SASHIMI

After procuring a large, premium fish of a species worthy of raw consumption (tuna, yellowtail, seabass are the obvious ones, but there are others, such as wild salmon, kelp bass, and striped bass that are also excellent), I usually follow a sequence of dishes that begins with raw, progresses to seared (tataki) and marinated dishes, and by the third day (if there is any fish left), I'll be cooking the fish.

Some fish are just better raw. For example, it should be a felony to apply any kind of heat to bluefin tuna, which is transcendent in flavor in its uncooked state but becomes just ordinary as cooked fish. White seabass (what I'm working with today) is already very firm when raw and has a tendency to become unappealingly tough or even rubbery if it's not cooked with extreme care. Yellowfin tuna, or "ahi," is excellent raw (though not even half as good as bluefin) but is improved with a bit of searing or marinating. Others, like yellowtail, salmon (wild—never the farm-raised, artificially-colored stuff), and striped bass, are wonderful at all levels of heat-treatment, with the caveat that overcooked fish (to the point of flaking) is never any good.

The key to success in home preparation of raw fish dishes is proper care of the ingredient. This means keeping the fish cold with minimal exposure to air, water, and bacteria, and to this end I bring my fish home from the ocean whole and packed in ice, rather than enjoying the convenience of having them cleaned and filleted on the boat (or if you don't fish, by the fishmonger, but be damned sure that the fish is less than a day post-capture and packed in ice). Rinsing with water is a sure initiator of bacterial degradation, and it also causes osmotic stress to those cells that are exposed to the water. Fish can be gutted without water, but care should be taken to remove the innards without rupturing the intestine or the gall bladder. Done correctly, there will be minimal blood, which can be wiped clean with a paper towel. Finally, the skin should be left on the fillets, as it protects the flesh from exposure and can be removed at the time of preparation for the table.

This may be totally gross, but one should always keep an eye open for dark spots in the muscle. Sometimes they are just spots of blood, but they might also be coiled-up Anasakis roundworms, which are not good to eat. The only way to kill them is to either freeze the fish (which ruins the texture) or to cook it (and this would mean no raw fish at all). Fortunately they are large enough to be easily visible—especially in thin slices of the light, transparent-fleshed species like seabass—while the other species like tuna with darker, more opaque flesh are far less likely to have them.

The easiest and most typical approach to sashimi is to take a slab from the fillet of a large fish (I think the frogs call this a pavé) and cut a "log" from it—meaning that the cut should be parallel with the direction that the fish swims. If you're good, the skin and most of the dark muscle can be left behind when you make this cut. If desired, the remaining dark muscle can be removed with your very sharp knife. Cut the log into salami slices, plate, and repeat. Simple. The only required accompanying condiment is soy sauce, but standard additions are wasabi and grated fresh ginger (ginger is not common in restaurants, but for inshore fish this is traditionally preferable to wasabi). Less standard but also very good are lemon and sambal oelek (Indonesian chili sauce).



Breakfast of champions!