My mom hates anything that comes from the oceans, rivers, and lakes. I take that back, she may like Shamu, but you can't eat him so it doesn't help me. It's this reason why I never learned how to cook any kind of fish or seafood.
After coming to Japan I played with some fish recipes. I still don't feel like my fish dishes taste professional, but I can clean them (sloppily) and I've got some good salt rubs and juices in my corner so I can whip up a decent fish if I need to. Recently, however, it occurred to me that I enjoy other seafoods as well and my not understanding them at all is a big waste of the pile of chewy beasts and shelled things sitting in my grocery store! Though to be honest, I think what's scarier than preparing them is just figuring out how to buy them. I'm really not accustomed to grabbing whole animals from a bin and presenting them to a cashier. You must put them in plastic bags somehow, right?
I don't know. In the meantime I keep going for the pre-wrapped special sales.
I love raw scallop sushi, so I started with a scallop recipe, searing them in a simple garlic butter sauce and serving them with corn grits. Turns out I did a pretty good job but, like lobster, cooked scallops are a little rich for me. I have no richness limit for sweets, but for seafood it's different. I won't rush to make them again, especially because they're expensive, but I still think I did it right.
Next task was clams - what the hell, right? Just because it's in a shell doesn't mean you have to be a pro to cook it. I spent a good while on wikipedia first, researching the different kinds of clams. It was mildly useful but mostly just for fun and curiosity (the geek in me comes out). I'm known for devoting entire afternoons to reading about specific foods and cross referencing what I've learned in Japanese to what I already knew in English. (Speaking of which, I was super shocked and psyched to learn that the thing I'd been so familiar with here in Japan, "tsubu," was actually what we know as "conch" in English. Furthermore, though we hear so much about conch shells, it hadn't occured to me that a conch was a form of snail and that you could eat the creatures that came from a conch shell! Oh the wonder of knowledge! I've been eating snails that come out of those beautiful shells children try to listen to on the beach.)
Anyway, the clams were a wonderfully successful endeavor for me, if for no other reason than how fun and easy it is to cook them! Put them in a pan with a little water for steaming and POPPOPPOP they snap open after a few minutes, signifying that they're done. It was like I could do no wrong while cooking this dish! Even from the very beginning. I was worried initially, they say to throw away the clams that don't close because they've been dead too long, so I figured I'd be throwing away a good deal of the ones I'd bought because so many of them were open. They're so still, I thought, so they MUST be dead. BUT when I tapped them, each one of them closed! It was mystically exciting in an eerie kind of way lol
I absolutely loved this recipe with asari (little neck clams). They make their own salty juices as they cook, so the leftovers were great in soup as well :D It was wonderfully salty and sweet (and easy!), especially paired with this other very Japanese spinach dish.
Maybe I'll make a gumbo or seafood soup someday soon, I think it'd turn out really well on account of all the fresh seafood available here. I'll probably put it off though, because those things are usually such a mishmosh of differents seafoods and it'd be a pain to cook and buy them in the right amounts for one person.
My final adventure - octopus. I could've gotten a cutlet but I figured there was something cheeky and seemingly inedible about buying the tentacle - so of course that's what I went with. I had a good time playing with it and taking pictures of it before preparing it, for no other reason than to freak out my friends. I'd never had the experience of touching an octopus that hadn't already been sliced up as sashimi or cooked. Feeling the suckers and how, rubbery it appears, their skin is actually quite rough and flexible over the tendons and fibers and such. And they're actually kind of pretty, what with the purple-y red color.
I'd been sitting on this recipe for octopus, served up with spinach in a miso sauce, but it just called for boiled octopus. It didn't say how to boil it! I did a lot of research online and found varying opinions on how to keep octopus from being chewy. Add lemon juice, don't add lemon juice, add salt, don't add salt. Boil it fast. Bake it slow. Boil it with a wine cork in the water. What??
Finally I found a review which seemed relatively informed and scientific. What I did was I blanched the (unbrined - baked octopus is salty enough) octopus arm for 30 seconds in boiling water, then baked it dry in a 200F oven for two hours (the original recipe called for 4-5 hours but my arm was small so it was ok). Like the clams, octopus makes its own juices - juices that are surprisingly rich and sweet and that you'd NEVER want to waste, so you boil them down into a concentrate. What makes it even better is that the juice comes out a vibrant pink, it looks as good as it tastes! I did a regular boil for a small piece of the octopus as the "control group" to my experiment, and even though I didn't overboil it, it was still not nearly as tender as the octopus that had been blanched and baked. I'd highly recommend that method if you've got the time.
Anecdotally, I was surprised to find my favorite part of the sliced octopus was the suckers! They have as light satisfying crunch to them when baked. The miso sauce was delectable, I'd readily make it again, even as a sauce for other things.
RECIPE
ほうれんそうとたこの酢味噌和え
Spinach and Octopus in Miso-Mustard Vinegar
100g spinach
100g boiled octopus
miso-mustard sauce
60g white miso
1 t yellow mustard
1 t sugar
1 T vinegar
1 T mirin
1) Blanch spinach in boiling water for about 30 seconds, then cut into 2 cm strips.
2) Cut boiled octopus into 5mm width slices.
3) To make miso-mustard sauce: mix white miso, sugar and yellow mustard, add mirin and vinegar. Mix well.
4) Dry the spinach and octopus, spread sauce on plate and arrange spinach and octopus.
So now what? I'm not sure what else I could make from here, as far as the "little known seafood" category goes, short of making my own tsubu - which is usually just grilled with some sake and butter - not overly complex. I already eat squid quite regularly and it's not so hard to prepare. These three seafoods were pretty much at the top of the list. Still, I've been so successful, I think I will continue the search for chewy beasts and shelled things to dominate.
No comments:
Post a Comment