estebanana -> RE: Spanish Gastronomy (Mar. 16 2016 0:46:59)
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I will edit the typos later today) Catalan rabbit cooked in chocolate, is it like a Mexican mole'? If so be not afraid, go forth and fork it. Fork it anyway, it must be good. Fresh shrimp right off the boat, I've eaten it a few dozen times. Ebi sashimi is not my favorite, but it can be good. And after the first night, yep you have to cook it, it ain't no good after sunrise. I am looking forward to my eventual trip home to the US, but I worry about the fish. I have become spoiled on local fish and cooking lore. Like Piwin I look carefully at fish now and I can see myself being a fish snob in the market. In the US there is an Asian grocery chain called Ranch 99 or something like that. I remember the fish section, in Japan a fish section that looked like that would be an abomination, a cultural travesty. And don't even get me started on how nasty is Tilapia; people in the US think that is a fish. My God how disgusting. If I can find a place that can simply sell a fresh Yellow tail jack I will be happy, I can cut sashimi. In the US they call everything cut from Yellowtail a Hamachi. I Japanthey count four different kinds of Yellowtail. Hamachi, Buri, Hiramasa and Kampachi. Kampachi is really Amber Jack,but it has a yellow tail fin and is in the same family. Hamachi is young Yellowtail, and Buri is a yellow tail over about 18" to 24". Hiramasa is a subspecies and looks almost exactly like Hamachi, but it get really big. If a Hiramasa was small it would pass as Hamachi. Kampachi has a slightly crunchy flesh when cut as sashimi and Buri is softer and supple. Hamachi is like young buri but not as tender, sometimes difficult to tell the apart. The yellowtail is still common in Ca waters so I can get one. Saba is whole case study in itself, and Katsuo is suer important. Both are plentiful in CA waters so I think I can get it too. My grandparents used to have a 35' Chriscraft fishing boat in San Diego harbor in the 1950 and 60's, they fished for Marlin, Albacore and Yellowtail. Along the way they caught plenty of Rock Basses and Ling Cods, Halibut, Bonita and Mackerel. When my grandfather used to tell me the family fishing stories he said there were some days that the Mackerel schools were so thick you could not get bait under them to get to the Yellowtail, they would grab it. Mackerel was a bad word to them and a nusance fish tat was a pesky by catch bait grabber. He told me Mackerel was unfit to eat and it was oily and stinky. So I grew up in a Sabaless environment because my mom remembered fishing on th ebaot and my grandfather cursing the unholy mackerel. The Bonito was even lower in this opinion, it was stinky oily fish that took a long time to reel in, because it was a top fighter, but a waste of time as a food fish. And ain't nobody got time for Katsuo when you are trying for Marlin. So he always got this disgusted stressed look when he talked about too many Bonito in the water that day. As I learned on my own later he was wrong about Saba and Katsuo. And since living in Japanese fishing town I gotten a Post Doctoral level education in Bonito and Mackerel. Saba is wonderful both salted and dried or soaked in rice vinegar, sugar, soy and kelp. And that is only two easy ways to prepare Saba. The vinegar soak is called Sime Saba AKA know to good Jewish mothers as Pickled Mackerel, and the salted dried Saba is grilled. The trick with making a good sime Saba is a pick a fish that has had it neck broken as soon as it was landed in the boat, they call it 'kube ori' neck broken. It kills the fish fast so it does not flop around and inject chemicals of stress into its own flesh. So a good Mackerel in the store and a broken neck, vivid coloration and a clear unclouded eye. I can give you the recipe in detail if you like. Bonito is a fantastic sashimi fish, but it has to be same day or within 24 hours to really be good. There is a part of the belly you remove, and that is where my grandfather went wrong, he did not know if you cut out a certain flap of belly the stink diminishes. There are a few kinds of Bonito, one og them has pretty substantial teeth, called Hagatsuo, Ha is tooth in Japanese, toothed Katsuo. It is the best for sashimi. The Katsuo is cleaned, the belly taken out, the fish split in half, the spine removed and the meat of the dorsal side of the fish is skinned and cut into long strip that is roughly pyramidal in cross section shape. That hunk of fish is them seared closed on all three sides and left to cool. The strip is seared closed and raw in side. The strip is them cut into medallions about 3/8" thick. To make Takaki with the medallions you our Ponzu into a shallow plate, cut a red onion into coarse slices, cut a few cloves of garlic into flat slivers and chop some Oba leaf into strips. Put the pieces of katsuo in the ponzu flat in the plate, layer the onion and garlic over it and throw the oba on over that. Then drizzle ponzu on top and tamp gently with your fingers to get the ponzu worked up into the onion. Let that sit in the refrigerator half the day covered with plastic wrap. Then put it on the table. It is not for everyone, but a sashimi lover who has not had Tataki yet will be delighted. My grandfather was not a sashimi man, it was not a way of eating his generation was comfortable with, unless maybe they happened to be military stationed in Japan after WWII and learned it. Eating raw fish seemed to my grandfather, well UnAmerican. he was stationed in Culver City CA. during the war and he was in the Air Force Motion Picture Unit, he was a set designer and builder, he worked mainly on training films for pilots. How not to get chomped on by sharks of you crash land in the Western Pacific, how to survive if you crash land on a desert island and stuff like that. When I was a lad of 14 I began surfing with the older guys on the water polo team and we made trips to San Clemente to surf at a beach located in Camp Pendelton Marine Base. A famous, no legendary, spot called 'Trestles' because it is a classic California rock reef right smack in front of a train bridge that fords a lagoon called Trestles lagoon. You have to park out side the base a walk on a path next to the train tracks, or park a mile down at San Onofre beach and walk up beach to get into the water by the bridge. That bridge has been there a long, long time, my grandfather was there 40 some years before me setting up a set to film a pilot training film. They used the lagoon at Trestles to simulate a lagoon on a Japanese occupied Pacific island. He and his team built a wooden replica of the fuselage a tail of Mitsubishi Zero and planted it nose first into the lagoon to look like a Zero crash site. And subconciously this gave the viewers of the film a sense of hope that a symbol like Zero was trashed out and defeated. The commanding officer of the Motion Picture Unit was none other than Ronald Reagan future president of the US to be. My grandfather really liked Reagan because he served under him in the 'Hollywood Air Force'. And since the time they sank the Zero tail into the mud at my surfing beach it has come out through the Freedom of Information Act that Reagan used to screen combat footage as it came in fresh from the front lines of battle. The Motion Picture Unit was the first place the raw footage was seen, and Reagan was in charge of the company that edited the footage for the president, Pentagon generals and for military news reels. Ronald Reagan literally experienced WWII via film, fresh front line celluloid. He never saw action in person,but he delegated out the making of films about the war to directors under his command who yelled ACTION! on set. My grandfather who became a lover of the area of the California coast bought a boat after the war, fished for good Marlin and Tuna, and he never became the sashimi enthusiast that I became. I loved the tales of Halbut fishing and the pesty Saba, and always looked out at the Coronado Islands when surfed in Baja, what would it have been like to be out there fishing for Buri with my grandfather. A lot of fun I am sure. My other grandfather, my dads dad, he went to Europe and he was trout fisherman. I did go fishing with many, many times and when I was in college and old enough to hear it, he would take me fishing and speak about walking from one end of France to Germany, Italy and back. Well I suppose they rode in truck too. he explaied what happened to him in the Battle of the Bulge and at liberation the prisoners of a Nazi resettlement camp,the ones that were still walking anyway. His stories were difficult to hear, but well told. He said he once stole a chicken and cooked it in his helmet. Never eat a trout raw, the sashimi is overrated in my humble opinion.
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