Half Moon Bay where you’ll find an excellent fishmonger near the intersection of Highways 1 and 90.
If you happen to be in the neighborhood of Point Reyes Station, a small town about a 90-minute drive north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, on Highway 101 and then west on Sir Francis Drake Blvd, then definitely sample the live mussels available from the Tomales Bay Oyster Farm, or from the Hog Island Oyster Farm, a few miles up the road. Both companies often sell live mussels and clams as well as local oysters.
Incidentally, it’s well worth a trip out to Point Reyes Station for the live oysters, which I’ll cover in far greater depth in another post. Bring a cooler bag with ice, some lemons, Crystal pepper sauce, mignonette sauce and a couple of shucking knives. Buy a few dozen of the medium small oysters, and be sure to try the nugget variety. Perhaps even buy some large oysters for cooking in your next batch of Cioppino.
Cheers!