CHOWDER and heat

There's a lot of people who are surprised to find that in many—maybe most—of the countries of Latin America the local cuisine does not make heavy use of spicy heat. This preconception is probably the result of general familiarity in the U.S. with Mexican food (in its various good and taco-hell forms), where hot chiles really do loom large. Truth is, the Cubans I know are perfectly milquetoast when it comes to tolerance of spice, and the one Panamanian that I knew was a physician--psychiatrist, actually--who insisted that spicy foods would cause long-term gastrointestinal problems. And while my Brazilian friend Rogerio is a bit better at getting spicy food down, his preference is strongly bent towards the mild.

So I don't know what made Roge plant his vegetable garden with so many hot peppers this year, but it worked out well for me. On a recent visit I came home with a bag half-filled with hot serranos and yellow wax peppers…and a plan: to make a fish chowder that would be hot, and I mean ridiculous, flames-out-of-the-ears hot, pushing the limits of my spice tolerance by virtue of the sheer volume of hot peppers in its base.

Why would anyone do such a thing? Well, why not?! Ask yourself why it is that people rarely make a very spicy stew or chowder. Generally the reasoning goes like this. Chowders usually get put together in fairly large quantities with the intention of serving several eaters. And some people don't like spicy (damn them!) and those who do can very well add their own heat after the fact. Well, dammit, I like fiery heat in my chowder, and it's just not the same to use a "death sauce" additive to a no-heat soup. I wanted the hot built-in to the foundation of the chowder, and this means starting with a sofrito based on some hotter peppers.

Now serranos and waxy yellows are not among the "ultra-hot" varieties, as they are only in the 5,000-15,000 Scoville units range—just a little hotter than jalapeños and nowhere close to Scotch Bonnets (100,000-350,000 Scoville units). Fine. I'll just use a lot of them, a gigantic mountain of diced green and yellow, cooked down in vegetable oil (not olive) with some onion and garlic, and to which I add some quartered small potatoes and raw sweet corn cut directly off of a couple ears.

After adding some fish stock—if you make it yourself it turns to jelly in the fridge but it returns to liquid with the slightest application of heat—the veggies can cook to doneness in a beautiful soupy simmer. Then after adding the fish and shrimp, I let this cook a bit, then add some heavy cream and salt to taste. I used some bass fillets from the last fishing trip and some wild-caught shrimp I picked up at the store. This could really be any kind of seafood, but realize that if you use farm-raised crap (like tilapia or non-wild salmon), your chowder will have the flavor of crap, no matter how many peppers you add.

The surprise was already evident from the first taste: it was a only a bit spicier than a typical (mild) chowder. Somehow either the capsacin wasn't there to begin with or it became less active through the cooking, or it became diluted with the addition of all the other ingredients. I suspect it was the first of these possibilities, since I hadn't noticed any burning in my fingers or eyes after having cut the big mountain of chiles. Ah well, it was still very good.

Welcome to my other kitchen

There are still places where you can go. Park your truck by a stream or on the shore of a lake and not see anyone for hours, days, maybe weeks. If you so desire, you can choose to take the sparest of supplies--a pan, a camp stove, and a few other cooking needs—with the plan to supply the bulk of calories via catch of the day. Worst case scenario is that you'll not eat, and maybe you'll find atonement during your involuntary fast. Better days will see you filling the belly with lovely fish.

Pack wisely and boldly. No side dishes. No back-up plan. If you don't catch, you don't eat. Period. Maybe some oil is okay. And breading—some flour pre-mixed with a dry rub seasoning, salt, and bread crumbs. Don't forget a good knife and a cutting board.

If you're feeling really cocky, you might go somewhere that doesn't allow you to kill any fish under a given size standard (like 18 inches). So unless you're willing to break the law, you might need to release fish after fish before you get one big enough. Not hard enough just to have to provide your own groceries? Neandertals didn't have to deal with size limits. [But they didn't have the benefit of graphite fly rods and personal fishing vessels either!]

The dinner bell doesn't ring until your net is around a keeper. After that, the kitchen help will watch attentively, cheering wildly with every bit of mess you ask them to clean up.

An 18-inch trout, having fed upon natural lake foods (bugs) for the better part of two years, develops a flesh with the deepest ruby tones of sockeye salmon. Fillets should be relieved of the larger (rib and fin) bones and cut into four pieces before dredging them in the breading mix.

Note that fish cooked within minutes of death "responds" to the heat of cooking as live muscle. The fish will contract fiercely on the skin side, and so it's best to start sautéing with the skin side up. It will still flex , but a lot slower, giving the flesh a chance to cook before you flip it over. It's really hard getting the pavé to cook evenly if the thing curls into a tube. It is seriously frustrating to cook fish this fresh if you're not expecting this small detail of the live muscle response.

The result is generally spectacular and made to seem even more so by your previous hours of fasting. A cold beer or two should be on hand to make the celebration complete.

How long to go on? A few days? Until the beer runs out? Until you're chased out of the site by unfriendly weather and abandoned by your kitchen staff?

BARRACUDA EGGS (no kidding!)

"'HA!' Ma blurted. 'Ol' bass-brained bean-farmin' Gnat! Hope ya give him a Howdy-do fer me, Gus. Gock-eyed Gnat. Knows more 'bout the seven B's than any man alive.'

"Right on cue, H2O asked, 'And what are the seven B's?... tip-toeing over the last three syllables like he was barefoot and they were a lawn full of honeybees.

"In an obviously rehearsed recital, Ma rattled out, 'Beans, Bait, Bass, Beer, Blue Lake, Jim Beam, and Bullshit!' And right on cue H2O made his face all crooked and revolted-looking—as if Ma's funkicity were something new."

I've just realized that during the summer when the spouse and kids are over in the Old World, I'm basically living the life of Gnat Buckley, a minor character in David James Duncan's The River Why (a book that has good fishing parts, but it takes "spirituality" way too seriously… man, I've become crotchety).

I remembered this passage when I looked at my dinner yesterday: bass, barracuda eggs, beans, brown rice, beer. If you count the bacon that used to cook the beans, that makes for six Bs, all in one sitting. And if you count the marinated anchovies that I had as the antipasto, seven* Bs –the perfect number for Bs or horcruxes or whatever you decide needs to be present in an exact mystical** number. [*Anchovies were bait when I went fishing for the bass and barracuda—the marinated version of the little stinkers is addressed in an older post. **This is another arcane holla to my friend Karen, who among other things is rather knowledgeable about cabalistic numerology.]

Stop. Rewind. I did say "barracuda eggs," and for most readers that makes a doubly out-of-the-ordinary menu item. Start with my use of barracuda as a species, which some erroneously equate with the vicious man-eaters responsible for countless attacks on innocent swimmers in tropical seas. It's generally off-putting to think that the fish on your plate at supper may have lunched on a fellow human –isn't this really just "cannibalism once removed"?

Well, for one it's only the "great barracudas" that pose a threat to human swimmers in tropical seas. The ones we have in temperate waters must be just "so-so barracudas," and they don't pose much of a threat, despite their wicked-looking teeth.

Another good reason for not eating a tropical great barracuda is that they, like a lot of large coral reef predators, have a rap sheet for accumulating ciguatoxin, which is definitely something you don't want to eat. Fishies like the one shown above, however, are quite edible and appreciated in many countries. In Japan, they call it kamasu. In Italy, it's luccio di mare. I'd be willing to bet that the French use this fish, too, though I have no idea what it's called there (when I first saw loup de mer on a French menu I figured that was it—the same as luccio di mare—but it turned out to be the boring ol' Mediterranean sea bass, 95% of which these days is aquaculture crap like most of the salmon that makes it to people tables).

For table fare, it's a good fish but not a great fish. I can enjoy barracuda meunière for a meal, but try a repeat the next day (a common occurrence, since these guys are fairly large and a fishing trip could provide meat for several days in succession) and it's not so swell. This is a fish that must be cooked with skin attached, which as with chicken becomes the tastiest part of the fillet. The flesh has a relatively assertive and characteristic flavor, and changing the cooking method, marinade, or saucing doesn't really make barracuda more "repeatable."

The eggs, on the other hand, are really quite nice. The Japanese method is to cut the roe into inch-long segments and simmer them in a soy-sauce-and-sugar based concoction. The skin shrinks with the heat, and the eggs get pushed out of the ends, making for a flower-shaped bite. It's a very pretty way to eat fish innards, but definitely not my favorite.

I prefer to open the roe and sauté, starting with the skin-side up, so that it gets fairly thoroughly cooked before the skin starts to shrink. After that, if it curls up and starts to bounce around the pan, you'll still have cooked eggs after a couple more minutes. Then saucing with a garlic and white wine reduction. And yes, a beurre blanc would be better. However, that would push my quota of "B" foods beyond the critical number of seven, and ol' Gnat Buckley wouldn't likely approve.

MOQUECA DE PEIXE (Brazilian fish stew)

In the opening scene of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, which is a decent movie based on not-my-favorite book by a favorite author (Jorge Amado), Flor (played by Sonia Braga) is in her own kitchen, teaching a cooking class on how to make a proper moqueca. This was the only part of the movie I remember, having seen it only once and long before I had developed any fascination with Brazil, its music, and its food.

Well, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I was able to find exactly that clip on YouTube. Took me about seven seconds. At 1:16 of this video, there's the scene!


Decades later, as I attempt to reproduce Brazilian flavors, I recall the insane volume of dendê oil poured over what seemed like a rather small volume of food in a shallow pan. Surely this is something of a cinematic exaggeration, a metaphor for Flor's passion for her just-expired husband #1. Dendê has an extraordinarily rich flavor, aroma, and mouth feel, and too much would take food beyond heavy—a supermassive brick in the stomach.

In southern Brazil I ate moqueca de peixe several times, and it was always delicious and intriguing. While the principal ingredient varied—from thresher shark to shrimp to gigantic pintado catfish to caiman—the stew base was basically the same, having predominant flavors of sofrito, dendê and coconut milk, usually with tomato and slivers of brightly colored bell peppers, mostly for appearance's sake. And while it was still very heavy for a fish dish, the dendê content was surprisingly modest—and this apparently is a concession to accommodate the wimpy palates of southern Brazilians.

Bahians (folks from the northeastern state of Bahia, home of both moqueca and samba) it seems, are acclimated to extreme levels of both dendê and coconut in their food. I've never been to the northeast to confirm this, but I did challenge my friend Rogerio (from the tiny town of Uruçuca in Bahia) once to a moqueca cook-off. Mine was the image of what I remembered from São Paulo, and his was what he claimed to be a very authentic Bahian moqueca de peixe, containing the better part of three bottles of dendê oil, along with four containers of cocounut milk. My dish had all of two tablespoons of dendê and half a can of coconut—which I saw as enough to provide the right flavor without weighing the stew down to the point of causing gravity-induced implosion/spontaneous human combustion. I realized then that it was no cinematic metaphor that Braga was creating with her supple hands. It was just lunch. Bahians consume palm oil like the French soak up butter.

I apologize those who insist on authenticity at all costs, but the moqueca I'm making here will seem to the purist as an abomination—a litany of broken rules--which I do quite happily only because I find that the "proper" amount of palm and coconut products makes a dish that's kind of, well, gross. It's not like I'm on a mission to teach all of Bahia a much-needed lesson in restraint—I wouldn't want to do that. We already have a surfeit of restraint, what with all the uptight folks in big cities like Milan and Chicago it's a damned righteous thing to have at least some people compensating with habitual excess. I just prefer my moqueca much lighter on the coconut and dendê and (while I'm at it) with quite a bit more fiery punch.

Apart from quantities of key ingredients, my process for moqueca is also different from what you would probably find in a book of traditional recipes—but to me it's more rational. For example, stewing the fish for the same duration that the vegetables stew would result in either overcooked fish or undercooked vegetables. Makes more sense to stew the vegetables on their own and add the fish at the end a few minutes before serving.

I start with rinsing and soaking the rice. I prefer brown rice, and if that makes me a hippie, so be it. Rinsing brown rice only takes away tiny flecks of chaff, and this step is not as important as it is when preparing white rice, in which there's enough starch to make the rice gooey if not thoroughly rinsed before soaking. After soaking I "calculate" the right amount of water by tilting the pot and allowing the water to pour slowly out of the pot until just a little more than half of the rice is still under the water's surface. I then put the pot up to boil until the water is below the level of the top of the rice, cover and turn the heat down to a low simmer. After twenty minutes I turn the fire off completely. After another twenty minutes, I use a paddle to turn and fluff the rice in the pot, before covering it back up. Of course this is all happening while I'm doing other stuff, but the timing must be such that the rice is done (to the point of fluffing) before the moqueca is ready to serve.

I'm using shrimp and salmon (the latter must be wild only, please, not the obese, artificially colored, foul-tasting mud marlin they raise in those ecologically disastrous aquaculture pens). Shrimp need to be peeled and deveined, after which I give them a little splash of white wine. The salmon I got (at Costco) was fresh sockeye, and I cut roughly 100 g pieces right off the skin. The seafood bits got a salt-and-pepper treatment and went back in the fridge to wait their turn.

The sofrito consisted of about two tablespoons each of dendê oil and olive oil, lots of onion, green (one pasilla and two jalapeño) and yellow (three of the common, waxy semi-hot type) peppers, lots of garlic and fresh ginger (julienned), and when this had cooked down and was just starting to brown, I added several fresh roma tomatoes peeled and diced, half a can of coconut milk, some jellied fish stock (from some fish I caught a few days ago) and salt (to taste). This mixture smells awesome and it should be allowed to cook on low heat for a while until all the veggies are very tender.

Everything I've gone through so far is pretty laid back—stuff that can happen at whatever pace you set. It could be just before dinner or it could be done a day ahead. The final step, however, is time-sensitive, and you'll want to do this shortly before dinner. I start by using a Benriner mandoline to sliver a nice pile of red, yellow and green bell peppers.

I break several rules with my practice of coating just one side of the fish with a dry spice rub and searing that side on a very hot iron pan before assembling the stew. If you don't do this, the moqueca will turn out just great, but I find that the sear adds another dimension of flavor and texture.

The fish and the vegetable mixture can be put together in the pan used for searing, which was already hot, and this could be "made pretty" with a casual scattering across the top with the bell pepper slivers (you're more than welcome to get artistic with this part). Cover goes on, it cooks for just long enough to make a couple of caipirinhas, and it's done! [The pan in the pic below is larger--a #12--than the one in the previous pic, a #8.]



Ladle a nice helping over rice, and toss in some finely chopped cilantro if you like (I totally forgot the cilantro today!), and regale in complete disregard for authenticity!

TOURNEDOS de poisson, the last of Jeanine's seabass (sniff)

Okay, sorry, folks, this isn't much, but it completes a tetralogy of fish posts developing from a sizeable donation of white seabass from my colleague. So far, I've been through three raw dishes, and by today, the fish is almost certainly still good for raw use…but heck, I might as well enjoy some cooked fish as well.

In my previous post, I made pokie, which being a tartare, is not a picky dish when it comes to the shape of the pieces of fish being used. Planning ahead, I cut seven perfect medallions (tournedos) and squirreled them away before dicing the remainder for the pokie. Those medallions are now the final act—but jeezus, this is just cooking fish…so…pedestrian after exploring the exciting possibilities of raw fish.

But wait—I did mention before that oversized white seabass turns to rubber if improperly cooked. It happened to my sister once when she decided to cook dinner (this was when I was a kid), and the experience was so traumatic that she would never cook fish again. The scars left from completely ruining a premium ingredient are deep and burning and may never heal, and my sister would thereverafter be consigned to a diet heavier on red meat than it otherwise would be and the unhealthy consequences of its saturated fats and cholesterol. So cooking seabass can be detrimental to your well-being and sanity after all, so maybe it's a good idea to at least cover how not to f*ck it up royally, à la Jacquie.

These particular fish medallions are meant to be cooked through—not just seared on the outside and raw in the middle. I would venture to say that for cooked seabass, the raw-in-the-middle thing just doesn't work. Knowing this, I had cut the tournedos relatively thin (about 1 cm), for quick cooking on a wickedly hot surface.

For me, that hot surface comes in the form of a cast-iron skillet. The penalty for using a non-reactive surface like nonstick or stainless steel is not huge, except for a slight deficit in browning. The important thing is that the surface is really hot when the fish is put in the pan.

I put oil (olive—or anything with a high smoke point) into the pan just before cooking the fish. This keeps the smoke to a minimum and gives less time for the heat-driven funky reactions that chemically change the structure of the fats into things you're better off not eating.

Once the fish is in the pan, I don't touch it again until the first side is done and browned. The guaranteed way to make rubbery seabass is to cook at insufficient heat and flip the pieces over and over.

The second side doesn't require as much time, as there will be some of the cooking occurring with residual heat from the top as well as new heat from the pan below.

As with any sautéed meat, it's a good idea to move the tournedos to a plate and allow it to sit a bit for even heat distribution. This gives you a chance to deglaze the skillet and make a quick sauce. Now would be the time to add white wine, butter (salted, of course), herbs, cream, whatever you like.

SARDINES, tasty morsels of good karma…

I'm a certifiable nut when it comes to raw bluefin tuna—I could eat it for every meal for the rest of my life (which would probably be conveniently shortened by the cumulative effects of the mercury and PCBs), but the reality is that it is prohibitively expensive, all the good stuff is consumed in Japan, and they are notoriously hard to catch on hook and line. And there's the fact that I don't freeze fish, so when I do get one it will be consumed in a series of gigantic sashimi meals stretching out over a small number of days and not a lifetime. Bluefin tuna is also severely overfished in all of the world's oceans, and I'm not helping things much by harvesting their juveniles (anything under 50-100 kg, depending on where the bluefin comes from) for my own consumption, or for that matter advertising to still more people (you) how worthy of a foodstuff this fish is.

If you find this interesting, I highly recommend the SeafoodWATCH site run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Did you know, Karen, that farmed Atlantic salmon are also on the "ecological disaster" list because of the impact that the salmon farms have on natural waterways and native fish? Yeah, I know that foodies tend to put "how it tastes" before any other consideration like ethics (think foie gras) or ecology (beluga caviar) or expense (either of the previous examples), but today I'm offering up something that is cheap, low on the food chain and has very healthy populations. You'll find it on any "best choice" list of sustainable seafood, and yes I mean sardines.



Aren't they beautiful? They're also very fresh—these are not more than an hour post-death—and herein lies one of the keys to preparing sardines or any of the traditional "pesci azzurri" like herring or anchovies. All of these small "baitfish" have a high oil content and some pretty active enzymes that break down proteins much faster than in other fish. If you're planning on eating the sardines, keep 'em cold and eat 'em right away.

My original plan was to remove head, innards and scales and fry whole. Adri reminded me that she is less than keen on having to remove bones from fish while she eats it. So how does one quantify one's affection in this household? If it's by the number of small fish that one will butterfly for the benefit of having the company of finicky spouse and kids, then I might score highly. I'm omitting the images of sardine beheadings and removal of backbones and skip to the just-before-frying shot.



I actually left a few sardines whole (because that's how I like them!) and they are in the plastic bag behind the board, which contains all-purpose flour, salt and hot paprika.

When using a dry coating like flour, it's a good idea to "rest" the floured thingies on a wooden cutting board before frying them. This gives the flour a chance to absorb some of the moisture and become more of a batter that will give a crackle-y crumb to the coating once it's fried. By the time these guys hit the hot oil they were looking less powdery and white than they do in the photo.

I used a little more than an inch of canola oil in a Dutch oven for the frying and cooked the sardines four at a time. I don't use a thermometer for cooking oil, but I would guess the temperature at around 375°F, based on the response of the oil to a wooden chopstick (moderately fast bubbles and no smoke).



My call on wine for this would be something like one of those Italian coastal whites "un poco mosso" (a little bit sparkling though not like a spumante). BTW, we're planning a wine-recommendation round table with Karen, me, and maybe our new Mouseketeer Trevor--I'm always interested in meeting someone who considers Tournedos Rossini a "light lunch." What's the proper wine choice for a spoonful of peanut butter at midnight?

Fish cakes

Quick & simple, these can be served as an appetizer or main dish.
I tend to make this when I have left over potatoes or mashed potatoes.

3 boiled potatoes
3 small filets of white fish
1 egg
1 small eschalot
parseley
paprika
salt & pepper
breadcrumbs
Oil for frying

Mash potatoes & fish.
Add rest of ingredients.
Pat into palm size paddies then roll in breadcrumbs.
Fry in oil.
Serve hot