Want to surprise guests with a gourmet salad? Nothing is easier! Buy a pack of sea cocktail - and you are guaranteed success. Add to it various vegetables, cheese, boiled eggs. Even those ladies who are on strict diets will not refuse such a salad. After all, seafood, of which the cocktail is made, is low-calorie. Enjoying such a salad, you seem to be transported to a tavern somewhere in Greece or Italy, where a light breeze sways the tops of cypress trees. Shrimps, squid rings, octopus slices, mussels and other shellfish - all these products make up a sea cocktail. A salad of them simply cannot be tasteless. You just need to defrost the bag correctly, boil or fry its contents, mix with other ingredients and season with some sauce. At first glance, it seems that it's easy? And there is! Although the culinary process itself is not without some secrets. And in this article we will reveal them to you. In addition, below you will find a selection of interesting recipes for delicious sea cocktail salads.
Product pretreatment
Alas, those who live in the depths of the continent, far from the coasts, can buy seafood only in frozen form. This is a very perishable product. Therefore, the “Sea cocktail” - an assortment of frozen clams and crustaceans - is a semi-finished product that still needs to be “brought to mind”. This can be done in two ways: boil or fry. But no matter what you cook from a sea cocktail - salad, soup or a hot dish - you need to unfreeze the semi-finished product. This will help get rid of excess fluid. How to do this? Pour the contents of the package into a bowl and place it on the shelf of the refrigerator. The longer the defrosting process lasts, the tastier the seafood. So do not rush to heat them in hot water or a microwave. To boil a sea cocktail, you need to pour it in salted boiling water, into which we have already lowered the bay leaf, several peas of pepper and poured a little lemon juice. For frying, we heat the pan with vegetable oil (preferably olive). Pour the semi-finished product, salt and season with spices. Remember that seafood is protein. The longer they cook, the harder they become. If you don’t want the squid rings to turn into something like a rubber band for hair, cook them for no more than two or three minutes.
Seafood salad recipe “Sea cocktail with tomatoes”
For this dish, defrost a half-kilogram pack of semi-finished product and boil in salted and lemon acidified water. Next, proceed to the next steps.
- We’re fishing seafood on a plate with a slotted spoon or we discard them in a colander and cool to room temperature.
- We cut ten cherry tomatoes (or three ordinary medium-sized tomatoes) into quarters / slices.
- One hundred grams of hard cheese is rubbed with small chips.
- A few lettuce leaves in ice water, shake off moisture, tear with our hands on the dish.
- We cut ten black pitted olives into thin rings. Mix all the ingredients.
- Now we are preparing a salad dressing “Sea cocktail with tomatoes”. To do this, grind a clove of garlic, put it in a mortar. Pour in a spoonful of soy sauce and olive oil. We push garlic to give its flavor to liquids.
- Water the dish with dressing. Stir with a wooden stick and serve.
With fresh cucumber and corn
A delicious salad of a sea cocktail is obtained if you add tender, crunchy ingredients and a sweet touch to it. We will provide this last with the introduction of milk corn and raisins in the dish. An exotic combination of products, guests will surely appreciate.
- Defrost a sea cocktail (a standard pack of half a kilo), fry or boil to your taste. Some people like juicy shrimps with a pale pink color. Others love seafood in oil with a toasted barrel.
- Pour a handful of raisins with hot water so that the berries swell a little.
- Boil the egg hard boiled. Peel it and chop finely together with two fresh cucumbers, a small tomato and a few feathers of green onions.
- We tear five leaves of lettuce with our hands on a wide dish.
- We mix the ingredients, adding strained raisins, three tablespoons of canned sweet corn, and chopped greens. We spread the mass on lettuce leaves.
- Squeeze lemon juice in mayonnaise (to taste). Mix and spread on a salad slide.
- Sprinkle with peeled fried sunflower seeds or sesame seeds.
- If you do not like mayonnaise, you can replace it with another delicious sauce. Mix olive oil with lemon juice, salt, add a pinch of ground black pepper. You can sprinkle with pine nuts.
With bell pepper
This delicious salad with a sea cocktail also looks elegant. Especially if you take yellow pepper for it. Green salad leaves, red tomatoes, white seafood and black olives will complement the palette. We unfreeze the semi-finished product. Stirring, fry seafood in a dry pan for two minutes. Let’s cool. Three small tomatoes cut into slices. Remove the stalk with seeds from the pepper. Scale the pulp with boiling water and cut into strips. Tear a few crisp lettuce leaves with your hands. Grind one hundred grams of hard cheese on a fine grater. Sometimes it is cut into thin plates. Squeeze the garlic clove through a press, mix with a small amount of vegetable oil, a pinch of salt and black pepper. Add grapefruit juice. This dressing water the dish. Gently mix, trying not to crush the tomatoes.
Greek salad recipe with sea cocktail
Defrost a half-kilogram packet of the semi-finished product and boil it in salted water with spices. We recline in a colander. While the seafood is cooled, cut a bunch of parsley. Just finely cut into half rings a glass of green pitted olives. Cooking the sauce. Peel the garlic clove, chop and crush in a mortar with a pinch of black pepper and a coffee spoon of salt. Add the juice from half a lemon and a third of a glass of olive oil. Choose a few large shrimp to decorate the salad. Grind the sea cocktail, mix with olives and parsley. Pour over the sauce. Garnish with whole shrimps. We put the salad in the refrigerator for half an hour. Serve on green leaves. Sometimes in such a salad add diced feta.
Appetizer with arugula and fresh cucumber
Italian herbs perfectly emphasize the piquancy and tenderness of a sea cocktail. Seafood salad with spicy arugula - a light and very healthy dish. Cucumber will give it even more freshness. It is done as follows.
- Boil half a pack of sea-assorted (250 g) until cooked, decanted, cooled.
- A handful of my arugula, shake off excess moisture, tear with our hands.
- Two fresh cucumbers are peeled and chopped with a shallow straw.
- One hundred grams of green olives without stones are cut into halves.
- Mix all the ingredients of the salad. Salt and pepper it.
- You can use yogurt for dressing. As a second sauce, mix olive oil with lemon juice in the proportions you like. Pour the dish and serve it right there.
You can also add to the salad as you wish: Iceberg leaves, purple basil, mint. Green olives can be replaced with black olives. It will turn out equally delicious if you add boiled quail eggs to the list of ingredients. They, like olives, should be cut into halves.
Sea Salad
If you follow this recipe, then the semi-finished product needs to be thawed and fried in olive oil. The heat treatment time depends on the size of the shrimp and other seafood. Therefore, focus on the instructions written on the package. Grind large seafood. We cover the dish or portioned bowls with salad leaves. Hard boiled three eggs. We cut them as small as possible. Peel one large cucumber or two medium ones, cut into thin strips. We mix all the ingredients of the dish. Lettuce from a sea cocktail in oil spread a slide on green leaves. Mix mayonnaise with lemon or lime juice. We squeeze it through the culinary bag onto the salad in the form of a “rose”. Sprinkle a handful of chopped pistachios in the dish. There is a second sauce option for this salad. It is necessary to mix 4 tbsp. l mayonnaise with 2 tbsp. l ketchup and 2 tbsp. l cognac.
With tomatoes and avocado
Boil 200 grams of assorted seafood. Grind large pieces of squid and octopus. We clean one avocado fruit, cut into a cube. To prevent the flesh from darkening, sprinkle it with lemon juice. Add one large tomato, cut into slices, to the avocado. Squeeze a clove of garlic. Shuffle. Fans of spicy can add to this mass cut into small rings of chili pepper pod. Add seafood and mix. We tear four lettuce leaves with our hands on a wide dish. Add a handful of arugula. We spread salad with sea cocktail on a green "pillow". The recipe offers two gas stations to choose from. The first is olive oil mixed with lemon juice. The second sauce is mayonnaise, in which we add some mustard.
With crab sticks and cheese
There are two variations of this seafood salad. Sea cocktail can be supplemented with red fish and caviar. This is a festive option. And on weekdays, we add 100 g of crab sticks to half a kilogram of seafood boiled in salted and acidified lemon water. We clean them from packaging and cut. Hard boiled four eggs. We cut them in the same way as the sticks (or in the same slices as red fish). Mix all the ingredients of the salad. Dress with mayonnaise, add. Top three hard cheese. Garnish with red caviar.