Cioppino - San Francisco Fish Stew (EASY but TASTY recipe)

If this pug can run a hotel, you can make Cioppino

I was lucky enough to visit San Francisco last year. I stayed at a hotel which is run by a pug that has his own facebook page. I also met a homeless man who became world famous for jumping out of a bush. True story.

A signature local dish is a tomato and fish stew called Cioppino (pronounced Chuh-PEE-no). I spent the whole time saying I was going to try it, and didn't get round to it in the few days I was there. I promised myself I would have a go at cooking it back home in England, and it turns out that it's amazingly easy.

Cioppino recipes vary, which is good for me because I never have the attention span to follow recipes to the letter. You can make it as cheap or as fancy as you like depending what seafood you go for. In mine, I've gone for some blue swimmer crab pieces, some mussels, scallops, squid and lots of prawns. It's probably not that cheap for each bowl, but it's a pay-day treat. You can use any combination of fish you want, so for a cheap version you could probably use leftover cuts of fish if you've any in the freezer. Even crabsticks would probably work for a cheap alternative and it would still be delicious.

For an accurate recipe of Cioppino, google it. There's loads of good recipes out there. I googled a few recipes, then forgot what I'd read and just freestyled it as usual.

Essentially, it's 2 tins of chopped tomatoes, 2 tins of chicken and/or fish stock (I just used one of the tomato tins to measure from), and 1 tin of white wine. Use this liquid to make a soup with garlic, onion, parsely, oregano and basil. Then cook it for about half an hour, then throw all your seafood in. When it's cooked thoroughly, eat it with lots of bread.

A borrowed Cioppino picture. Sorry, internet.

I was hungry and got stuck in without taking a picture of it, so here's an 'illustrative' picture of the dish from someone else's website.

What I can't stress enough is how easy this recipe is to make. It's like you can't get it wrong! If you like tomato soup and seafood, then this is an ideal dish for an amateur chef to make to impress friends. It is really, really tasty. They'll think that you have ritually sacrificed and cooked Jamie Oliver, then eaten his flesh to absorb his internal genius and external punchability.


For reference, this is the recipe I followed the closest.