LOW-KEY POKIE (that's what it's all about)

Pokie (poke, poki, pokey—the Hawaiian kind not the Norway kind) is a near total sham. With a sauce based on any combination of red chili pepper, soy sauce, and sesame oil, you could cover up almost anything and it would taste pretty awesome. It's a fairly standard introduction—a "raw fish for beginners"—for those who haven't quite mastered the concept of raw fish but have already developed a liking for fiery spice (and this is becoming increasingly common in Europe, though there's still a high wuss-factor there when it comes to spicy or raw food). If you've been to a sushi restaurant and had "spicy tuna," you are familiar with the general flavor of pokie—that is, more about the seasoning than the fish. Not something I get too excited about, and in restaurants I rarely order it.

Why do I make it, then? Well, I did say it tastes pretty awesome, and it's a really easy—a laid-back (and low-key) way to use fish that is in good enough condition for eating raw (i.e., excellent condition). At some point in the procession of dishes from beginning with raw and unadorned sashimi and ending with pan-seared tournedos de poisson, even my seabass donation from Jeanine gets the Hawaiian treatment.

Pokie is basically a fish tartare, in which the size of the dice of fish may vary wildly. I have had everything from huge chunks to what looked like puree, though a medium dice (a bit smaller than 1 cm) works well for my purposes, which usually involves the use of romaine lettuce hearts or cucumber sticks for spooning up the pokie.

In creating a sauce for pokie the basic needs are soy sauce, sesame oil, and some kind of red chili pepper—traditionally the last part would come from a "Hawaiian red pepper"—whatever that is, keeping in mind that pokie is a relatively recent invention and red Capsicum is just as native to Hawaii as soy sauce and sesame, i.e., not at all. The traditional fish used in pokie is sashimi-grade ahi, or yellowfin tuna, which is native to Hawaii (so at least one ingredient is local).

Beyond the basic three, you can pretty much toss in whatever you want—garlic, ginger, mayonnaise, sugar, lemon, lime, green onions, chives, oyster sauce—this is a very forgiving recipe. Here's what I used for the seabass pokie in the picture: soy sauce, sesame oil, sambal oelek (Indonesian red chile sauce) and sriracha (a.k.a. "rooster sauce") for the spicy kick, lime juice for acid, a bit of mayonnaise for creaminess, and chopped chives for pungency and texture.

Mahalos, dude (or whatever it is they say there).

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!

WHITE SEABASS CARPACCIO

White sea bass, Atractoscion nobilis, are known around here for being generally quite large (10-30 kg), running around in large schools, getting famously stupid when they are hungry, and being wonderful to eat. This summer I've gone fishing for them twice already and have come home empty-handed both times, which has thrown a monkey wrench in my plans to post fish dishes to Frangykitchen.

My luck changed today when I got an email from my dear colleague Jeanine, who is an expert on fish physiology and is married to another fish researcher and captain of a fish-research vessel. "Jeff," she writes, "you're pitiful. I'll leave a chunk of seabass in the fridge at work for you."

I wasn't planning on driving in to work today, but I've gotten fish from Jeanine often enough to know that when she offers fish, you jump at the opportunity. The fish she brings me is always in pristine condition and never frozen—suitable for raw dishes like sashimi, tartare, and carpaccio. This chunk was the picture of seafood perfection—about a kilo of fillet (skin still on), cut from the front half of the right side of a fish that must have weighed over 40 lb (18.14 kg). Okay, right or left doesn't make a difference, but the rest does.

The first of three raw dishes I'm making is carpaccio. What's the difference between fish carpaccio and sashimi? Well besides the fact that one is Italian and the other Japanese, it's mostly about how the fish gets "dressed." With little variation, sashimi is uniformly-sized and overlapping slices of raw fish presented simply on a small dish, and it is dipped into a mixture of soy sauce and wasabi. Carpaccio, is more elaborate, and the fish itself is not always simply raw but may be cured or marinated—just not cooked. In carpaccio, the slices tend to be thin but broad and presented in a single layer on a large dish, with toppings that vary. Because the slices are usually larger, carpaccio requires the fork-and-knife approach, whereas sashimi is cut to bite-size and eaten with chopsticks.

White seabass is good for sashimi but ideal for carpaccio, because it's large and very firm (easy to slice off large, flat, thin slices), and because it has relatively little flavor on its own and takes nicely to a variety of condiments. Here's what I did.

I cut slices from the center of the fillet and parallel with the longitudinal axis of the fish (if this were sashimi, I would slice in a very different direction). In case you don't know this, you need a very sharp knife for this work. If all of your kitchen knives are dull, you shouldn't be reading here anyways, so go away. All of you squeamish raw-fish haters can leave as well. Bye.


I used a light marinade to make the fish less sashimi-like and more carpaccio-ish. Squeezed a lime over the slices, drizzled tequila, and then some walnut oil, mixed it up and put it in the fridge for a couple of hours while I went to the gym and to the grocery to get some fresh chives.

Back home, it's put a plate in the fridge to chill, slice tomatoes, prepare a "vinaigrette" (sans vinegar) with the juice of another lime, a teaspoon or so of white wine, about a teaspoon of ginger juice (I use my garlic press, which I never use for garlic so it should really be called a ginger press), salt, a bit of sugar, olive oil, and a half teaspoon of mayonnaise from a jar to help emulsify. The sauce needs to be kind of salty to flavor the raw fish, which is thus far unsalted. Besides the vinaigrette, the fish gets liberal sprinklings of chopped chives and shichimi togarashi, a Japanese red pepper spice mix that adds just the perfect "punch" to an otherwise very tame dish.


Great summertime snack by the pool!