San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Pasta & cod pull a surprise on S.F.’s iconic cioppino stew
Tomato-anchovy broth is the base for this simpler dish
I take a lot of pleasure in updating and adapting recipes, either my own or others. I’ve been on a kick actually, and my last column on baked brie is a good example. I didn’t invent the dish (and I’m still very interested to find out who did), where often the baked wheel of cheese is stuffed with jam, nuts or a savory mix of mushrooms. But I found that stuffing the cheese with a hefty amount of fresh herbs and coarse black pepper is delicious and revitalizes the dish.
Cioppino, the very quintessentially San Francisco seafood and tomato stew, is one dish I actually never thought I’d adapt. It always seemed untouchable. “It’s already so good, and if you omit the crab like you want to, you’ll get cancelled,” I said to myself. Plus, it’s so easy to order here at a restaurant, I thought. Is it worth the time and effort?
It’s also a dish The Chronicle has covered. Chronicle reporter Tara Duggan wrote up a fun non-recipe recipe with plenty of adaptation ideas in 2014 (find it at tinyurl.com/cioppinoSFC). Even the New York Times got in the San Francisco cioppino game recently when it published Anchor Oyster Bar’s beloved, and roughly 30-ingredient, complex recipe.
However, when a friend served me a very simple yet delicious version of the iconic stew recently, I felt like I had been cioppino-starving myself. For too damn long I thought this stew had to be super involved to be cioppino and too laborious for a weeknight. His version threw the maximalist fish stew idea out the window and focused on one main fish: cod. A tomato-anchovy broth with bloomy saffron and tender potato chunks was more than enough flavor, too, fishy and all.
What follows is a recipe that might get me kicked out of San Francisco. It’s for cioppino pasta. Classically, the dish is not a pasta dish at all, but versions I’ve had that have noodles have always been my favorite.
Traditionally, cioppino has a ton of different fish in it too, especially local Dungeness crab.
But, I do not call for a lot of different fish or even crab here — alas, I don’t like getting super messy while eating; getting down with thorny, tomatodrenched claws doesn’t do it for me, sorry! Also, making a rustic stew might sound cheap, but calling for several fish types can make it decidedly really spendy. So, I’ve tried to keep the fishy ingredient list tight here.
Don’t fret though, I haven’t adapted the fish out of this cioppino pasta. Local white fish flakes, plump mussels and rosy shrimp are all in the mix. Salty anchovies add umami to a bright wine and tomato broth that’s slightly spicy, very garlicky and perfumed with bay laurel. The penne rigate soaks in all of that, plumping up for a starchy, saucy base that’s perhaps nonclassical but still feels very San Francisco.