Few meals can replace a truly good ceviche. Made with fresh ingredients and freshly diced fish, and placed alongside a bowl of hot fresh salted tortilla chips and salsa, there’s nothing better than the world to eat for either a small snack or a hearty dinner.
But ceviche is not a type of meal that you can pull out of the freezer. It must be made fresh and consumed quickly. So how long does ceviche last once it is made?
In order to ensure freshness and prevent the texture from becoming mushy, always eat ceviche within 48 hours of preparing. Also, make sure to purchase fresh, not frozen, seafood for ceviche. The vegetables and seasonings in ceviche will not last long, so it is best to consume the dish quickly.
High quality fresh ingredients are the key to a good ceviche.
How Long Does Ceviche Last?
You must eat ceviche with fresh ingredients. If someone is serving ceviche at a party, they most likely will have made the ceviche earlier that day.
Because lemon and lime juice is so acidic, it can change the texture of the seafood and the other ingredients in the dish if they’re combined for over eight hours.
To serve ceviche at its freshest, serve the dish right after you finish making it.
Keep in mind that ceviche requires a one hour marination time so that the lemon and lime juice can soften and cook the raw seafood as the mixture sits in the fridge. After this marination period, you can add the rest of the ceviche ingredients.
Once you combine all the ceviche ingredients, serve it so it can be devoured quickly.
That being said, you can keep ceviche in the refrigerator for up to 48 hours. After 48 hours, the quality of the ingredients will have degraded noticeably.
Most people dislike the taste and texture of ceviche if it has been sitting in the refrigerator for 3 days.
Eating ceviche after 4 days is practically unheard of. And if you eat it after 5 days, you’re pretty much asking for food poisoning.
Can You Freeze Ceviche?
Technically, yes, you can freeze ceviche. But as a ceviche lover, I do not recommend doing so. Ceviche is meant to be eaten with fresh ingredients.
When you freeze seafood, or any food that has a lot of water, the water will freeze and expand. The water and juice inside fish, shrimp, sea bass, and other seafood will expand and alter the texture of the meat.
Frozen ceviche will not taste as good as freshly made ceviche. If you order ceviche in a restaurant, it will not be made with frozen seafood.
People who love ceviche can tell if seafood has been frozen. The texture of frozen seafood is different from fresh seafood.
Basic Steps for Making Ceviche
Making ceviche in your home is easy. All you have to do is follow a few simple steps and you could be eating ceviche made by your own hands in less than two hours.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Select type of seafood from the seafood ingredient list below. You can also use cooked seafood if you do not want to eat raw seafood. Dice the cooked or raw seafood into small chunks. Place the diced seafood in a bowl.
- Then, cover the seafood in lemon or lime juice. Place the seafood and juice mixture in the fridge and allow the mixture to sit in the fridge for an hour.
- After an hour has passed, remove the mixture from the fridge and add the vegetables, spices, and herbs that you would like in your final ceviche dish.
All of the ingredients must be diced. If you plan to add avocado to your ceviche dish, save it and add it as the very last ingredient.
Possible Ingredients in Ceviche
There are so many ways to prepare ceviche. If you have four or five ingredients, you can make a delicious ceviche in your home. Here is a list of the most common ceviche ingredients.
Save this list for yourself!
The next time you go to a grocery store and you find that there is a fresh shipment of seafood, you can look at this list and make your own ceviche in no time!
Seafood
- Shrimp
- Sea bass
- Halibut
- Corvina
- Dorado
- Mahi mahi
- Tilapia
- Escolar
- Red snapper
Other ingredients
- Lemon juice
- Tomatoes
- Avocado
- Salt
- Onions
- Red onions
- Cilantro
- Serrano peppers
- Cucumbers
- Black pepper
- Chili flakes
- Jalapeno
- Lime juice
- Clamato
- Hot sauce
- Your favorite salsa
- Sliced radishes
Serve ceviche on top of a tostada or on the side with a basket of tortilla chips.
Tips for Making Ceviche
Many chefs do not cook raw seafood before making ceviche. They will dice the raw seafood and mix it with the lemon or lime juice. If you do not feel comfortable eating raw seafood, then you can cook it.
Do not cook the seafood with any spices. Blanch the seafood in water and salt and do not overcook it.
After cooking the seafood, allow it to reach room temperature and then place it in the fridge so it can chill. Ceviche should never be served warm, and cooked seafood in the ceviche should never be warm either.
If you plan to add diced avocado to your ceviche, add the avocado right before you serve it. Avocado should not sit in the lemon or lime juice while the ceviche is sitting in the fridge.
Wait until 5 minutes before you’re going to serve the ceviche to add the diced avocado.
You can dice the avocado and store it in a separate bowl in the fridge. Avocado is delicate and the citrus in the lemon or lime juice can turn the avocado mushy and gross if it sits in the juice too long.
Remove the skins of the cucumbers before dicing it and adding it to the ceviche.
When selecting certain seafood to add into ceviche, only use seafood that is tender and has light colored flesh. Seafood with light colored flesh, such as shrimps and sea bass, can cook when added to lemon and lime juice.
If you were to add other types of seafood into the ceviche, the juice cannot penetrate through the surface of the seafood meat and you could end up poisoning yourself by eating raw seafood.
When you add raw shrimp or raw sea bass to lime juice, it will actually cook the flesh and it will no longer be raw. However, this will not be an issue if you are making ceviche with cooked seafood.
When you take the cooked seafood out of the refrigerator, use a fork and gently flake the seafood. Flake the flesh of the seafood as thinly as possible.
Conclusion to How Long Ceviche Stays Good
You can store ceviche in the fridge for up to 4 days. But the texture and flavor of the ceviche will change day by day, so you should only eat ceviche 48 hours after being made.
Do not eat ceviche after 5 days as you will get food poisoning. This dish is made traditionally with raw fish, but you can use cooked cold seafood if you do not want to eat raw seafood.
