Random notes from tuna land

In the spring, the blue fin tuna go the Mediterranean to mate. Many of these huge fascinating creatures have travelled from far away. Some have spent the winter here. It is during the full moons that they mate. There are fewer of them, at least the wild ones. Few seem to dispute that. Just how bad the situation is for the tuna in the Mediterranean is hard to say. The Western Atlantic tuna is on the verge of extinction. The Mediterranean tuna is not likely going extinct any soon but it is partly due to some relatively bizarre reasons. Some 15 years ago, the tuna fishing trade took some odd turns. Due to a growing demand from sushi restaurants in Japan and elsewhere for tuna all year around, there was an unsatisfied market for fat tuna. To meet this demand, tuna fattening farms were set up.

It started in Spain and continued all over the Mediterranean Sea. With the introduction of these farms the fishing industry of tuna changed and investments were made in new and more costly equipments. A large number of the blue fin tuna today is caught by purse sein nets and kept alive and transported to these farms in which the wild tunas are kept in captivity and fed abundant amounts of food so that they fatten for anything from a few months to a few years. The food is the same as the tuna eat in their natural environment. There are many of these farms today and nobody seems to know exactly how many tunas are kept in captivity only that there are a lot of them. I will come back to the differences between wild and fattened tuna.

Blue fin tuna never ceases to fascinate me. It can show the same textural density and mineral-like flavor profile as meat, yet at the same time display iodine flavors that unmistakably emanates from the sea. It is one of the most versatile produce I can think of from the sense that almost all parts of the tuna can be eaten raw or cooked in various manners and it is a surprisingly logic vehicle for marrying flavors that may seem totally disparate. I find myself over and over again wondering why I did not think of serving certain flavors with tuna that immediately upon trying seemed so obviously made for each other. It can counter sweetness, bitterness and acidity like only some very delicate game seems able to do. I don’t think chefs in general have tapped all the possibilities that the tuna offer. Perhaps it is due to the irresistibility of raw tuna.

I have been offered to swim with the tunas in one of these big cages or pens in a Mediterranean tuna farm. I keep telling myself I want to do it because I might learn something from it. Perhaps it is really just a macho-thing. I know it will impress my foodie friends and silence them for a long time. It just about beats anything they can come up with. But the thought of being so close to a 500 kilo tuna is scary. They are not like cuddly bears. Their fins are sharp. I have cut myself a couple of times when handling tuna. Perhaps the fears raised by my friend Sophie Brissaud of ptipois fame have scared me the most. She made me think that the real danger with the potential physical contact with the tunas was that I would connect with them. You could become friends while in the water, she said. You would never be able to eat tuna again, at least I would not be able to, she continued. The prospect of becoming that close with tunas really scares the shit out of me.

My favorite parts of the tuna are the head and the belly. When I say that, it always raises eyebrows. Why the head, people ask. Granted, heads are not the most prized parts of the tuna in monetary terms. Most of them are thrown away to no good. On most fish markets around the Mediterranean where you some years ago could find locally caught blue fin tuna- yes it has gotten rather rare -, they used to give away the heads, if they at all had bothered bringing them to the market. The meat in the head is full of flavor and gelatinous. It is simply fantastic. Perhaps my interest for it is augmented by it being so chronically overlooked. Maybe the inaccessibility of the meat in the head and its proneness to oxidization can explain the lack of commercial interest in the heads. It is good advice to look out for them as they are inexpensive and it offers some of the most flavorful parts of the tuna. I try to get my hands on tuna heads, or most large fish heads for that matter, as often as I can. I prefer the heads from smaller tunas because cut in half, they will be just about the right size to go into my oven. A few weeks ago, I was given a head from a pretty big tuna. The head alone weighed more than 16 kilos, which is the kind of head that will simply not go into my oven, let alone my backpack in which I was planning to put the fish that I bought since I was cycle-borne that day. It is really kind of a bourgeois tragedy to be given a tuna head weighing 16 kilos. The only sensible thing to do seemed to be to cut out the best parts of the head, that is to say the main portions of the “torpedos” and the bones surrounding them and the cheeks. Unfortunately the cheeks didn’t go into the backpack either because a 1,4 kilo langouste had higher priority to go in the backpack.

As good as the head is, my ultimate preference is for the belly parts. I mean if I really had to make a choice. So if I had to pick one of the two, then I would pick the belly. I think it is because I like the fat. Perhaps it is an instinct. We seem to have a preference for the fatty parts of animals. The head is more gelatinous. I like that too. There is more taste in the head than in the belly. Generally, the belly meat in fish is not the tastiest. Except for the head, most flavors are usually found in the tail of fish, which is the least fatty part with the toughest texture. A tuna belly that has been aged a bit can however offer amazing flavors. If the ageing is perfectly calibrated, the resulting flavor profile is not very far distant from that of a great caviar, clearly not as concentrated but with the same kind of complexity albeit more elegant.

The belly is perhaps the part of the tuna that offers the best indication of the quality. It is entirely possible it is purely imaginary and that I believe so only because of my passion for great tuna bellies. Sometimes the belly of the fattened tuna can be luxuriously decadent to taste but unfortunately the fattening process often results in a tuna that is literally dripping of fat. This is true not only for the belly part. The taste will as a consequence of the excessive and not well integrated fat be a bit cloying. The fattened tuna’s tendency to over-fattiness makes them usually best consumed raw or cold as higher serving temperature will only enforce the appearance of cloyingness. The fatty structure of the captive tuna can be more akin to that of lardo than that of wild tuna. Of course, when it has the right kind of fatty streaks and it does not too obviously grease the fingers when you run them on the belly parts, well then it can be totally sublime and yes merits highest gastronomic interest. Below follows first a picture of a tuna belly from a fattened tuna that is too oily for my taste and after that one that is almost as sublime as a great wild tuna, perhaps because it has spent only a short time in the fattening farm.

As good as any fattened tuna can be, it will simply never compete with a wild tuna caught in some of the deep current waters at the end of the spring or early summer when food is abundant and of good quality and the tunas will have to go deep and exercise for the food. It seems like the best tunas are not the lazy ones. Famous places for tuna fishing in the Mediterranean are the currents between Siciliy and Malta and those between Malta and Lampedusa. The most memorable Mediterranean tunas I have had have been fished in the latter currents. They say that only the really athletic tunas go there. A belly part from that type of tuna is exceptional. It is fat but the fatty streaks are perfectly inserted in the belly. There is no greasiness, only tenderness and a perfect resistance when you bite it. The fat is enough to give weight and length to the taste. The best such tuna has a long taste that offers a complexity like a great wine. It is almost a pity to serve anything with it. When like this, there are no doubts it is one of the greatest produce the world has to offer. Here are a few samples of such tuna.

There is an extremely difficult question that is often discussed by amateurs of tuna. Should tuna belly be aged? If so how should it be done? It is a question that merits its own post. I have discovered a lot on that subject especially over the last year. My position on the subject has been reversed back and forth a couple of times during that journey and I feel there are still a few more details that need to be clarified before I am totally ready to go into the deep waters of this subject. Ageing tuna seems to be a sort of black art. There is very little written about it at least for the non-Japanese readers. I have tasted tuna from fish that has been still warm and over the course of up to a 10 days storage at different temperatures and conditions and yes there is a clear improvement in the quality within this span – without going into indications of optimal number of days, temperatures, conditions and other prerequisites – but it is also amazing to follow how rapidly deterioration can be under sub-optimal conditions or when deterioration has started. When the right conditions are met, the result is amazing. Simply amazing. The next post will cover cooking tuna and well, not cooking tuna. It might be the second to the next post as I have another subject on my mind that is interesting. It has to do with killing fish. Not ike jime.