There’s something particularly comforting about rice recipes, no matter where in the world you’re sourcing your flavors. And whether you’re simply serving rice as a side or making something more composed with it, integrating wild-caught seafood into rice dishes adds a key component of healthy protein to round out the meal.
For when you want to cook something composed, here’s a roundup of 8 rice recipes that feature wild-caught seafood, spanning culinary traditions from East to West.
Salmon with Coconut Rice and Cilantro Sauce
Food Republic pairs up lean salmon with creamy coconut rice — although you really could use any lean, white fish in its place and have an equally delicious meal. This recipe gives you the option to either separately pan sear the salmon for something crispy, or steam the fillets together with the coconut rice in the last ten minutes of cooking. To complement the sweet richness of the coconut rice, you’ll serve this dish with a drizzle of sweet cilantro sauce, made from fresh cilantro pureed with a seasoned simple syrup.
Miso Sablefish with Dirty Shiitake Rice
This recipe from the Cooking Channel for miso sablefish served with dirty shiitake wild rice is a proper umami bomb. As with many miso sablefish recipes, you’ll want to give your fillets an extended period of marination — a full 24 hours, in this case — to get the most flavorful final dish. Once you’re ready to get cooking, remember to start both the wild rice and long grain white rice first, as the sablefish needs less than 15 minutes in the oven. Note: The recipe fails to direct you to mix the cooked wild rice with the long grain rice in its final step; just fluff them together as you mix in the shiitake powder.
Leftover Fish Fried Rice
A great use of leftover, cooked salmon fillets, this recipe from Phoebe Lapine for salmon fried rice keeps things easy without taking shortcuts on health. Shredded cabbage and julienned carrots give this dish fresh texture, while ginger, garlic, lemon juice, and soy sauce give this dish some well-rounded flavor. The fish gets stirred into the mix for the final minute — just enough to heat through. Feel free to use any leftover wild-caught fish fillets you have in the fridge.
Vietnamese Rockfish Stir-Fry
Hank Shaw’s recipe for a Vietnamese-inspired stir-fry would work really well with a thinner fillet like rockfish, which can get nicely browned in a minimal amount of time. The other flavors in the dish are what you might expect in a nuoc cham — lime, sugar, fish sauce, and fresh chilis, which will become a tangy sauce to serve with the fish over a steaming bowl of rice.
Butter-Dijon Salmon Rice Bowl
A decidedly Asian fusion recipe like this salmon rice bowl from How Sweet Eats hits all the right notes: sweet, sour, creamy, and toasty, with a little spice from some quick-pickled fresh ginger. The salmon get baked with a buttery, seasoned dijon mixture, then served over rice with slices of ripe avocado, a drizzle of sesame oil, and a sprinkle of furikake. The one significant change you’ll want to make with this recipe is the cook time, as portioned fillets cook faster than a big two-pounder. Cut the time in half, and check for doneness from there.
Cod with Tomato-Saffron Sauce and Arborio Rice
Food & Wine’s recipe for cod cooked in a tomato-saffron sauce is ideal for summer when you can get your hands on really ripe tomatoes; they’ll give you the sweetness and acidity you need to make a proper sauce. As for the arborio, it’s typically used in a risotto; in this recipe, it’s boiled with aromatic components like bay leaf, orange zest, and cloves, adding mouth-watering complexity to the dish.
Green Olive Tapenade Rice with Seafood
Another Mediterranean seafood and rice recipe, Jamie Oliver’s one-pan fish dish is ridiculously easy to make. You’ll need to have a jar of green olive tapenade in your pantry, as this will be one of the predominant components of the dish, mixed straight into the rice as it cooks. From there, you’ll just add in the rest of the ingredients along the way, including large pieces of whatever wild-caught seafood you want to make for dinner, including whitefish, salmon, or even spot prawns; if you’re using spot prawns, we recommend replacing some or all of the water in this recipe with prawn broth.
Halibut with Buttery Lemongrass Sauce and Lemony Rice Pilaf
Perfect for a rainy day when you have all the time in the world to cook up a fantastic meal of wild-caught seafood — and we say this as a loving preface for a complicated recipe — this maximalist recipe from Ming Tsai for pan-seared halibut is served with a zesty lemon and rice pilaf. Bringing everything together is a buttery lemongrass sauce with tender artichoke hearts, and a watercress salad dressed with a ponzu vinaigrette.
