Cook cleanly
Build your base, stagger the drop, and give every ingredient the time it needs.
Where today’s catch becomes tonight’s meal
Build your best
seafood boil.
Pick your pot, seafood, and flavor. We’ll build the shopping list, drop order, and cook plan.
A plan for your pot. No account needed.
Captain’s principle
Cook for doneness. Soak for flavor—but watch the texture.
Seafood Boil Planner
Let’s plan the pot.
Six quick choices turn into one clear boil plan. Your selections update the dockside summary as you go.
Regional starting points
Start with a coastal tradition.
Apply a researched ingredient mix, then change anything below. These are starting points—not rules about how a region cooks.
01
Your equipment
Choose your pot
Leave headroom. A boil pot should never be filled to the rim.
02
The main event
Choose your seafood
Choose the seafood you have, then adjust its weight below.
8 lb
0 lb
0 lb
0 lb
0 lb
0 lb
0 lb
03
Who’s coming?
Set the table
Suggested seafood8 lbYou’ve selected 8 lb
04
Make it yours
Pick a flavor
05
Turn up the heat
Choose your kick
06
Round out the pot
Choose vegetables & extras
Butter finishes contain milk and scale to your guest count. Nashville Hot is spicy even with a mild boil. Check all packaged ingredients for other allergens.
How this scales: vegetables and sausage scale to the crowd. Each selected vegetable is a full side portion; choosing many makes a generous spread. Seafood amounts stay under your control; reapply a regional preset to resize them. Confirm water against your loaded pot and dose seasoning by its label. Your selected seafood mix sets the drop order and working cook windows.
Captain’s Boil School
Temperature is
an ingredient.
Timing changes with the pot, load, weather, and burner. Learn the checkpoints that matter more than the clock.
Cool the exterior
For compatible outdoor equipment, turn off the burner before exterior cooling. Keep water out of the food and away from fuel connections.
Season in the soak
Hot liquid keeps cooking the food. A soak is optional: watch texture as well as flavor, and lift delicate seafood early when needed.
From the Captain’s Notebook
“Don’t chase somebody else’s perfect boil.”
Use this plan as a starting point. Record what happened, what tasted right, and what you’d change. Great boils are repeated—not guessed.
— The Fresh Catch Kitchen crewComing next
Save the ones worth repeating.
Captain’s Log will remember your pot, blend, cooling method, soak, and notes—so next summer’s boil starts with what worked.
In the test kitchenAbout Fresh Catch Kitchen
Gulf roots.
A wider table.
I grew up in Illinois fishing for bluegill and crappie. Those tiny bites of fried fish—almost like fish potato chips—are still some of my favorite food memories.
In my late twenties, I moved to Charleston. I’m a College of Charleston graduate, and I still remember my first she-crab soup while visiting a plantation west of town. Travel brought other unforgettable meals, including octopus on the coast south of Athens, that widened my idea of what seafood could be.
Vacations with my mom and stepdad in St. Kitts brought another set of favorites: conch, scamp, and Caribbean lobster. They’ve had a place there for years, and I’ve been fortunate to spend many vacation weeks with them. Those island meals are part of this kitchen’s story, too.
I reached the Gulf Coast just before forty. It’s home, and I don’t plan to leave. But I’m grateful for every place and every table that helped bring me here.
Fresh Catch Kitchen is rooted in the Gulf, with room for freshwater fish, family favorites, and seafood traditions from around the world. Most nights, the goal is simple: a good meal without hours of work or a shopping list a mile long. Sometimes there’s room for something special. There’s always room to learn.