Good Fish_ Sustainable Seafood Recipes From the Pacific Coast - Becky Selengut [4]
HOW THIS TYPE OF SEAFOOD IS RAISED OR HARVESTED: It’s incredible how often we eat things without having any idea of how they came to be. This is especially true for farmed seafood. Look to this section to learn, for example, how a mussel can be farmed or how sustainable albacore is caught.
SUSTAINABLE SUBSTITUTES: There will be times when you head out shopping with a recipe in hand looking for a specific type of seafood. It’s helpful to know ahead of time what some good substitutes are in case you can’t find what you’re looking for, or if the quality doesn’t pass muster.
Remember these “Good FISH” rules—F: Farmed can be OK (verify that it is done responsibly). I: Investigate your source (ask questions; support good chefs, fishmongers, and markets). S: Smaller is better (limit portion size; eat smaller fish, like sardines and young albacore). H: Home (buy Pacific Coast fish because the United States has higher environmental standards).
RECIPES
For each of the fifteen types of seafood, there are five recipes, organized from simplest to most challenging.
EASY RECIPES: The first two recipes are designed for a beginner who is eager to learn how to cook with seafood but may be intimidated by it, or the home cook who wants a recipe that can be prepared in thirty minutes or less on a weeknight. I’m a cooking teacher by profession, and I love helping novice cooks (especially intimidated novice cooks) learn how to work with seafood. In these recipes, I will gently hold your hand throughout the cooking process and hopefully anticipate any questions you might have. I tell this to all my students, but it’s especially important for inexperienced cooks: make sure to read the recipe through at least twice before starting. Pay special attention to the Ingredients and Terms Defined (page xxii), Tools of the Trade (page xxiv), and Fresh Versus Frozen (page xxvii) sections as well as the Anatomy of a Flake (page 102) box. Also be sure to check out the links for online cooking videos (see How-To Videos, opposite), especially if you are a visual learner like I am.
INTERMEDIATE RECIPES: The next two recipes are written for a more experienced home cook; these recipes can be prepared in under an hour. These medium-level recipes also expose you to less familiar species (geoduck) and ingredients (shiso, kombu, hijiki), and they may require some special equipment (a wok or ice cream machine) and advanced prep time (presalting or marinating fish).
ADVANCED RECIPES: The last recipe of the five is designed for the adventurous and involved cook, perhaps a self-described “weekend warrior”—someone who is happy spending several hours in the kitchen and likes a challenge. It is also meant to appeal to my fellow chefs out there who want to flip directly to recipes that involve more advanced techniques such as fish smoking, pasta making, curing, or working with multiple steps, components, and/or garnishes.
WINE PAIRINGS: Wine pairings are selected by my partner in life, work, and sometimes crime, the lovely (no bias here) and talented sommelier April Pogue. April has worked at some of the finest restaurants on the West Coast: Fifth Floor in San Francisco, Spago Beverly Hills, and in Seattle at Earth & Ocean (in the W Hotel), Yarrow Bay Grill, and Wild Ginger.
HOW-TO VIDEOS
Scattered throughout the book are links to short, fun how-to videos (denoted with the symbol ‡) in which I show you how to perform some techniques that are hard to capture in words. Check out www.goodfishbook.com, where you’ll see the following:
• How to select quality sea food
• How to clean a geoduck
• How to debeard, clean, and store mussels
• How to shuck an oyster
• How to cook and clean a Dungeness crab
• How to devein shrimp
• How to sear a scallop
• How to remove the skin from