What's The Best Seafood To Pair With Pesto?
Short answer
Any seafood can be paired with pesto, but the biggest gains are with cheaper fish.
Long answer
Our two favourite foods in the world are pesto and lobster, which must mean that pairing the two will create something incredible, right? Well, it's not that simple. Lobster is such a special treat that when we're dropping £50/kg on the finest creature in the ocean, we want to taste it in its unadulterated glory.
Adding a dollop of pesto to a traditional lobster thermidor recipe works very nicely, and we've achieved some pretty good results pairing pesto with mussels, scallops, and tuna. Generally, though, we tend to reach for pesto when we find ourselves with more affordable seafood like mackerel and salmon or white fish like pollock, basa, or whiting that, bless them, don't boast masses of flavour by themselves.
Depending on the seafood in question, we use pesto slightly differently. For flash-frying prawns, as part of a stir-fry, we simply add a little pesto to the wok for the final seconds of cooking. For whole fish, mackerel and bream in particular, we like mixing two parts pesto with 1 part butter and stuffing the fish generously before putting it on the BBQ.
For whole salmon fillets, we strongly advocate mixing pesto with breadcrumbs, grated hard cheese, and lemon zest and grilling until the fish is cooked through and the top is bubbling and crispy. This makes for an impressive dinner party centrepiece but is equally at home being served as a cold salad among friends on a lazy Sunday.