Acid Tataki

Wowing Myself

I like to experiment with variations and fusion cuisine. Luckily, this works more often than not. Otherwise, my family would probably groan every time they saw something unrecognizable on the plate. One of my most recent spectacular failures was pasta in a thick mushroom cream sauce. The sauce was delicious—cremini and porcini mushrooms in a chicken stock reduction with cream and sherry and a sprinkling of roasted ricotta—but, well, not wanting to be too indelicate, it looked like an unhealthy bowel movement. I'm still trying to figure out how to make that one look like food.

Last night's experiment was more fortuitous. In fact, it was the best success I can recall in quite a while. Even for a success, this meal was pretty amazing, especially for a first time creation. Usually, I try to keep my mouth shut when I serve something new. I want to hear my wife's reaction, and I don't want to unduly influence that reaction by presenting a possibly contrary opinion. Last night, though, when I put that first bite in my mouth, I just couldn't help myself. I was stunned. I was wowed. I couldn't even give my usual, non-committal, "Doesn't suck." Autonomically generated by a beautiful balance of sweet, tart, salty, spicy, creamy, and meaty flavors—before I'd even finished the first bite, came the astonished words, "This is perfect." My wife agreed. Dinner disappeared rapidly.

It's exciting as hell to get one right on the first try. It's even better when "right" is sensual to a nearly orgasmic degree.

Earlier that evening, I'd had one of those little epiphanies that makes the experimentation worthwhile. Like many such creations, this one was inspired by more or less equal parts happenstance and cravings. I arrived at the market with a vague notion of dorado or wahoo with mango salsa. I had already picked out the mango, hot red chili, sweet onion, limes, and a bunch of cilantro for the salsa when I noticed that the greenskin avocados are in. We only get those for a short time in the latter half of the summer. As a rule, I don't have much use for greenskins. They have a watery texture and less creamy richness than Hass and fuentes avocados. They are sweet, however, and mild enough that they can pair well with delicate seafood dishes. In the past, I've served greenskin halves stuffed and heaped with chilled crab salad or tuna poke.

So, not wanting to miss out on the greenskins, I grabbed a couple, thinking, hey, I can always serve them tomorrow. When I got to the fish counter, however, I found that the dorado, wahoo, and kona kompachi weren't too impressive. The dark spots on all three were brown around the bone, so I knew they'd been out on the ice for quite a while. The wild caught sockeye salmon, on the other hand, was a glistening unbroken scarlet, and the yellowfin steaks looked like sashimi waiting to happen. So, okay, I thought, salmon and tuna poke in avocado. I bought enough to prepare poke for the two of us (my stepdaughter is visiting Daddy in D.C. this month), and then I noticed the king crab. They had a big pile of five-inch king crab leg segments at the incredible price of $10 per pound. They're frozen and would keep for a while, so I bought a couple pounds of king crab.

As I thought through the ingredients in the cart, I began to realize that I had two slightly contradictory ideas going in my head at once: I wanted to do a poke with the tuna and salmon, but I wanted to use mango salsa. I could taste it. I even had an idea how it would work. This dish is a ceviche/poke hybrid. Ceviche is a citrus-pickled seafood, often mischaracterized as chemically cooked seafood. Poke is a raw fish salad, typically dressed with salt and sesame oil. The result of the hybrid is like a chemically seared tataki.

Stuffed avocados with mango salsa young ceviche

dramatis personae
one mango, diced
one tablespoon sweet onion, minced
one tablespoon hot red chili, minced
two tablespoons cilantro leaves, chopped
juice of two medium limes
sea salt to taste
one third pound tuna, cubed
one third pound salmon, cubed
one third pound king crab meat, cubed
one tablespoon roasted sesame oil
one large greenskin avocado

preparation notes

Mix the mango salsa, onion, chili, cilantro, salt and lime juice and set it aside. Normally, two limes would be too much liquid for this much mango salsa, but for this application, you need the extra liquid to coat the fish.

In a separate bowl, combine the fish and crab and coat it with the sesame oil. To avoid damaging these delicate bits of seafood, I recommend mixing with your hands. The sesame oil, in addition to being mighty tasty, will keep the lime juice of the salsa from penetrating too rapidly.

Immediately before you are ready to serve the meal, split one large greenskin avocado and remove the pit. Do not damage the skin, but cut out any brown bits and use a knife tip to remove any obvious brown fibers (they'll get stuck in your teeth). Thoroughly mix the fish and crab into the salsa. Spoon this young salsa into the avocado halves and mound enough to cover the avocado flesh.

Serve the avocado halves with spoons. When it gets to the table, the outside of the salmon and the edges of the tuna will just barely have begun to pickle. The trick of eating this dish is digging in to get a bit of avocado in every bite. You'll want to bring the remaining ceviche to the table in a separate bowl so the diners can refill their avocados. Trust me, you'll run out of stuffing before you run out of avocado.

The one element this dish does not have is crunch, so you might want to serve a crusty bread as a side.

Keeping Cool - the crab course

The Case of the Missing Summer

Naturally, as soon as I start preaching about competing with the heat, the heat just up and runs to Montana. It's been raining for forty days and forty nights, now (give or take an order of magnitude), and the temperature in Austin probably won't make it out of the 80s today. So, my incentive for serving cold food is weakened a bit. My joints are achy and I'm bitchy enough that on the drive home I'll probably run down and kill the next moron who cuts me off in traffic.

I did say I'd follow up with the cold crab menu, though, so I'll get that out of the way before going on to some hot crab dishes, fish dishes, and various tartares and carpaccios.

Ice Cap Food

You just can't beat king crab (Arctic) and snow crab (Antarctic) for cold crab dishes. Both provide large, rich, sweet, meaty legs. Both are available year round. Both are usually sold fully cooked. Maybe it's just a matter of personal preference, but to me, blue crab, stone crab, and dungeness all taste a bit off when served cold.

Safety warning: whatever you do, do not use my recipes with artificial crab (also called krab, sea legs, or seafood sticks). Artificial crab is far more artificial than crab. It's actually a surimi (fish purée) of generic fishy white-meat fish like pollack, whiting, or hake. To imitate the sweetness of actual crab meat, the manufacturers add corn syrup. Spam of the Sea: ick. My daughter is fond of California rolls, which are usually made with this so-called food product, so I try to concentrate on other things when I know she's eating said rolls.

But I'm not talking about California rolls. I'm talking about cold crab recipes. Be aware, I have placed a curse on this blog entry. If you use artificial crab meat with my recipes, expect one or more of the following:

• one of your diners will spit it out in a planter when your back is turned, which your cat or dog will eat and later gack up on a fine silk garment or oriental rug


• you will suffer a nine-year bout of constipation following which you will bear a striking resemblance to the late Richard M. Nixon


• you will die (eventually)

King crab with avocado cream

dramatis personae

one pound of king crab legs
one large Hass avocado
one cup cream
juice of one lime
one tablespoon nonpareil capers

quality of ingredients

King crab legs, which are sold pre-cooked (steamed) and frozen, come in various sizes. I used two half pound legs for this preparation, and that was just barely enough to feed three people. In the next recipe, I used a single one-pound leg. Use only the leg meat for this recipe. The claw meat is tasty, but the texture would feel odd in combination with a thick cream sauce. Snow crab should work as a substitute. In either case, the legs should be intact, have no black spots, and should smell sweet.

I discussed avocado selection a while back in Skirting the Name Issue. Those comments apply here. If you can't find ripe avocados in your produce department of choice, see if they sell the vacuum-packed, peeled, and seeded avocados.

Just about any brand of capers should be okay, but I wouldn't recommend the Alessi brand capers packed in white balsamic vinegar. You want tart and salty, not sweet.

preparation notes

I know this is going to be a cold dish, but I recommend steaming the legs for about ten minutes before prepping them for the plate. Once they're done with their little steam bath, let the legs cool enough to handle. King crab legs are covered in thorny projections that are sharper than they look. Wear heavy gloves or wrap a pair of towels around the leg sections. Depending on how stiff the shells are, you should be able to break the legs at the joins. When you pull the sections apart, you should see two cartilage strips pull out of the meat. If you don't see the two strips, you'll have to pull them out another way. Pliers will work for this. To remove the sections of meat intact, snip away a portion of the shell at either end of the section and slide out the crab meat. If the meat won't slide out (usually this is only a problem with snow crab), you might have to cut the shell lengthwise.

The avocado cream is incredibly simple. Blend the avocado with the cream. Once they're thoroughly blended, add the lime juice and blend to a smooth consistency. The lime juice clabbers the cream, so this concoction thickens quite a bit. You might have to stop the blender and scrape down the sides a few times to get it all blended. Depending on how you want to present this, the capers can be scattered over the dish or blended with the cream.

King crab salad

dramatis personae

one pound of king crab legs
one small avocado
one green celery rib, sliced thin
one half cup thinly sliced radicchio
two mandarin oranges

for the dressing:
one quarter cup peanut oil
one half can coconut milk
juice of two limes
one teaspoon wasabi powder
sea salt

preparation notes

I prepared this salad to go with gazpacho, so I didn't want the spices competing. The wasabi powder is just enough to give a hint of heat. If I were pairing the salad with something a less spicy, I would probably add a pinch of nutmeg and a minced red hot chili (probably a fresno or hot fingerlong), and I would also leave out the wasabi.

The coconut milk probably seems an odd choice to some. Mayonnaise is the standard dressing base for crab salads, but I consider this a long-standing screw-up. I don't dislike mayonnaise (my wife and daughter do), I just consider it too heavy for crab.

After you've shelled the crab and removed the cartilage, bias cut the segments into half-inch pieces.

1. You want the avocado skinned (duh), pitted and cut into pieces about the same size as the pieces of crab. Here's how I do it:
2. Pluck out the stem piece, and cut straight down through the stem end until the blade makes contact with the pit.
3. Cut the avocado in half buy running the knife blade all the way around the pit. The cut should come back to the same starting point.
4. Twist the two halves of the avocado and separate them. The pit will stay in one half.
5. Remove the pit. I want to tell you how to do this cleanly, but without pictures to help clarify the instructions, someone could easily find themselves minus a finger or three. So, once I get the pictures, I'll revisit this topic.
6. Once the pit is out, with the peel still on, cut both halves length wise into half-inch strips.
7. Depending on the ripeness of the avocado, the skins might peel off easily. If not, removed them with a paring knife.
8. Cut the avocado strips to half their length.

The mandarins are, admittedly, something of a pain to prepare. They peel easily, but removing the membranes from the segments is a bit of work. I nick the membrane with a paring knife and then peel it off of each segment. Some of the segments tear in two or three pieces during this process, but it looks good that way. If this sounds like too much work, canned mandarins packed in their own juices are okay. If you use the canned fruit, discard the syrup and rinse the segments.

Make the dressing in a separate bowl by pouring in all the ingredients except the coconut milk. Then, with a whisk in one hand and the coconut milk in the other, slowly drizzle in the coconut milk while whisking vigorously. If you do this slowly enough, the emulsion won't separate right away.

One point about the limes: limes vary quite a lot in tartness, juiciness, and size. The limes I used produced about two or three tablespoons of juice. The quantity matters less than the impact of the juice on the dressing. Always taste your vinaigrettes—especially if you're using citrus juice as the souring agent.

Toss the crab, avocado, celery, radicchio, and mandarins in a large bowl with enough dressing to coat everything.

Keeping Cool - the soup course

No, it is not the humidity

Am I the only one who finds it odd that, when the summer heat gets to be nearly unbearable, guys all over the USA decide it's time to leave their air conditioned homes to stand over a barbecue or grill and eat hot smoke? Sure, grilled food is tasty, but backyard grilling always seemed to me an activity better suited for autumn or winter. At least here in Austin. Maybe it's just my genetic make up. I didn't get the beer or football genes, either.

As much as I generally enjoy playing with fire and flipping sauté pans, there comes a time here in Texas when no amount of air conditioning can keep up with the combination of the heat outside, the heat from the kitchen, and a hot meal. Just last night, we had pasta in a mushroom cream sauce. By the end of the meal, I was sweating. Guess it was a bad day for a dish that retains its heat. Usually on such days, to avoid torturing myself in the kitchen and my family at the table, I end up preparing a lot of salads, tartares, carpaccios, and the occasional cold soup preparations. Understand, many of these cold preparations do require a bit of cooking—vichyssoise, for example, requires quite a lot of cooking—but I prepare and serve the key components cold. These past two weekends, I experimented with gazpacho recipes and a couple of king crab preparations.

I'll talk about the crab dishes in another posting, which means this will be my first ever published recipe that is vegan-safe. (I was going to put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, but even my hypocrisy has its bounds.)

Gazpacho

Tomatoey gazpacho is a long-standing summer favorite of mine. It always astonishes me how grinding up some tomatoes with some cucumber, peppers, garlic, and onion and mixing in a little oil and vinegar can produce such a remarkably cool and surprisingly buoyant texture. Gazpacho is an excellent adjunct to crab, shrimp, lobster, or just a little cheese (oops, so much for the vegan vote).

Purists and food historians will tell you that gazpacho has to be made with stale bread. Yes, gazpacho, which was around before the tomato and chili came to Iberia, was originally a concoction of stale bread, garlic, vinegar, and olive oil. I haven't tried it, but I have to admit: I think it sounds ghastly. Since I don't use stale bread in my recipe, some food mavens might say that mine isn't true gazpacho. I've tried it both with and without the bread, though, and I can't see that the bread adds anything to the flavor or texture of the soup.

I approached the gazpacho prep in these last few attempts with a few extra goals in mind. First, I wanted a recipe that uses a chili other than the traditional green bell pepper. Green bell pepper lends a slight pepperiness but I believe it also gives a flat bitterness to the soup. Besides, bell pepper and my wife don't get along. Second, I wanted to use roasted garlic and chilis to lend a little smokiness to the soup and to reduce the harshness of the garlic. I also tried out two varieties of sweet onion in an attempt to eliminate the lingering oniony aftertaste I have experienced in some gazpachos.

In the first gazpacho experiment, I used two pounds of tomatoes, one English cucumber, two roasted garlic cloves, a roasted poblano pepper, and one quarter of a large Walla Walla onion (about a half cup of diced onion). It was tasty, but I thought the onion overpowered the garlic. I also noticed, about an hour after the meal, that I was still tasting cucumber. I decided I could do without that cucumber aftertaste. Based on these results, I decided that my next attempt would include twice as much garlic, a quarter cup of sweet onion, and half an English cuke.

Here is the recipe I finally settled on (enough for four diners):

dramatis personae

one poblano pepper
four garlic cloves
two pounds red tomatoes, cored and seeded
one half English cucumber, peeled
one quarter cup sweet onion, diced
one cup tomato juice
one quarter cup red wine vinegar or sherry vinegar
one half cup extra virgin olive oil
salt

quality of ingredients

The garlic should not be so dry that the husks have cracked. You also don't want cloves that have begun to sprout—they're bitter. If any have started to sprout, you'll see a green or yellow tail poking through the narrow end of the clove.

The tomatoes should be as red and ripe as possible. Fresh off the vine is best. Tomatoes sold as "vine-ripened" are probably the next best choice. Other tomatoes in the grocery stores are likely to have been artificially ripened by storage in ethylene gas, which makes them paler, mealier, and less flavorful. Any firm variety of tomato will do for Gazpacho, but I wouldn't recommend anything smaller than Romas, since seeding them will take a lot more time.

Some folks prefer sherry vinegar in gazpacho. I honestly can't tell the difference, and red wine vinegar is easier to find in the stores. The vinegar is only in the soup to add a little sparkle; it's not a major component. Since you're not going to taste much of it anyway, I certainly would not recommend wasting a premium sherry vinegar in something that's going to swallow up most of its character.

I usually use tomato juice from concentrate in my gazpacho. This boosts the tomato flavor and flavor just a smidgeon, but it has the negative effect of increasing the water content of the soup. Next time I do this, I think I'll try straight tomato juice concentrate instead of the reconstituted juice.

I have used Anaheim chilis and Hatch hot chilis in the past. I prefer the extra heat from the Hatch chilis, but they're not available year round. I like the smoky heat of roasted Poblanos, but their heat ranges from as mild as a bell pepper to not-quite-jalapeño strength. If you want consistency, taste the chili before you roast it.

I used a sweet red Italian onion in my second gazpacho experiment, but I still was not happy with the results. Next time, I'm going to try eliminating the onion altogether.

preparation notes

Making gazpacho is generally damned simple. You toss the ingredients into a food processor and run it till it reaches the desired consistency, chill it for a half hour, and serve it.

As I noted previously, I complicated matters by roasting two ingredients. I think the results proved positive.

You can roast the poblano under the broiler, but that heats up the kitchen and takes a bit longer. I just put it directly on the grate over my largest burner. Use a pair of forks to turn it every few seconds. Once all the skin is completely charred black, remove the chili from the burner and wrap it in a pair of wet paper towels. After about five minutes, wipe away and discard all the black skin. Don't rinse the chili. You'll wash away some of the flavor. You should be able to pluck off all the blackened skin with your fingers. If you can't, you didn't roast it long enough. Remove and discard the stem, seeds and any pulp remaining inside the chili.

The garlic is even easier to roast. Peel off the papery layers, but leave the hard husks intact. Place the cloves in a cast iron skillet or comal, dry, over a medium-high flame. Turn the cloves every three or four minutes (I use chopsticks). Every flat surface of the cloves should be black, and the cloves should be quite soft. Set the cloves aside to cool for a few minutes. Once they're cool enough to handle, peel away and discard the husks. With a paring knife, scrape away any black bits from the cloves.

Now you should be ready to process, chill, and serve your gazpacho.