Chefs Put Fish Waste and Trash Fish to Delicious Use

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Chefs Put Fish Waste and Trash Fish to Delicious Use



Coal-roasted halibut tails or collars with toasted garlic lemon oil, Greg Denton, Ox, Portland, Ore. Photo by Cassidyphoto.com

“We respect fish and the fishermen by utilizing everything we can from their ingredients,” veteran sushi chef Mitsunori “Nori” Kusakabe says, speaking to a philosophy woven throughout Japanese industries—from food to construction to clothing. In cooking, bones and heads of fish are not tossed in the trash. “We use techniques like ikejime to drain the blood from a live fish to keep it fresh, or use drying or fermenting to preserve [what a chef cannot immediately use]," Kusakabe explains.

In many ways, this mentality serves as a guide for sustainable cooking. As news of the globe’s blossoming food waste surfaces, chefs are learning that how we eat—and how we dispose of what we don’t eat—is not sustainable for the planet. And that's especially true when it comes to seafood populations already in peril.

At Kusakabe, Nori-san’s restaurant in San Francisco, the chef serves leftover fins and heads for staff meal or boils them into soup broth. Fish bones are dried in the oven and fried twice at low temperatures to create crackers, served perhaps alongside ikejime halibut with its own liver or tamari- style sea bream on the seasonal, kaiseki menu.

A tradition in Japan, this utilitarian notion of using a whole fish—fins, collars, skin and all—is catching on with chefs around the U.S. The realities of the food we waste—paired with diners’ increasingly open-minded palates (aka, cricket bars and tripe soups becoming the new norm)—are giving chefs a platform to experiment with Nori-san’s mandate: Use all of what you have on hand.

"The goodies between the fins, and where the scales are connected is nothing but flavor,” raves Greg Denton, head chef/owner at Ox in Portland, Ore. “Those are the parts with the highest ratio of fat, skin and gelatin,” making them the most piquant parts of the animal, he notes.

On the menu, patrons can find a listing for hali“bits”—the parts left behind after slicing up halibut fillets.

“It’s good for us because of cost; it’s good for diners who aren’t ready to commit to a whole piece of halibut, and we’re not just throwing something away—we’re serving the whole, fresh fish,” Denton says.

As for the patron’s experience? “They lose their minds; they love it,” Denton observes. “One of the first times we put the tail, collar and the section behind the collar—that we call the ‘neck’—on the menu, a man ordered one of each. When he was done, it looked like he’d dunked the bones in acid. The fins were clean. And that’s when I knew we had something.”

Davin Waite, chef/owner of Wrench and Rodent Seabasstropub in Oceanside, Calif., is also digging into the nooks and crannies of ocean critters, in an effort to limit waste and discover new ingredients. “The real technique in cooking comes from peasant food,” Waite comments. “Anyone can get the best produce and put it on a plate and it’s going to taste good. The ultimate test of a chef’s technique is to take something that someone might not want to put into their mouths, gain their trust, and then have them ask for it again when they come back.”

Which is exactly what Waite has been doing as he experiments with fish marrow, heads and bones. “You can break through the wall of taboos,” Waite notes about Americans’ unease with innards, “by creating something that people associate with comfort food.” At Wrench and Rodent, he slices leftover tuna heads in thirds, par-roasts and then fries the sections to create Kentucky fried tuna head ($10, recipe)—served with maple mustard, à la drive-throughs.

The playful title, he notes, is of course all about marketing. “How it’s marketed is what’s going to make it sell on a vast enough scale to where it could make the biggest difference in terms of sustainability and limiting waste,” he says.

Swordfish marrow is one more example. “The vertebrae of a swordfish,” Waite says, “looks as if you make two fists and put them together. There’s a little sweet spot in between where, if you whack it with a cleaver, there’s a perfect little cup, almost like a round jelly disk the size of a small oyster, that’s like a sweet, salty Jell-O with an ocean finish.”

To help his guests along, he prepares the marrow two ways: first, brûléed with sugar and then, straight up, with fried bones to nibble on ($6, recipe).

It’s not just about culinary experimentation, he notes, but really about shifting palates and opening minds so that eaters become accustomed to new flavors and textures. “There seems to be a renaissance of peasant cooking,” he says.

Trash fish revival

Along with the attempt to waste less of each fish, chefs are also seeing declining fish populations. A recent report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) puts things in perspective: Marine populations have declined 49 percent between 1970 and 2012, with some populations, like tuna, mackerel and bonito, down by 74 percent. In 2012, the WWF announced that “all species currently fished for food are predicted to collapse by 2048,” due, in large part, to overfishing. As a result, some chefs are turning to "trash fish" dinners. The goal: Open our minds to the idea of eating under-served fish species like redfish, pollock and dogfish.

“These fish are in fact delicious,” notes Paul Fehribach. He serves “trash fish” like Asian carp in croquettes (recipe) and goatfish in curry at Chicago’s Big Jones (recipe). Eating these varietals will ease the pressure on in-demand species such as bluefin tuna, and encourage chefs to experiment.

“Today, having produce that’s in season on your menu is expected," Fehribach says. "I’d like it to get to a point where chefs are approaching seafood in the same way, and have that same flexibility as they do with other produce.”

Awesome!!

 

Never cooked the butt tail...will have to try it this year!!

 

 

Sincerely,

Jim

Swordfish marrow is one more example . . .  there’s a perfect little cup, almost like a round jelly disk the size of a small oyster, that’s like a sweet, salty Jell-O with an ocean finish.”

I'm adventurous but this sounds