Seafood bowls are perfect for unfussy weekday meals when you need something tasty, easy to make, and brimming with variety. And to top it off, using fillets of wild-caught seafood as your protein, you can have any seafood bowl on the table in under 30 minutes — even sooner, if you’re savvy enough to have some components already prepped.
Here are 7 recipes for wild-caught seafood bowls that will get you through the week. Use these recipes as inspiration rather than as set rules, as these meals are infinitely customizable, depending on what you’ve got in your kitchen to cook with.
Teriyaki Salmon With Noodles
This teriyaki salmon noodle bowl from The Cozy Apron is easy to love and even easier to make. You’ll just need to think about it ahead of time so that you can marinate your salmon in teriyaki sauce so that it gets charged up with flavor. The finished noodle bowl gets dressed in a complementary sesame-ginger sauce.
If you’ll allow us to make one major adaptation to the recipe, rather than cutting the salmon into cubes before cooking it on a grill pan, leave your fish intact and with the skin on; leaving the skin on will act as a barrier that can help keep your fillets moist and tender, even if the skin ends up sticking to the pan. Once it’s cooked, cut into pieces or flake into your bowl.
Crispy Salmon and Farro
The Kitchn’s farro bowl with crispy, pan-seared salmon is a delicious mix of textures and flavors, and very easy to assemble. The recipe doesn’t specify which side of the salmon to put down first into the hot pan, but if you’ve made salmon with crispy skin before, you know that you need to put the skin-side down first. One other thing to note: The recipe has you cooking farro from scratch — which takes about 30 minutes to do — but you could make a big batch of it and freeze portions of it for future use to cut down on cook time the next time you make this bowl.
Easy Salmon Poke
For a weekday poke bowl, check out our own super easy recipe for wild salmon poke*, served with fresh cucumber, ripe avocado, nori, and whatever other toppings you want to throw in there — maybe carrots, steamed sugar snap peas, or even thinly sliced shiitakes. Serve over steamed rice.
Halibut Poke With Hearts of Palm
As a white fish alternative, try this poke bowl from Hank Shaw made with the unexpected combination of halibut and hearts of palm. The flavor profile is otherwise straightforward, using soy sauce, sesame oil, lime juice, and some onions and spice. While the recipe doesn’t specifically suggest a rice or grain to serve with the poke, we think the white cubes of halibut would look gorgeous against a bowl of brown rice, soba, or even black rice noodles.
Cod With Curried Cashews and Soba
Chock full of umami, Self’s recipe for a cod soba bowl is topped with curried cashews, sauteed mushrooms, and garlicky glaze. It’s perhaps the most labor-intensive dish on this list since you’ll have to roast the cashews while you’re cooking up the rest of the ingredients on the stove top — it’s certainly not hard to do, but it is an extra step. Consider roasting up a full pan of cashews to have them ready to use for this recipe, since you’ll definitely have it on repeat.
Curried Cod With Rice and Hard Boiled Eggs
Bon Appetit’s recipe for curried cod with rice and boiled eggs takes its cues from kedgeree, an Anglo-Indian dish. You’ll want to make the rice from scratch for this seafood bowl, as you’ll actually be steaming your cod fillets on top of the rice. Serve with hard boiled eggs — or, shorten the time that your eggs are cooking to around 7 minutes so that the yolks are nice and jammy.
Cod Taco Bowls With Mango Salsa
For a veggie-forward lunch or dinner, try making this recipe for cod taco bowls from How Sweet Eats. Seasoned with a simple spice mixture, you’ll broil the cod fillets, whose charred flavor plays well against the freshness of the mango pico and the raw veggies loaded into the bowls. The broiling is the only cooking required for this dish, since everything else just needs to be sliced or mixed together — so if this seafood bowl is your thing, you can have most of it prepared ahead of time for repeat consumption.
*Consuming raw or undercooked seafood and shellfish may increase your risk of foodborne illness. Therefore, we recommend only using cooked salmon in this recipe. For any raw or semi-raw preparations, be sure the salmon has been properly frozen previously.
