What Einstein Told His Cook (20 page)

IN THE SEA

THE
REAL
WHITE MEAT

Why does fish cook so much faster than other meats?

M
eats, like wines, can be either red or white. Beef is red; fish and shellfish are generally white. Salmon are pink—rosé, if you like—because they eat pink-shelled crustaceans. Flamingos, if you care, are pink for a similar reason.

In the kitchen, we soon learn that white fish flesh cooks much more quickly than red meat. It’s more than just color, of course; fish flesh is inherently different in structure from the flesh of most running, slithering, and flying creatures.

First of all, cruising through the water doesn’t exactly qualify as body-building exercise, at least when compared with galloping across the plain or jetting through the air. Therefore, fish muscles don’t get to be as Schwarzeneggish as those of other animals. The more active fish, such as tuna, have more red muscle, containing more red myoglobin (see page 126) and therefore a darker flesh.

More important is the fact that fish have a fundamentally different kind of muscle tissue from that of most land animals. To dart away from their enemies, fish need quick, high-powered bursts of speed, as opposed to the long-haul endurance that other animals need for running—or that they needed at one time, before we domesticated some of them into indolence.

Muscles are generally made up of bundles of fibers, and fish muscles consist predominantly of so-called fast-contracting fibers. These are shorter and thinner than the big, slow muscle fibers of most land animals, and are therefore easier to tear apart, such as by chewing, or to break down chemically, such as by the heat of cooking. That’s why fish is tender enough to eat raw in sushi, whereas steak has to be chopped for steak tartare to render it vulnerable to our molars.

Another big reason that fish flesh is more tender than that of other animals is that fish live in an essentially weightless environment, so they have little need for connective tissue—the cartilage, tendons, ligaments, and such that other creatures need for supporting their body parts against gravity and fastening them to the skeletal tree. So fish are made mostly of muscle, with very little gristly, chewy stuff, and little more than a simple spine suffices in the bone department. Fish’s relative lack of connective tissue means a relative lack of collagen, the protein that changes into nice, juicy gelatin when heated. That’s one reason why fish cooks up drier than many other kinds of flesh. Another reason is that, being cold-blooded, fish don’t need a lot of insulating fat, which would contribute to juiciness.

For all these reasons, the main problem with fish is to keep from cooking it too much. It should be cooked only until the protein loses its translucent quality and becomes opaque, pretty much the same as what happens to the protein in the white of an egg. Fish will get tough and dry if you cook it too long because the muscle fibers contract, shrinking and toughening the flesh; at the same time, too much water is lost, drying out the tissue. The usual rule of thumb is eight to ten minutes of cooking per inch of thickness.

SOMETHING’S FISHY

Does fish have to smell fishy?

N
ot at all. People put up with fishy-smelling fish because they’re probably thinking, Well, what else should it smell like? Odd as it may seem, though, fish needn’t smell like fish at all.

When they’re perfectly fresh, only a few hours removed from carousing around in the water, fish and shellfish have virtually no odor. A fresh “scent of the sea,” perhaps, but certainly nothing the least bit smelly. It’s only when seafood starts to decompose that it takes on that fishy aroma. And fish starts to decompose much faster than other kinds of meat.

Fish flesh—fish muscle—is made up of different kinds of protein from, say, beef or chicken. It is not only tenderized more quickly by cooking but it is also more quickly decomposed by enzymes and bacteria; in other words, it spoils faster. That fishy smell comes from decomposition products, notably ammonia, sulfur compounds, and chemicals called amines that come from the breakdown of the amino acids in proteins.

The odors of these chemicals are noticeable long before the food gets downright unpleasant to eat, so a slight fishy smell indicates only that you’ve got a good nose and the fish isn’t quite as fresh as it might be, not necessarily that it’s bad. Amines and ammonia are counteracted (Techspeak: neutralized) by acids; that’s why lemon wedges are often served with fish. If you have scallops that smell a trifle ripe, rinse them quickly in lemon juice or vinegar before cooking.

There’s another reason why fish spoils quickly. Most fish have the unfriendly habit of swallowing other fish whole, and they are therefore equipped with enzymes that digest fish. If any of these enzymes should escape from the guts by rough handling after a fish is caught, they’ll quickly go to work on its own flesh. That’s why fish should be gutted as soon as possible after being caught.

The decomposition bacteria in and on fish are also more efficient than those in land animals, because they’re designed to operate in the cold, cold seas and streams. To stop them from doing their dirty work, we have to cool them down a lot faster and a lot more than we do to preserve warm-blooded meat. That’s why ice, which never gets above 32°F, is the fisherman’s best friend. Your home refrigerator is at about 40ºF.

A third reason that fish flesh spoils faster than land meat is that it contains more unsaturated fats. Unsaturated fats turn rancid (oxidize) much more readily than the saturated fats in beef, for example. The oxidation of fats turns them into bad-smelling fatty acids, which contribute further to the fishy odor.

HAKE MAKES FAKE

I bought some artificial crab sticks the other day, and they really weren’t bad. The label said they were made of surimi. What is that, and how do they make it?

S
urimi is fish flesh that has been minced and fabricated into crab-and shrimp-like shapes. Developed in Japan to utilize the waste scraps from filleting and to exploit some of the less desirable fish species caught in the nets, it has gained a foothold in the United States as a low-cost alternative to the real things.

The fish scraps, most often of pollack and hake, are minced, washed thoroughly to eliminate fat, pigments, and flavors, rinsed, strained, and partially dried to reduce the moisture content to about 82 percent, after which they are frozen until needed. That’s surimi.

To fabricate a given product, the surimi may then be shredded into fibers, after which ingredients such as egg white and starch and a little oil are added to give it a texture similar to that of real crab, shrimp, or lobster. The mixture is then extruded as a sheet and heated briefly to stabilize it into a gel. The sheets are then rolled, folded and/or molded into sticks or other shapes, flavored, and colored to mimic the real things, and frozen for shipping to the market.

WOULD YOU LIKE FRIES OR CAVIAR WITH THAT?

In a catalog I saw various kinds of caviar spoons ranging in price from $12 to $50. Why does caviar have to be served with a special, fancy spoon?

O
ne can imagine several reasons. (1) Merchants assume that anyone who eats caviar regularly is an easy sell. (2) Caviar
deserves
it. (3, and least romantically) There is a chemical reason for it.

Caviar is the roe of the sturgeon, a huge, dinosaur-era fish with armored plates instead of scales. The sturgeon lives primarily in the Caspian and Black Seas although there is a growing supply of good American caviars from farm-raised sturgeon and other fish. The Caspian coastline used to be monopolized by Iran and the Soviet Union but is now shared by Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and a smidgen of Azerbaijan.

Of three main species of Caspian sturgeon, the beluga is largest (up to 1,700 pounds) and has the largest eggs, ranging in color from light to dark gray to black. Next largest is osetra, which can grow to 500 pounds and has grayish, gray-green, or brown eggs. The smallest is sevruga (up to 250 pounds), with small, greenish black eggs.

Because caviar can contain anywhere from 8 to 25 percent fat (and lots of cholesterol), it is perishable and must be preserved with salt. The highest quality caviars contain no more than 5 percent by weight of added salt. They are called
malassol
, which is Russian for lightly salted.

Therein lies the problem: salt is corrosive. It can react with silver and steel spoons to produce traces of compounds that reputedly impart a metallic taste to the caviar.

Spoons made of inert materials have therefore always been used for caviar. Gold, which is impervious to corrosion by salt, is often used, though the time-honored material has been mother-of-pearl, the hard, white, lustrous substance called
nacre
of which pearls and the inner surfaces of mollusk shells are made.

But this is the twenty-first century. We now have an extremely inexpensive material that is every bit as nonreactive, noncorroding, and flavorless as mother-of-pearl. We call it plastic. Luckily, a variety of plastic spoons are available just for the asking at fast-food restaurants, although I need not to point out that they were not intended for caviar.

As a public service, I have researched the caviar suitability of spoons from Wendy’s, McDonald’s, KFC, and Dairy Queen. (Taco Bell doesn’t provide spoons. They provide
sporks
: utensils shaped like spoons with tinesat the ends. Remember the Owl and the Pussycat’s runcible spoon? It was a kind of spork.) Alas, all of these spoons were too big. Eventually I found the tasting spoons at Baskin Robbins to be the ideal size—and a pretty pink color to boot. (It’s only polite to order some ice cream when you go to acquire your free spoon.)

If you think it sacrilegious to serve caviar from plastic, yet you don’t want to spend $600 for a gold-plated Fabergé caviar spoon, try the so-called body shot. Make a fist of one hand, with thumb pointing downward, and place a dollop of caviar onto the web of skin between the thumb and forefinger. Then eat it off your hand and wash it down with a shot of ice-cold Russian or Polish vodka from a narrow tequila glass.

Na zdorovye
! Here’s to your health!

IT’S A CRUEL, CRUEL WORLD

Are clams and oysters on the half shell still alive when we eat them?

Y
ou’re on vacation at the shore, right? Seafood restaurants abound. Many have raw bars, at which hordes of heedless hedonists are slurping hundreds of luckless mollusks that have been forcibly demoted from bivalve to univalve status. It’s only natural to be squeamish about chomping on a creature so recently relieved of its shielding shells and, gentle soul that you are, you can’t help but wonder if they’re still alive.

To settle this question once and for all, let me make this definitive statement: Freshly shucked clams and oysters are indeed sort of, kind of, more or less alive, one might say, in a manner of speaking. So if you’re one of those people who believe that plants feel pain when you prune them, you may want to skip the rest of this answer.

Consider the lowly clam. He spends his days buried in sand or mud, huddling within his shells, sucking in water through one of his two tubes (siphons), filtering out the yummies (plankton and algae), and spurting the waste water out through the other tube. And, of course, on occasion he reproduces. (Yes, there are boy clams and girl clams.)