What I Learned over Winter Break

Okay, it's been more than awhile since I posted, but it's not like anybody reads this.  Also, this post will be uncharacteristically devoid of photography as the meal to which it refers was too stupendous to waste time with snapping photos.

At a party this past fall, a friend - let's call him Bill as that's his name - and I were discussing our mutual love of raw oysters.  In a boozy, gregarious mood, I proposed that we have a night where we buy a few dozen oysters from the farmer's market and share them with a couple friends.  At the next get together a month later, I said, "We still have to do that oyster night," and offered to steam a couple crabs and make clam chowder.  Bill offered to make scampi.

At the next shindig, Michael and Cristina were included in the oyster-fest equation which now had a date, January 6.  They are germane to the discussion because they are restauranteurs - like badass restauranteurs.  They offered to buy the seafood for Crustacean Celebration (CC) through their wholesaler.  Seemed sensible until I called Michael to place the order, which went a little something like this:

Me: So, I was going to make clam chowder, steam some Dungeness crab and Bill's making scampi.

Michael: O.K.  So how about 15 pounds of cherrystone clams, 10 pounds of U12 shrimp, I'll bring some littlenecks to eat raw...how many crabs?  Eight?

Me: ...um...that seems like a lot of...

Michael: Fine, five pounds of shrimp.  Six crabs.

Me: ...Sure?

Michael: I'll bring over scallops, too.

Me: And I'll go to the Hollywood farmers' market to get the oysters.

Michael: O.K.  So I'll just bring over six dozen Kumamotos.

Me: There are only going to be 12 of us.

Michael: Look, Marty: You can eat a dozen oysters in your sleep.  Whatever we shuck will get eaten.  Trust me.

Lesson One: Trust the Master.
It was a little intimidating cooking clam chowder for the first time for a chef about to open his second restaurant, a high-end seafood shack serving three types of chowder, but I had committed to the dish before I knew that.  When I went to pick up the seafood from the restaurant the day before CC, Michael gave me the two-minute rundown:

• Put the clams in the freezer for an hour to kill them to make them easier to open
• Save the clam juice and store the shucked meat in the fridge
• Make the soup the night before so the flavor penetrates the (Idaho) potatoes
• Use bottled clam juice if you want - it's a good product
• Serve heavy cream (reduced by half) on the side so people can have creamy chowder if they want
• Just before service, chop the raw clams into the reheated soup so they don't get overcooked
• Don't add flour, the starch from the potatoes will thicken the soup

This technique is fantastic and works with about any recipe.  The fresh brininess of the clams shines through and even with cream, the soup stays light.  The only difference was I had already bought Yukon Golds as per the Bon Appetit recipe I was using, but taters are taters, right?

Lesson Two: Knife Skills
Apparently, it's not enough to stick a clam in the freezer for an hour to kill it.  Cherrystone clams are resilient creatures.  Even though they had reached 26 degrees, they still hadn't died.  They needed to freeze and thus refused to succumb to my pryings.  That I was using a butter knife might also have been a problem.  Thankfully, Bill and his wife brought a clam shucking knife which saved the chowder.

But I did feel like a badass with my bona fide oyster shucking knife.  You just pop the tip into the hinge of the shell, lean into it and pray it doesn't slip and sever an artery, which is why they make them dull.  Michael brought his own shucker, which was sharp enough to cut paper.  He was popping open oysters like a Frat brother opens beer cans.  It was a frightening blade, but really it makes sense since it gets into the gap so much more efficiently.  Just like with regular cutting, a sharper, more effective knife will reduce the incidence of injury.

Michael and I both brought mignonette sauce and I was humbled once more.  His shallots were chopped in perfect 1 mm x 1 mm squares while mine - which I had been proud of - looked they had been savaged by a cross-eyed psychopath.  The divide between the professional from the enthusiast is vast.

Lesson Three: Trade Secrets
Despite feeling hopelessly incompetent, I was still eager to learn:

A shrimp boil is a misnomer.  I tossed the giant shrimp into hot broth and turned off the heat.  They will cook at 140 degrees or so.  I sort of forgot about them but when I served them fifteen minutes later, they were perfectly cooked, moist and firm.

It was fine to store the crabs in the cooler overnight covered with wet newspaper and a couple ice cubes.  36 hours later, they were alive, albeit slow.

After you shuck an oyster, flip it with a cleaned knife so that the belly is on top.  It's purtier that way.

Fresh is better (duh). Michael brought these scallops attached to their shell that were so fresh, when you flicked them, the muscle contracted.  He painted them lightly with butter then grilled them face down.  He then flipped them finishing them with a bit of butter, lemon and pimenton.  The best scallop I've ever eaten.

A New Annual Tradition
Under the guidance of a master, CC was a massive success.  Everything was delicious and all the oysters were, indeed, consumed. Cristina suggested we do this every year and even proposed a springtime Fin Festival (FF) where we charter a fishing boat and only cook what fish we caught that day.  We shall see how that works out for a motion sickness-prone land lubber like me.

During post-feast poker, the one thing I lamented was that the chowder was on the thin side to which Michael responded, "I told you to use Idaho potatoes.  You should have listened to me."

The Horror...The Horror..

One of the three in this photo is not having a fun time (hint: it's the one without an Oscar)

There has been a considerable amount of research done about whether crustaceans feel pain or not. Is this actually under debate? When you stick a crab in a steam pot, I’m pretty sure the ensuing clanking is triggered by unmitigated agony and not because they’re dancing a jig. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like cooking crabs and lobsters; it’s never the yuk fest promised by Annie Hall. I want the death of the animals I eat to be as swift and painless as possible and I have yet to find a way to provide that for crustaceans. Chefs suggest freezing them, putting them in fresh water (a slow death that takes over 12 hours) or putting a knife through their heads. The latter method seemed to make the most sense and a few months ago, I tried it.

This sure as hell don't look humane.

I was making grilled lobster with herb butter so we split the lobsters from head to tail. The results were not convincing, probably because the brain halves were still connected to the body halves so the lobsters continued to twitch and squirm as I slathered their insides with butter. At least the dinner guests enjoyed the meal. Then I read about Simon Buckhaven, the Temple Grandin of shellfish. A few years ago, the English lawyer invented the horribly named, Crustastun, a metal bin that sends 110 volts through whatever you put into it – Dungeness crab, crayfish, spiny lobster, a large guinea pig – bringing about death within a couple seconds. Sounds great except the base model is the size of a Xerox machine and costs over $4,000.

It also plays a lilting lullaby right before they're zapped

Enter eBay, where you can get a pocket-sized rechargeable stun gun that delivers 2.7 million volts for under $20. So I did. This doesn’t mean that the stun gun has thousands of times the killing power of the Crustastun; stun guns only deliver milliamps where the Crustastun chamber hits its targets with 600 times the current (4-6 amps). My hope was that the delicate crustacean nervous system wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I decided to name her "Mercy"

The day the post office delivered my instrument of death, I hightailed it over to the crazy Chinese market where they had stone crabs for a few bucks a pound. I took a couple of them home and then thought, “Oh shit. What do I do with them until killing time?” It’s not like I have a saltwater holding tank next to the sink. So I tossed them in the fridge and walked away, rationalizing to myself that they were napping peacefully. Yay, death with dignity!

I highly recommend using rubber gloves.

When it came to cooking time, I made sure the steam pot was hot and ready to go should the crabs survive their tasing. I took them out of the fridge and zapped each of them for a few seconds. The animals barely reacted despite the arcing current and tiny wisps of acrid smoke. After that, they seemed thoroughly and completely dead. Rather than do an autopsy, I tossed them in the pot where they cooked away soundlessly. Mission accomplished.

Now that’s what I call a dead crab

I made my friend shell the carcasses while I rolled out pasta and I made a green curry-like sauce substituting cream for coconut milk and tossed it all together with some corn and cilantro. My plating sucks

While stone crabs don’t yield as much meat as a Dungeness crab and they’re more of a pain to shell, they were nonetheless delicious and I didn’t have to shell squat (thanks, Steve). Boiled down with shrimp shells to a paste for a future bisque

Obviously, there is nothing scientific about my method and maybe it didn't even work. Maybe the tasing put the crabs into a state of paralyzing agony. But it seemed more humane than any method I've tried in the past. And since lobsters die from electrocution even more quickly than crab, I can't see why it wouldn't work on them, too.

My only regret is that I didn’t tase the giant shrimp I also cooked. They didn’t die as instantaneously in a hot pan as I thought they would. But if it’s any consolation, they might have been the best peel and eat shrimp I’ve ever eaten – tossed in a hot wok with ground pasilla and chipotle powder, cumin, sliced red jalapeno and garlic and salt. Sweet, spicy, sucked the heads...amazing. Sorry, shrimpses.

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.