On Authenticity

I have a subscription! During a summer dinner for friends I served gazpacho. It was a warm evening and I had tons of tomatoes, so it seemed like the perfect starter. It’s pretty simple: you chop tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions and a bit of garlic, then add some vinegar and olive oil and mushed up bread and tomato juice. Give it a two second pulse from the hand blender et voilà. One of the more cosmopolitan diners looked at the chunky soup and said, “Oh, so it’s not real gazpacho.”

True Andalusian gazpacho is mashed in a mortar and pestle (or at least a blender). It’s smooth and velvety; not like my coarse, vulgar slop. The thing is, I knew my soup wasn’t authentic and I even thought about introducing it with that caveat. But I didn’t because I don’t need another reason to be labeled a “foodie,” a.k.a. “food-douche.” I served it all chunked up because that’s the way my mother made it from some Sunset magazine recipe when I was a child. And I prefer it that way. It has texture. Each bite has a different ratio of tomato to cucumber. It looks more appetizing than the pink, pasty appearance of the “authentic” version. The current Sunset recipe but back in the '70s it was chunky. It was! Yet it still irked me that I was called out on my bastardization of a venerated Spanish tradition. Stuff like that bugs me all the time. Like how when I mention my affection for Abbot's Pizza, die hard New Yorkers will scoff, “They use bagel flour in their dough. It’s not real pizza.” To which I say, “It still tastes better than 95% of the pizza that I ever had in Manhattan. So suck it!” Maybe I don’t say those exact words, but I’ve thought them.

I've never eaten lutefisk nor have I wanted to Why is authenticity so damned important? I suppose it’s a connection to history, just like chunky gazpacho connects me with my childhood. But if not for culinary innovation, we’d still be eating charred meat, nuts and berries. At some point, we have to acknowledge that sous vide whitefish, a modern preparation, tastes better than lutefisk, a preserving method involving lye that dates back to the 16th century. Not surprisingly the editor of Cook's Illustrated There is a limit to bending tradition. If you read Cook’s Illustrated, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This is this pedantic culinary bi-monthly where they supposedly show the better way to cook. Their mission is, “to test recipes over and over again until we understand how and why they work and until we arrive at the best version.” Their definition of the “best version” is based on some borg-ian concept where they measure the amount of time it takes for a vinaigrette to separate. Their recipe held its emulsion for a whopping 1 ½ hours! But…can’t you just shake up the dressing right before you pour it? Who takes 90 minutes to eat a salad?

If you don't use unbleached organic parchment paper, it's not true en papillote This past spring they presented their improved version of cooking en papillote, a method where you bake vegetables and fish in a paper wrapper. The crack staff of Cook’s Illustrated contends that aluminum foil seals better than parchment paper and that the recipe works best if you parcook vegetables beforehand. But the whole point is that it’s a quick and easy way to cook fish with a dramatic presentation. If you have to cook the vegetables beforehand and serve it in foil, you’re spending too much time to serve what looks like a fancy TV dinner. Their complaints of too much juice or slightly undercooked vegetables are what I consider to be the characteristics of the dish.

Fold it in half and crimp the edges tightly in a semi-circle Basically you create a bed of small chopped vegetables for a lightly seasoned fish fillet upon which you add a little butter or olive oil. You wrap it in some parchment paper and cook it in a 375º oven for 20 minutes and then put it on a plate. Everyone oohs and aahs as they unwrap their gustatory gift. Maybe the kale is a tad crunchy or the zucchini juices accumulate on the plate but it still tastes really good and you only spent 15 minutes preparing the thing.

This was just for me on a Tuesday night so it's not as sexy looking as it could be So what’s my point? I dunno. Don’t make such a big deal of things? I mean, I have respect for authenticity and tradition; I’m more likely to buy a raw milk Brie de Meaux than some Wisconsin cheese product called “Bree.” But I’m also a huge fan of Rouge en Noir, a Sonoma cheesemaker who makes a perfectly delicious Brie that’s often cheaper than its Frenchy counterparts.

I’m also grateful to the nerds. I do get some value out of Cook’s Illustrated. They’re the dorks who will make scores of batches of biscuits to find out the perfect ratio of butter to lard. They are like the not-quite-as-smart cousin of Harold McGee who doesn’t know quite when to shut up. You kinda take the basic concepts from them and then tune out all their extraneous efficientizing bullshit. So, yeah. That’s where I stand. Thoughts? Anyone? Anyone?

On Fish

Here are my rules on buying seafood: 1) Don't buy farmed salmon. Never mind that farmers frequently dye the flesh pink and most practices are bad for the environment. Farmed salmon tastes like crap. It’s mushy and bland and good for nothing. Wild salmon, while not perfect for the environment, is a world apart from the farmed crap. Just look at Copper River salmon next to a fillet of pale and floppy farm stuff and you wouldn’t think they were from the same planet, let alone species. Don’t even get me started on the taste difference. Coho, Sockeye, Copper River, King – I’ll eat them all. 2) Never buy farmed shrimp. That’s just because of the environment. 3) Steaming your own live crab is far superior than buying the precooked stuff. It’s not even worth it to buy the precooked stuff. I’ll either buy the refrigerated canned crab from Southeast Asia or I’ll steam my own Dungeness crab. It’s a pain in the ass to shell it and it’s no fun dumping those poor little crustaceans into the Pot of Death but it’s one of my top ten foods. The sound of crab claws banging against the pot can be haunting. “Tell me, Clarice. Have the crabs stopped clanking?” 4) Buy fresh local stuff whenever possible (tough luck, Kansas) or, if not, buy flash frozen stuff. A lot of seafood is sold defrosted. You just don’t know when they did it. Could’ve been that morning, could’ve been last Tuesday. Luckily, recent USDA laws make it mandatory for sellers to specify the fish’s country of origin and whether it’s fresh or frozen. 5) Not all farmed seafood is bad. Farmed oysters are benign. Vegetarian fed fish like catfish and tilapia aren’t terrible, though they’re often fed corn. Is industrial corn worse than overfishing? Vegetarianism is sounding better and better. 6) Above all, avoid escolar. Why? I’m glad you asked. Now, I love the succulent fish. The kind whose flesh is on the fatty side; it can be like the Kobe beef of the sea. It tastes decadent and it’s easy to cook; it’s almost impossible to overcook. But since Chilean sea bass hit the top of the unsafe list and sablefish, or what my people call “black cod,” is kinda pricey, what’s there to eat? So when the dude at Fish King said that escolar was like Chilean sea bass and it was under ten bucks a pound, I pounced on it. I had John and Ole over for dinner where I served fillets with a watercress pesto. During dinner, we all were freaking out on how amazing the texture of the fish was and how odd it was that we’d never even heard of escolar before.

Watercress Pesto 2 big handfuls of watercress 2 garlic cloves 1 squeeze of lemon 1 small handful of pine nuts Extra virgin olive oil Stuff everything but the olive oil with some salt and pepper into a jar. Slowly add olive oil while zapping it with a hand blender. Keep adding and mixing until it comes together.

So after dinner, I looked it up on the Internet and I read this article out loud about how some chefs call it the evil fish or something like that. Apparently one of the fats that makes escolar flesh so luscious is indigestible by humans which can lead to “intestinal discomfort.” An oceanic Olestra. We all laughed nervously. The article recommended that you grill it so the fat can drip away in portions no larger than three ounces. I baked 14 ounce fillets – extra juicy. Oops. Oh well. How bad could it be? CUT TO: MORNING. I woke up with a rumbling in my stomach. Hm. Gurgle. Uh. Oh no. Then something terrible happened. Something unspeakably horrific. And then I made it to the bathroom. This continued on and off for a couple hours until I gathered the strength to call Ole and John. Ole had no problems. John was fine. So I thought it was me. And then I got calls from both of them not two hours later. I was not alone. For three days, we suffered in ways that – well if you need a description, just read the side of a nonfat Pringles can from the ‘90s.