Seafood Ceviche

Listed under Recipes.Theme

From the original article on October 1, 2021. Author: Forest Seeker.

First off, let's address the elephant in the room: is ceviche a soup? I say it is, and I've got “research” to back it up. Etymologically, “ceviche” can be traced back to the Persian word “sikbāg,” a combination of their words for “vinegar” (sik) and “soup” (bāg). While the use of vinegar in ceviche has largely been abandoned in favor of citrus, it appears that the dish originally was a sort of fresh seafood pickle, where the seafood was denatured in vinegar instead of citrus. But it was a soup, okay? It’s in the ancient Persian name—doesn't get more traditional than that!

Summer is a time of free-floating action punctuated by hazy languor. Long days, short nights, and nature flourishing around you. What better way to celebrate such days than with fresh seafood, herbs, and vegetables prepared almost directly before consumption? In a perfect world, when you sit down on your back porch to enjoy your ceviche, the seafood would have been in the ocean that morning and the vegetables would have been plucked from your garden a few hours before. That is how to enjoy the bounty of summer properly: collecting ingredients directly from the land and sea and eating them before the sun sets. In proper happy-go-lucky summer fashion, you don't even need any heat to make this dish—just fresh ingredients and some deft knife work.

Author’s note on the preparation: if you're unsure of the quality of your seafood, by all means, cook it. I recommend steaming. Besides seafood quality, the most important thing in this dish is consistent knife work. This is a great opportunity for you to hone your dicing. Keeping the size of your ingredients consistent will lead to a beautiful presentation, which makes a noticeable difference in flavor. Evenly sized ingredients mix together better, and perhaps even taste better this way because they just look so damn nice (the human mind is funny like that).

Recipe customization: There's lots of room to make this recipe your own, starting with your source of protein. Almost any seafood that can be eaten raw when fresh—and this describes the majority of good quality fish and shellfish—can be substituted in for the shrimp in this recipe, and the options begin to get a little intimidating once you open the door to mixing multiple types! Some suggestions would be fresh scallops, squid, tuna, mackerel, or sea bass. I also hear that Peruvian limes are far superior to other variants for ceviche recipes, so if you can secure them you should absolutely use them.

Ingredients

• 1 pound raw shrimp, peeled, deveined, tail removed, cut into roughly 1/2-inch segments
• 3/4 cup freshly squeezed lime juice
• ¼ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1 cup of 50%-peeled cucumber (reference), de-seeded if excessively seedy, diced into 1/4 to 1/2-inch segments (removing 50% of our cucumber peel in an alternating pattern keeps the segments from liquefying into mush, while ensuring that the peel itself doesn't become too noticeable in the mouth-feel of the dish)
• 1 cup cherry tomatoes, quartered
• 1/2-cup finely chopped fresh cilantro
• 1/2 cup red onion, cut into 1/2-inch segments. Run under cool water in a strainer for 1 minute and allow to dry a bit (they don't need to be perfectly dry)
• 1 jalapeno pepper, seeds removed, finely diced
• Kosher salt (for seasoning)
• 1 medium to large avocado cut into, you guessed it, 1/2-inch segments
• 1 cup pineapple cut into 1/4-inch segments

Makes 4 servings.

Instructions

1. Mix your lime and lemon juice. Place your shrimp in a bowl with 1/2 of the resulting mixture. Stir perhaps 1-2 times to make sure all your shrimp gets time submerged in the citrus. Leave this somewhere cool (your fridge or a cooler) for 60 minutes. If 1/2 cup isn't enough to mostly submerge your shrimp, squeeze more lemons or limes (whatever you've got around) into bowl until it is. This process of soaking citrus denatures the protein in seafood—not quite cooking it, but still significantly changing the texture and killing some pathogens that may be present.
2. Mix everything but the avocado together into a bowl (if you add the avocado now you risk turning your ceviche into mushy green guacamole paste). Season with salt to taste.
3. Add the avocado and mix together gently. Garnish with cilantro and/or parsley. Enjoy!

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