Fugu has a reputation of being expensive and very rare. For those readers who don’t know it, fugu contains tetrodotoxin in the organs, especially the liver and ovaries , although there is also farmed fugu that do not contain tetrodotoxin. There are some 70 different species of fugu of which only some 15 are edible. The most searched after is the Tiger Blowfish or torafugu and it is also the most poisonous.

The usual comment on fugu from food writers and foodies trying it for the first time is that it has a rather bland taste but interesting texture. Somehow this comment intrigued because why would such a revered fish and expensive be so overestimated? It didn’t make much sense.

My fugu meal at Yamadaya was a 14 course meal, 13 of which featured the fugu. Naturally they only used torafugu or Tiger Blowfish. There was a gelatin made from the fugu stock with fugu skin. There was cooked shredded meat and lightly heated meat in miso soup. There was a large plate of the classic chrysanthemum style sashimi of back center piece. I also had a steak from the back bone, male sperm sac in kelp stock, a soup of the heads and gills and deep fried jaw bone.

It is clear that there were some dishes that were less good than others in terms of execution, which is to say they could have easily been improved upon. But a couple of the dishes were nevertheless truly fantastic. But this isn’t really about reviewing Yamadaya as a restaurant but rather exploring fugu as a fish. It is true that the sashimi style back part was rather bland in taste and had a texture which was somewhat crunchy. I felt the portion of it was a little large and the slices in the end started to so to speak grow in the mouth. So for those who only eat fugu this way, I can understand the comments of its bland taste and “interesting” texture, but for me fugu is about so much more that just eating it sashimi style. The different flavors of the different parts and that were brought out with the different cooking techniques were simply astonishing. The skin offered remarkable pure fish flavors without any “fishy” taste so to speak. The aspic made from the bones was amazingly fragrant like one can only obtain in a chicken stock made from true pasture chickens of ancient breeds.  The jaw bone and its meat were gelatinous and savory like cheeks from a tiny veal. Even the shredded meat was unique.    

So yes, I can easily understand fugu’s revered status as one of the most celebrated and notorious dishes in Japanese cuisine. I cannot wait until my next opportunity to savor it. But it is not for those faint hearted who do not eat fish bones, fish heads, fish skins and sperm sacs. It is only for the true gourmets.

I wrote this post some time ago but never got around to publish it. Being in the middle of the festive season, it seems appropriate to push the post button now and it will buy me more time to finalize posts related to Japan.

One of the most sought after lobsters is perhaps the spiny lobster from the Mediterranean so I will write about that this time. But the principles are the same for any kind of lobster.

I frankly don’t know many people who see the big deal with spiny lobsters or regular blue lobsters. When disappointing, and it often is, a spiny lobster it is just a chunk of really boring protein. And it can be a chewy chunk too.

To succeed with any kind of lobster recipe, whether it is European blue lobster, American lobster, spiny lobster or slipper lobsters, the quality of the lobster is essential. If not of great quality, it can indeed be one of the most disappointing expensive ingredients on the planet. But if it is of top notch quality, the flavors and textures can be sensational. Yes, at its best, to my palate it is one of the truly great ingredients. So what determines the quality of lobsters?

The best lobsters I have eaten, whether they were European blue lobster, American lobsters or spiny lobsters have always, without exception, not spent much time in a tank or out of the sea. Also, I think the best lobsters have been net caught. Why is this? Well, much of what is living in the sea can take on flavors from what they eat. Blue lobsters that have been trap caught have often consumed bait that has decomposed and that may have been treated with chemicals to attract lobsters to the trap can take on undesired flavors. The general idea is that trap caught lobsters need to spend at least several days in a tank after catch to so to speak wash off flavors from the bait. However, net caught lobsters never display these off flavors. If a lobster spends time in tank, the texture changes and there will be a lot more loss of liquid when cooking the lobster, at least generally speaking. It is easy to explain. While they like much fish are used to fasting, it has been shown that lobsters under starvation undergo a change of the composition of their bodies. The body weight will not really change but their water content will increase and the amount of organic material will decrease. The changes are quite remarkable. So it is no surprise that lobsters that have spent time in tanks are so obviously inferior. On top of this there is the stress factor. Two weeks in a tank will be absolutely detrimental to the quality of a lobster. It is however a complicated matter because it also depends if the lobster is preparing to change its shell. Just before changing the shell, lobsters absorb a lot of water to crack the previous shell. The few lobsters I have eaten that have been about to change their shells have not been particularly good. On the other hand, a lobster that has changed their shells recently and gotten a new shell in place is usually of exceptional quality. While it is pure speculation from my part, this probably has to do with that after removing the old shell, lobsters eat ferociously to gain weight and to harden the shell.

When choosing a lobster, it is important to only deal with reliable suppliers. A reliable supplier is someone who can guarantee the exact provenance of the lobsters and the time it has been up on land. A lot of lobsters spend time in tanks on land or in cages in the sea after they are caught. As explained above, it does not improve quality.

Ideally, a spiny lobster should look like on the images below with antennas intact and a glossy shell. If the shell is somewhat soft, it is normally not a bad thing as it means it has changed shell recently.

The best lobsters come from waters where there is great food to eat and where the waters are relatively non-polluted. Period. It is simply the case for most seafood. The better the waters, the better the whole food chain will be. So good a rule of thumb is to look for spiny lobsters in areas where there is good diving.

If I can’t find top quality lobsters, I will cook something else.

I generally prefer the females for the coral inside. Are they better? Well I think so. How do you spot the difference between a female and a male spiny lobster? On the image below on the top is a female and on the bottom is a male. The female has bigger flaps on the tail to enable eventually carrying the roe. The same applies for blue lobsters and American lobsters although for those the sex can be seen from looking above too.

Spiny lobster can be cooked in many ways. What is important to remember is that it is essential to apply some high heat initially to avoid the putrefactive proteins from turning black. This time I choose a simple one of just splitting it in half and baking it in the oven, first at high temperature (190 C) for around 4-5 minutes, then at lower temperature (120C) until it is ready. It is easy to spot when it is ready. Simply put the index finger at the thickest part of the tail. It should be warm but the meat should have almost entirely lost its translucent appearance just before the proteins really set. If it is a great quality lobster it will be tender as anything.

If it is a female and there is roe inside it I often make a mousse with it. It is simple. You only need vegetable jus, a bit of gelatin, white banjuls vinegar and clarified butter. Mix it in a mixer and it is ready to go. If more air is needed, run it in the siphon.

I like to serve a sea weed persillade with lobsters. For this you need top quality nori. Forget the supermarket nori “Green dragon” or whatever it is called. For those who pass by Paris I can recommend the Issé shop in 2nd. Great nori is quite expensive but in my fantasy – with a splash of really good shiro-dashi – it can sometimes replace truffles. Not that the flavors are the same but it can evoke similar sensations for me. To make the persillade, clarified butter and a mild Ligurian olive oil are also needed. Clarified butter is by the way my cooking oil of preference right now. Mix the butter and oil with a bit of finely diced and in butter sweated sweet onions. Add the very finely chopped nori and parsley. Finish with a splash of good shiro-dashi.

On the top image above there are also potatoes smoked over juniper berries. It goes well with the seaweed persillade. I will get back to how to do those some other time. It is a childhood memory.

Right now I am busy trying to figure out how to ignite the binchotan I bought and how to keep it burning. Well, I kind of did succeed yesterday and grilled red mullet filets under a burning piece of binchotan. The result was the best cooking technique for red mullet I have come across. Simply astonishing. When I told David in Japan that the first thing I would do with the binchotan when I got home was just that with red mullets. That is a no-brainer, David responded. He is right.

Here are some tidbits.

Fugu or blowfish.

Fugu spermsack, or male egg sack as they say.

 Sushi at Masa

My favourite soba-place

Not a crime scene.

 
Tuna butchers in action.

 The dish of the trip. Grilled eel at Koju. Then below, a new knife with my name and ike jime in action.

If I ever were to write a 50-must things to do in one’s culinary life, there are a couple of things that would be obvious choices, some of them are fries fried in horse fat, Mediterranean deep water shrimps (aristeus antennatus) directly off the boats – of course you are munching down the whole shrimp including the shell with the seawater still in the head -, live tiny squids still crawling when put in the mouth, aged (plus 10 years) preserved foie gras, Corsican tiger veal and buckwheat fed duck. Just to be clear, eating at the Fat Duck or el bulli would not make it at all to my 50-musts list.

On my Tokyo trip a few new such obvious items on the must do list were added. One of them is to eat at the Kawamura steakhouse in Tokyo. Calling it a steakhouse wrongfully suggests it is a large restaurant, which it isn’t. Shoebox operation is a better description.

The kitchen is tiny with just about enough space for two chefs to work and not without some difficulty. A small counter seating seven people is facing the “kitchen”. That is all there is to this place, which is all about beef and nothing else. But it is not just any beef. It is so good that superlatives like ”exceptional”, “extraordinary” or “as good as it will ever get” all seem insufficient. Nobody going to Kawamura needs to worry about inconsistencies in produce qualities. The chef will simply close the restaurant if he is unable to source top drawer beef and he will advise clients to come and eat another time. Problem is that this is one of the most difficult reservations to score in Tokyo, so the wait for a second chance might be long. The superstitious of those that have secured a reservation might find it useful to make sacrifice to the beef gods a week before the meal.

The beef at Kawamura is not necessarily Kobe beef. He is obsessed with finding the highest quality beef. This strategy is similar to some of the most produce quality oriented chefs in France I know who have told me that they don’t care from where in France the veal for example comes as long as it was the best veal that could possibly be found. At Kawamura only the best beef will be served, regardless of what protectorate it comes from. The chef, proud of his beef, will show it and cut it in front of the clients. The beef is aged, the one we had had been aged for 4 weeks. Beef is served in several ways, raw, cooked rare and cooked through. The filet was cooked rare at low temperature on a grill. The cooking of Passard comes to mind, with the difference that here it is the obvious choice, which it isn’t always at Passard.

How do you characterize the beef? It is incredibly flavorful. A bit as if marrow fat has been injected into the meat. Kawamura gives tenderness a new definition and reference. It is like a steak tartar of aged beef and marrow fat that have been chopped then pressed together. If I would give a score to the quality to the beef, 24/20 – I don’t know why I say only 24 – seems appropriate, since it is better than it could possibly be. This is beef that will stand up to any truly great red wine. A beef fit for the gods.

We started with some beef Carpaccio that set the expectations of what was to come in the right perspective. We also had a fantastic beef broth that had the look of clarified butter and it tasted heavenly.

The filet was served simply with some mustard, onions and beans. Why complicate matters?

The faux filet was sliced in thins slices, slowly stewed for a few minutes with sugar, soy, water and onion and served in a bowl with rice. The result was a spectacular simple beef stew with incredible flavor depth attesting the very high quality of the beef.

One of my eating partners at Kawamura, Pim of chez Pim fame, said that she considered becoming a vegetarian after the meal because she could not eat beef anymore. I look at it differently. It is really another type of produce. The beef we are discussion here is ultra fattened beef. It should not be compared to normal grazed beef. However good Japanese beef can be, one should beware that these animals are obese and probably suffer from being obese.

I said Kawamura is about beef only. Well it is not entirely true. There was dessert too. The wobbly crème caramel was nothing short of a text book example of perfectly executed traditional French cuisine that is so incredibly hard to come by these days. Even Escoffier would have been impressed by the crème caramel.

Kawamura will silence anyone who believes that produce quality is not the absolute cornerstone of cooking and will also support the notion that a large number of the current famous chefs in the world have no cloths. Is it expensive?

I suppose those who need to ask, shouldn’t go.

Then one day when I was about to give up, I found the two-word description I had been searching. Crousti-bleu. I want my steak crispy on the exterior, well seared but not charred with a good flavor from the Maillard reaction. Then inside I want it blue. Body temperature, but not warm, so that no liquid would run out from the beef when cutting it. Warm enough to optimize the beef flavors of beef.

One the one hand, beef that is too cold does not taste much. Hence, a raw beef tartar should be let to reach a temperature well above fridge temperature. On the other hand, beef that is too warm, is runny and will taste dry when chewed plus I find the heat sometimes to be masking flavors. Perhaps some flavors are too volatile for cooking beef beyond rare.

First time I ordered my beef crousti-bleu in a Parisian bistro famous for their beef the server looked at me for a few seconds and repeated: Crousti-bleu? Yes, “crousti” on the outside and blue on the inside. Aha, he said. Often the reaction is a few seconds of afterthought, but more often than not, at least with professionals, it will be clear what it is I want. The success rate has improved immensely. I now often get the beef the way I want or not to far from it.

So how do I do it at home? There are a couple of approaches. My preferred one is to use a 3 centimeter thick piece of rib-eye beef that I take directly from the fridge and put it in a moderately hot pan, but not fuming hot, greased with palm oil for its higher burn temperature and let it crust on one side, then on the other. After that I do each side one more time on a little lower heat and for a relatively short time. The beef is finished off with one more turning on even lower temperature on each side. This sort of evens out the temperature. I suppose we could call it triple cooking of beef. The result is a crisp beef with an interior that is approximately body temperature and not runny. All juices will flow in the mouth when the beef is chewed. It is delicious.

I think it is written in our genes to love bone marrow. A lot of paleo-research witness of our ancestors’ love for this fatty highly nutritious part of animals.  In these two articles, here and here, for instance we can read about the life in the Paris Bassin in the Magdalenian. Especially this quote is interesting: 

“There are no whole bones in the faunal assemblages from Pincevent or Verberie. There are abundant impact fractures, systematically placed to open the medullary cavities for the extraction of marrow”.

Speaking of rein deer bone marrow, I highly recommend everyone to try it as it is really something. Also to try is marrow from a just killed animal that has not quite cooled.

Now back to the topic, namely the paleo-style beef tartar. It is simple to do. You need the following ingredients for one beef tartar:

One nice piece of bone marrow

A slice of good beef, I use rib eye or if I can find a tender and marbled bavette I will use that

Cevennes onions or onions of the Cénol variety, which is really the same thing except for that the former must be from Cevennes

Capers

Orléans mustard from Martin Pouret

Fleur de sel from Guérande

Egg yolk for those who want

Sarawak pepper

Fresh wild arugula leafs

So what are Orléans mustard and capers doing in a paleo beef tartar? Well that particular mustard is there because it is the best mustard in the world and a dash of it makes the tartar simply irresistible.  The capers are there because they are home cured and good.

Preparation is done according to personal preferences or mood.  Pop the morrow from the bone. One way to do it is to place it in cold water for a while, then pop it with the thumb. Dice the bone marrow or pass it through a tamis. Dice, grind or grate the beef. Add the marrow to the beef and a small spoon of mustard and blend. Dice the onion finely and rinse the dice thoroughly to soften the flavor somewhat. Add the diced onions and some capers to the tartar and blend. Season with a bit of sea salt and the pepper.  Remember that the arugula leafs will add peppery notes to the tartar so be careful with the pepper.

Plate the tartar and add arugula leafs on top.  Enjoy!

I assume that everyone who reads this blog knows what ike jime is. For those whose minds it has slipped for one or the other inexplicable reason, you can read about it here, here and here. Even if it hasn’t slipped your mind, I highly recommend those blog posts anyway. They are great. For those in a hurry, ike jime is a technique for slaughtering fish by which the brain is spiked and the spinal cord is destroyed by a wire or needle that is pushed into the spinal cord.

It is among many considered a superior technique to slaughter some fish this way especially if it is to be served raw. I don’t know. I remain skeptical. For oily pelagic fish, it seems to make a difference. Most tuna is handled with ike jime technique, at least if it is to be exported to Japan.

The tests described in the three links above were conducted on farmed fish, which as a rule among other things have higher fat content than wild fish. How that might have impacted the outcome, I don’t know.

But this post is not really about ike jime but a closely related subject. As I said, I have a hypothesis. There are numerous studies that have concluded that stress before slaughter is detrimental to the quality of the fish. I think so too. But it also seems to vary between species. Some time ago I started to see a pattern, namely that fish that had been spear fished often displayed a particularly exceptional quality. It became eye catching. At first I thought it was just imaginary but the pattern was there if the spear had hit the head and cut the spinal cord and the fish had been left to bleed for a while in the salty water. There also seemed to be a pattern that fish of certain sizes were particularly good when shot with a spear. The sizes seem to range from around a kilo to maybe 2,5 kilos. Much larger fish that is spear fished is often shot several times and they seem not to have bled sufficiently. My theory is that the smaller sizes die instantly, while the larger ones will struggle and panic. I am of course speculating. But it seems plausible that a fish that is killed in an instant while swimming in its natural habitat will never feel pre-mortem stress or panic like with other fishing methods or the stress that a farmed fish is likely to be under for the duration of its life. It is incredibly difficult to validate or rather falsify this hypothesis that spear fished fish shot like this is better. How do you set up a proper control group with line caught wild fish e t c, e t c? To validate that there is basis for this hypothesis I would present the image above. The slices are photographed about 30 hours after the fish was killed. It is a Mediterranean grouper (merou blanc). What is the deal? The deal is the texture, which is firm yet tender and translucent, and the taste, which is incredibly clean. Though I would not call the texture crunchy, it does have a certain resistance to it when you bite it, while still being perfectly tender. It is like the opposite of being mushy.

I also think that the best storage solution is if the fish is slowly cooled without ice and kept cool.

This is what it looked like cooked.

When I talked to David Kinch of Manresa on the phone the other week he mentioned that he had been doing a Bolognese kind of sauce using cuttlefish instead of meat. It sounded intriguing and caught my attention. I asked him for the particulars, but he just responded, got to run Mikael, talk to you later. In a sense it was good he did not have time to elaborate. It is more fun to play around with my fantasy not being influenced by too detailed instructions. Afterwards, it is always interesting to compare how in this case David had done his Bolognese.

This idea sounded great. Yes, indeed another one of those “why did I not think of that before”-moments. I have done similar sauces with finely diced shrimp and fish but cuttlefish or any cephalopod had never occurred to me. It would of course be interesting with pasta, especially with paccheri but I am only eating pasta on the very odd occasion. The other interesting alternative would be to use a fish that would be a good companion to such a tasty and powerful sauce that I had in mind to do. The flavors of the sauce would be cuttlefish, chicken stock, bay leaves and diced tomatoes. Nothing more. Perhaps a few leafs of basil in the end. This type of sauce would outshine most fish. But there are some types of rockfish that in theory seemed perfect to match this sauce. I decided to give it a try with a scorpion fish.

For several reasons I wanted a small scorpion fish, that is to say maximum weight of 500 grams. And I wanted it ultra fresh.  The small scorpion fish can be gently grilled and the resulting flavor is quite tasty. It goes through rigor mortis relatively quick and later the same day as it is caught the texture is translucent, yet firm and correctly cooked it won’t lose much liquid and stay moist and almost gluey. It took a few days before I found one to my liking. Like much of the truly great stuff it came from Joker’s catch. I put a finger in the gills and smelled my finger. It was a fantastic pure smell. When I gutted it, likewise the smell inside the belly was pure with no bad odours.

I never scale small scorpion fish. I just gut it, clean it and stuff it with a quarter of lemon and salt. Then I grill it on a grilling pan. I grill it slowly moving it once on each side. Then I finish it in the oven at 130C until it is ready. I check readiness with a small thin and sharp knife that I stick in the back by the bones down to the spine and let it stay for a few seconds. If the knife is warm it will be ready. You want the fish meat to just let go of the bones. Not too easily, but it must not be stuck to the bones either.

The Bolognese was simple. I minced the cuttlefish and seared it in clarified butter. I added a bit of chicken stock, lemon and a bay leaf and let it simmer under cover for a while. Before serving it I added some chopped confit tomatoes that were leftover from the day before.

A great and simple dish. Now I just need to know how David does his Bolognese.

Some posts ago I wrote about toro-spread with sour dough crackers. It was a great find to make spread from toro, o-toro of course. So simple as a preparation that it made me wonder why I had not thought of it before. And it was good. No, it was not just good, it was simply fantastic. Yet, after I had done it a few times it made me restless. I couldn’t sleep. The flavor was remarkable, especially with not too oily tuna belly that had been rested enough to put on those complex tastes so typical for tuna belly. It was like the ultimate baby food, which perhaps perplexed me since by default I don’t like baby food appearance in food. Good as it was, there was something missing. It was begging for contrasts and complexity to fulfill its true potential. Over the course of a good week, I tried what seemed to be everything with it. Every time the inescapable conclusion was that it was best in its most natural state with the sourdough crackers. But something was missing.

So I started to think about other preparations and in particular caviar of aubergine. Really good caviar of aubergine is not the usually mashed aubergines that most restaurants serve or most recipes result in. A great caviar of aubergine is quite time consuming to make. The result is like a symphony of tastes and colors where each of the added components, aubergine, onion, tomato, basil, anchovy, caper and what else that is added can be sensed when eating it.

I didn’t have to think twice what to include in this caviar of toro. Confit tomato, nori, parsley, lemon juice, sea salt, black pepper, finely diced sweet onion and a dash of olive oil seemed so totally obvious. And tuna belly of course. Well I hesitated on the black peppar. The wild Madagascar pepper was an option, because it is so good with tuna belly, but I settled for the Sarawak pepper.

I also wanted a condiment. Like a wasabi but different, totally different. So the old basil/horseradish/Greek yoghurt recipe seemed a great option. It was.

So this is how it is done. You need:

• 300 grams of raw tuna belly
• Confit tomatoes – Made with tomato wedges from deseeded and skinned tomatoes. Best is to use tomatoes that can be skinned without blanching. Drizzle the wedges with mild olive oil (Ligurian taggiasca) and sprinkle some sea salt on them. Roast at 70 C until they are ready and have lost most of their water, which is to say that when dicing them with a sharp knife they will not shed water.
• Nori – One leaf of nori is enough. It needs to be toasted on the stove.
• Parsley – (Flat leaves)
• Olive oil – Ligurian olive oil is the best for this recipe. Unripe Tuscan oils will ruin this preparation, like they usually do with most preparations
• Lemon
• Sweet onion – Preferably Cevennes onions
• Sea salt and Sarawak pepper for seasoning
• Basil
• Fresh horseradish
• Fat Greek yoghurt (10% fat or more)

Make the basil-horseradish condiment first as it needs to rest in the fridge for a good hour. Simply mix basil with Greek yoghurt with a hand mixer. A Bamix is advised. Add grated horseradish. The flavor should be that of basil but there should be a hint of horseradish but only so much that when eating it you need to think twice before uncovering the flavor of horseradish. Pass it through a sieve to make it smooth. Season with salt. Cover with cling film and let it rest in the fridge for a good hour or more.

Dice the onions finely. Rinse them thoroughly and leave them in water for a few minutes. Rinse again and let the diced onion dry up on a towel. This is good procedure for onions to be used raw in any recipe since it removes the aggressiveness of the onions that can be overwhelming in some preparations. Cut the confit tomato in cubes sized 5*5 milimeters. Dice the nori. For this a very sharp knife will be needed, if not needed, the nori has not been sufficiently toasted. Dice the parsley. Pass the belly through a tamis or a not too fine meshed sieve.

I haven’t put any exact proportions of the ingredients, because there is no exactness here. You simply have to add the different components and taste after each of them. Start by adding some lemon juice and olive oil to the passed toro. Blend in the diced tomato, then the nori. Continue with the parsley, then the onions. Be careful not to overuse onion. Season with the Sarawak pepper and sea salt. The idea is that the tomato and nori flavors should so to speak stick out every now and then when eating this. The other flavors should play in the background.

Plate it and serve with sourdough crackers. How many people the recipe is for? I don’t know. The portions always seem insufficient.

If you can’t get toro? It is not the end of the world. Try a blend of smoked and raw salmon.

I like squids, but I am so often, not to say always, disappointed when served them in restaurants. It is really simple, I want them fresh and I want them very gently cooked. Frankly, there are very few places that offer squids to my satisfaction. I only buy them myself when they are in the pristine condition shown on the picture above. If not, it is better to cook and eat something else. This time of the year is a good time for squid in the Mediterranean. I got the ones on the image yesterday.

They were 20 centimeters long and still crawling when I got home with them. One sign of freshness is that they either move or respond to being touched upon. If they are not responding they may still be fine if they still have that translucent appearance as on the picture. Also important is that the skin is undamaged. Most squids sold have been frozen. Frozen squids look like on the picture below. The picture was actually taken on a famous fish market in the Mediterranean region and I suppose most people who buy them believe they are fresh. I suppose they once were. Before they froze them that is.

I never ever buy frozen squid and I complain when eating it in restaurants. I frankly don’t understand why chefs of some starred restaurants bother serving ingredients that so obviously are of inferior quality, at least in relation to the real deal.

Cooking squids is easy. Most important perhaps is to not overdo them. Yesterday I decided to do a preparation inspired by a Rocco Iannone of Pappacarbone dish and stuffed them with quickly braised lettuce, the arms and some smoked cheese and served them with rocket-oil.
It is simple to prepare. Clean the squids. Be careful not to ruin the skin on the outside.
Chop some lettuce, such as little gems. Braise the lettuce in clarified butter with the squid arms diced in a few pieces until the lettuce starts to soften but before it changes color too much. Add some lemon juice. Add the cheese cut in fine cubes (0,5 cm*0,5cm) and let them melt a little. Fill the squids with the filling. Quickly sear the filled squids starting with the flaps down. Serve with rocket oil, made by mixing rocket salad leaves and a Ligurian olive oil. Season the oil with salt and black pepper. Simple.

There is great variation of flavors in different oysters. There are different species of oysters. There are small and large. There are cultivated and wild oysters, although in Europe the wild ones tend to be rare.  Then there are oysters from cold waters and oysters from warmer waters. Everyone has their favorites.  I like all kinds of oysters although I often look for horse feet, pied-de-cheval, as the French say, which are large old oysters that can be 10-25 years old and weigh more than a kilo. I will go into the differences between different oysters in detail some other time.

When buying oysters it is important to make sure they are alive and well. First look on the date of the shipment. There should be a tag on the box. Then check each oyster. They need to be closed and full of liquid. Easiest way to check this is to take one oyster and use it to knock on the “lid” of each of the other oysters. If the sound is hollow, the oyster is dead, dry or on its way to pass out.   

For those who prefer warm oysters and who find opening oysters a tedious process, there is a neat solution. You cook them in their shells without opening them. They oysters will come out beautifully presented in their shells. Simply put them in a pot of water and poach them at 60 degrees centigrade until they start to show signs of opening, but not longer. They should have a wobbly texture. A good advice is to start the poaching at 65-68 degrees centigrade and let the temperature cool when the oysters are put into the pot. When ready, open them with a sharp knife and cut the muscle that holds the oyster to the shell on both sides.

A good pairing is an emulsion made as follows:

0,5 dl vegetable jus (somewhat reduced cooked on celery and leeks)

50 grams of melted butter

White wine vinegar (I have a soft spot for Banuyls vinegar so I pick the white version)

Salt and black pepper for seasoning

Half a gelatin sheet – soaked

Heat the vegetable jus and add the gelatin. Stir until the gelatin melts. Put in a hand mixer bowl. Add the butter, which should be warm but not hot. Add one table spoon of vinegar to start with. Mix with a hand mixer until fully emulsified. Add vinegar if needed. Season with salt and black pepper. Pour over the oysters when they are ready. I have also added shavings of dried reindeer meat. The salt beds are done with sea salt and egg whites. The emulsion can be of course be spiced to anyone’s liking.

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.