Wanderers seafood ideas
Introduction to seafood ideas
These wanderers seafood ideas are only sometimes related to backpacking. However, they are usually connected with wild outdoor living, adventures, water and eating. They are invariable ideas learnt from experimentation, experience and kind sharing of ideas by others. So if you love water and beach wandering, why not share them here with you if you have got this far.
Sand Crabs.
These are a delightful morsel from the ocean and in my experience are a pesty bait thieves and a bycatch when ocean salmon fishing. Some crabs tangle in the fishing line and hooks and reach the shore while retrieving the rig for bait inspection and rebaiting the hooks.
If there are no salmon biting then the crabs make a nice alternative feed. When cooked whole, as they do in most restaurants, much of the edible meat is contaminated with ‘mucky yellow’ coloured and somewhat bitter tasting ‘mustard’ (a culinary euphemism for guts).
Now, for some people, this blood-filtering organ is supposed to be a delicacy but it may contain toxins and PCBs that are not leached out by cooking (Tomalley).
I don’t like toxins or the taste of crab guts through my sweet crab meat. If anything extra is needed I like Mayonnaise turbo style.
I was delighted to be taught a better preparation method by a kind lady fisherperson on the Barrier Landing Pier one evening. It was quick, clean, avoided throwing live crabs into boiling water and left 100% of the meat clean, without a trace of mustard and ready for a quick steaming.
Crab preparation. Disable the crab claws by crossing them and holding them closed and together firmly with one hand in the grip shown in the photo below.
Tip the crab on to its back, lift the tail flap, roll the crab back upright.
Leaver off the carapace in one quick action that instantly kills the crab, removes the gut and disables the claws. The thumb is pressed down on the butt of a back leg and the index finger is lifted up under the back of the carapace.
Next, the remainder of the crab can be broken in half.
Hold onto the legs and claw and swish the halves in a bucket of seawater until all the guts fall out.
Remove the grey gills (or dead man fingers) and trim off any excess broken shell and the crabs are ready for quick steaming in a small amount of freshwater. The crab halves turned that lovely red colour indicating that they are ready for eating. If freshwater is used for the steaming it makes a lovely tasty clear crab soup when the steaming is done.
“Cooking your crabs this way will make most restaurant crab taste like crap. The freshness of the just-caught crabs and the environment may also be part of the magic. Watch your fingers!”
Serving suggestions. Crab-eating is by its nature a messy business and is best done near or on the water as the scraps can simply be thrown back into the sea and they make wonderful fish-attracting burley. My twin sister and I caught a gummy shark this way one evening.
“My favourite crab-eating situation is to eat freshly steamed crab halves while gently slicing through the water under sail in silence, with the autohelm holding course while I keep watch and having a couple of trailing lines out the back trolling for tailor and salmon for dinner…. and bucket slosh of seawater will clean the deck when the feed is finished…bliss….”
Five Secret Ways to Cook Abalone… Shhh.
In my youth abalone were big and abundant around Melbourne’s bayside reefs and a brief reef dive could easily yield monster abalone. The trouble was that whenever we cooked them the meat was tasty but as tough as gristle. Much much later while beach walking along the wild rocky coast around Cape Liptrap we met another wanderer who had sailed all around the Pacific and visited many places and was a self-acclaimed seafood expert. Seeing out little catch of large abalone (all legal mind you), he insisted on telling us his five secret methods of successfully cooking abalone to make a tender feed of them.
- fine slice and quick fry with ginger and garlic
- fine slice and flame with a flame thrower
- searing for seconds on a red hot BBQ plate
- a big rock dropped on the abalone to put 4 cross pattern splits in it followed by a quick sear on a hot BBQ plate
- The fifth method, either we have forgotten because we were so excited with the first four or were never actually told the real secret.
Somewhat later on a beach walk near Warrnambool, I met a friendly fellow diver with a wet beard. He, at last, made sense of the abalone cooking secret by whispering behind his hand (on a lonely beach with no one else in sight) into my eager ears ” Tim…….. just don’t cook them, they are just beautiful to eat as is….. I eat one while I am out diving (He might have called it the ‘marine munchie recipe’.) and it means that I can bring back my legal bag of five abs for the family for dinner.”
The lesson from these experienced strangers was that thorough cooking is the ruination of beautiful abalone meat (Maybe very long cooking could work?).
This means that the charade of; flash-frying, flaming, BBQ searing, rock dropping, is a clever cover masking the fact that you are essentially eating raw abalone that looks like it could have been cooked. Cooked this way, it is delicious and as tender as bacon fat or fillet steak.
Consequently, my favourite beach recipe is to sear the very thin slices of abalone with a butane flame thrower for 15 seconds. I use a light steel pan (very little mass to heat) and olive oil (with garlic or ginger if available). The garlic and ginger need to have a preliminary quick cook in the oil before the abalone slices are added for their very brief ‘fake cooking’ directly in the flame.]
[Add a photo of the flame thrower and pan ‘barely cooked’ abalone slices]
Delights of Rubbish Fish
You may have guessed that I do quite a bit of fishing and enjoy eating fish. I catch some beautiful eating fish like flathead (not so photogenic) and calamari. “Probably not much better.” These freshly caught fish, without a doubt, taste better than all the fish that I can purchase in a market or restaurant.
I also catch other more ‘oily’ fish such as Taylor, Yellowtail Scads, Australian Salmon, Tommy rough and Mackerel that are considered by many expert fishermen and expert fishing books to be ‘rubbish fish’ in terms of eating quality.
They often say “We only catch them for bait to catch other better fish.” On the other hand, if you listen to the dietary experts these oily fish are some of the best fish that we can eat for our health.
In my experience, if these underrated fish are handled well, their eating qualities are up with the best. My family scores fish-eating qualities with ‘freshly caught’ boneless flathead fillets as score 10). The above rubbish fish that have been handled well have no fish shop smell and just smells of the sea with an eating score of 8-9. I have never experienced a fish shop that has smelled like the sea!
It is no wonder that these fish don’t smell so good when they die slowly and are later shifted to processing works, guts and all, to be ‘cleaned’. “If you treat your fish like baitfish they will probably taste like old bait with a score of 2-3”.
Enjoyment of fish bones from big and small fish
Apart from a few fish like Flounder Eels and Leather Jackets, I filet most of my fish to make them; bleed well, cool quickly, store well, cook quickly and provide boneless eating.
Large fish. The bony portion from between the filets and the rib section is usually thrown away (it doesn’t even make good bait that will stay on a hook). However, I have found that with appropriate cooking they can be a delight to eat.
For large Salmon and sharks, the filleting leaves a thick meaty strip. After suitable bleeding in plenty of saltwater and cutting into pan size lengths, these make excellent eating that is every bit as good as the filet and somewhat sweeter from near the bone or cartilage.
Small fish. For the smaller fish, the backbone, fins tail and all, can be crumbed in wholemeal flour (homemade of course) and fried until crispy brown. Much of the fins, tail and bone is edible along with the sweet meat off-the-backbone. I was delighted to discover that the traditional restaurants in Japan cooked and served a split Mackerel with its head left on and the crispy fried backbone was served beside it (fins, tail and all). My ski friends were perplexed with this dish, but with each ordering of this dish, it is one of my favourites, I see them eating more of the fish. The Japanese certainly know their fish, respect the fish quality (even rubbish fish) and use as much of the fish as possible (their version of nose-to-tail usage).
Large fish head. Big Salmon and Snapper heads are usually thrown away. However, after cutting out the gills, they can be steamed, sitting mouth upwards in a covered pot with a small amount of water. After peeling off the skin with the scales attached they make a delightful feed of the sweet meat off-the-bone that is best eaten by the sea or on a boat where the many scraps can be thrown back into the sea.
Octopus Balls
Small octopus can be quickly grilled or fried to become a tasty but slightly chewy treat with chilli dipping sauce.
Cooking a larger octopus is a bit more of a challenge regarding tenderness, but they have much more flavour than calamari. However, mincing the octopus deals with the texture problem and fried octopus balls from minced octopus turn big octopus into a seafood treat.
After enjoying mystery tasty seafood balls in Japan I again discovered that the Japanese use minced octopus for these delights.
The mincer that I use, in the photo below, works best with gutted and frozen octopus that has been cut up into small chunks and minced in the frozen state.
The cooked minced octopus has the texture and mouth-feel of minced steak. It is very tender and has a rich and sweet grilled meat flavour when fried to a brown colour. “This is attributable to the Maillard reaction– “See there is more chemistry.”
A food processor will do the job, but the texture will be finer, like sausage mince or fish paste, by the time all the meat is fully minced.
Octopus recipe 1. Mix the mince with a little raw egg and a tiny trace of flour. Spoon blobs of the mix into a hot pan with a little olive oil and squash flat as the undersides start to firm up. Flip and brown the top side and serve hot with sweet chilli sauce or plum and garlic sauce.
Octopus recipe 2. Having packed the mincemeat into small freezer bags, squeeze out the air and roll up the bag forming an even cylinder of meat along the bottom of the bag and freeze for storage. When ready to cook, just cut off ~8mm thick slices of the meat. Return the un-thawed meat to the freezer. Drop the frozen rounds into a little wholemeal flour in a paper bag. Shake until the rounds are coated with flour. Cook them as above.
[Add a photo of the convenient frozen tubes of minced meat]
“This second method is great if, like me, you get preoccupied with other projects and adventures that you forget to get something ready for dinner. They can be prepared and cooked in the time that it takes to cook a wok load of stirfry veggies. Also, there is no need for waste”
Smoked Eels
“My first experience with smoking fish was with butterfly filleted sardines. I did them as an experiment. As a fluke, in total ignorance, they were so nice that my family (a bit reticent to try new homemade foods) ate the lot immediately and we had to get something else for dinner.”
Me
“Unfortunately, my next try was a disaster and the fish was inedible because it tasted like, I imagine, dilute tar would!”
Me
The lesson from this is that limiting the amount of smoke available in the process is key to success.
Smoking without smoke?
On a recent boat trip with my extended family, we successfully ‘smoked’ eels in a kettle BBQ with very little effective smoke on two occasions.
The fishing was a success and the ‘smoked’ meat was a stunning success, even to smoked eel connoisseurs. We even finished the last morsels of the ‘unsmoked’ smoked eels as a lovely eel pate.
“So the lesson I take from this is; that you don’t need much (or any) smoke for good smoked fish”
Mothy The Elder
I can eat normally cooked Eels that have been slow-cooked (by someone else) with tomato, onion and garlic, but I never enjoy them as much as smoked Eel. They just must be designed for smoking as the practice seems to have spread around the world.
I have recently learned that Australia’s first people, in Victorias Western district, modified the landscape to farm Eels in vast numbers. They smoked them and Eel smoke can still be detected in hollows in trees. They probably traded smoked eels on a massive scale. Ancient Australian eel farming. A claim that Neolithic aquiculture at ~4,000y BC is the oldest is challenged by Australia’s first people’s Eel farming that has been date back to ~6,600y BC.
The smoked meat is very rich and I enjoy eating it in small portions, so smoking allows an Eel catch to be enjoyed over an extended period by storing the smoked meat in the freezer. Luckily I have never been tempted to eat raw Eel, but it is reportedly potentially toxic if not cooked or smoked with heat (poisonous eel blood).
Avoiding toxicity is probably the reason why Eels smoking is so popular around the world.
Eel preparation. They are difficult to kill and clean. “Even with the head cut off they will wriggle out of a kitchen sink and head off across the kitchen”. Consequently, I use two pliers to do the dead. I grip with one and crush the head with the other and this rapidly kills and immobilizes the Eel. I slit the belly from the anal vent to the head and remove the guts. Then I cut further back along the spine from the gut cavity toward the tail to reveal and remove the soft brown organ that is hidden there.
Eel smoking. Rub the Eels with raw sugar (others use salt and soaking, but I have never bothered with this and the end product has been a great success.
I place them on a circular cake rack in a big steel wok and cover with a large round lid. The lid can be covered with layers of newspaper and topped with an old blanket as insulation to make the process hot.
Add a small amount of leaf tea to the very bottom of the wok (1 teaspoon of tea/Eel) to make a controlled amount of smoke. Then I line the wok with loosely fitted aluminium foil to catch dripping Eel oil so that it does not burn on the hottest part of the bottom of the wok and make extra smoke that could ruin the meat flavour.
Continue slow cooking, outside on a small flame, to the point where the skin starts to crinkle without splitting. At this stage, the flesh takes on a soft buttery texture and the smoking is at its peak. Smaller Eels will need less time than big ones and should be removed early to prevent excessive drying. This method works for other oily fish such as the ‘rubbish fish’ mentioned above. The smoked meat can be stored tightly wrapped in freezer bags in a freezer.
[Add photo of smoker]
Seaweed.
Kelp is another pesty byproduct of ocean fishing as it gets caught on lines and gets reeled in for removal. As children on seaside holidays, we would collect kelp and attempt to make sandals or thongs with it as it resembled leather. However, it was always a failure and any moisture would make them horribly slippery.
As mentioned before I have discovered many food delights during my visits to Japan and come home with a desire to incorporate them into my own food ideas. One recurring food item is seaweed dishes in the traditional meals, nori seaweed sheets being the most obvious.
One little unidentified morsel was often served in tiny ceramic dishes (This often means that it is precious or not to everyone’s liking). My ski friend Kate named it ‘slime’, in the absence of an adequate English translation or knowledge of its origin. When you pick up a portion of this dish, with your chopsticks, a streamer of goopy slime would extend from the bowl to your mouth and elsewhere even if you were very careful. “The streams could stretch so thin, like spider webs, that they could blow or drift to a neighbouring table on the airconditioner breezes! (The photos below describe this better than any words can).
Now when I first tried eating kelp on a recent sailing trip I cut up the fresh weed with a very sharp fishing knife and placed it in a bowl ready for inclusion with our dinner stir-fried vegetables. As the contents of the bowl were transferred to the pan the tell tail slime streamers formed. “I knew I had discovered the origin of the mystery Japanese ‘slim dish’.”
Anyway, when cooked the fresh seaweed had quite an interesting soft but crunchy texture and went rather well with other vegetables. No doubt it would have loads of iodine in it and this should be good as many of us are deficient in iodine The crunch is a soft crunch and the seaweed disperses after the crunch much like those highly coloured Japanese crunchy pickled daikon radishes.
The kelp seaweed weed dries quickly in the sun in the yacht rigging and can be pulverized quickly in a food processor to give seaweed granules that store compactly in a jar, ready to use as an interesting additive to stir-fries after swelling the granules in water.
Alternatively, they can be used for the preparation of raw seaweed dishes. They miraculously retain all their magical physical properties through the drying and processing. If you stir the wet granules they become very slimy. This probably explains why our childhood kelp thongs kept slipping off. Kelp is a good source of omega 3 fatty acids for cardiovascular health Health benefits of omega 3 oils. I also heard of a recent large meta-study that has dismissed these health benefits Omega 3 benefits dismissed.
Seaweed ginger and soy slime. Use fresh kelp that is finely sliced (looks just great) or rehydrated dry kelp granules with water. Add pickled ginger or ginger jam (homemade of course) and a dash of soy sauce. Let stand for at least an hour and stir until the desired sliminess is achieved. “This is a quick treat that can impress visitors or possibly illicit revulsion, either way, it will be memorable! Don’t use your best tablecloth”
I apologize for the number of photos below but I think you would agree that they all contribute to describing the various aspects of the properties of this amazing food. It also will prepare you for the eating challenge, but it will not help you to learn how to eat such dishes with any sense of decorum while in beautiful and very refined Japanese traditional hotels.
Caramelized Kelp shards
This is another Kelp recipe that will probably have a more universal appeal than Kelp slime.
I am still unsure of the Japanese name for our common ocean Kelp. The Japanese make a soup stock made from Kelp from the seas around Hokkaido. It seems to have the name Kombu but it is a different looking Kelp to the one (shown in the photo below) that washes up on my beaches.
I should also tell readers that if you think you have not encountered Kelp in your life, then think again. According to Wikipedia extracts of Kelp are in many of our processed products: ice cream, jelly, salad dressing, toothpaste and skincare gelling agents. Even the Kelp carbohydrate, alginate, can be used for making orthodontic impressions. Possibly large scale Aquaculture could make, Kelp become a CO2 sink that could produce biofuels.
When used with the cooking of beans it can break down complex sugars and reduce the flatulence. “Of the eater, I presume? It is nothing short of miracle food if it can do that!”
Not to be discouraged, on a recent ocean fishing holiday, I resolutely reeled-in some big fighting strands of succulent fresh glistening Kelp from the undertow.
I thought that if my fishing at this new beach was a failure, I could again try my luck with another seaweed culinary trick to continue to pretend that I was still the great hunter-gatherer-poobah.
It was a high-risk strategy for someone who had reached a mature age (of wisdom?) where they know that they are no longer invincible.
Anyway, the dreamt-up recipe was a great success and after cautiously eating a small sample, the remainder of the dish was eagerly shared and eaten.
“Yes, we will have that again thanks.” is, at least, my definition of culinary success. I should add that also having fresh fish for dinner was a big help. The fish smelled like the ocean and not that smell of a fish shop. “I was in luck.”
Gourmet caramelized Kelp
Weed species selection. Australia has an abundance of seaweeds (or more correctly macroalgae) and most are edible. Some bio-accumulate heavy metals and undesirable chemicals, but this is probably a problem of the pollution of the growing environment, rather than a problem of the weed per se. But let’s stick with Kelp from our relatively clean oceans because that is what I know about. Each strand has a massive yield, it is so abundant and is easily identified.
Size selection. I select thinner and more translucent weeds, as in the photo above. I do this because it is easier to prepare and faster to dry or dehydrate for storage. It tastes and looks good on the plate and melts in the mouth. I don’t know if the much thicker kelp tastes as good, but I am certain that my rapid preparation method (described later) would be much more difficult with very thick Kelp.
Daily intake. According to a report about research by O.J. Mouritsen, a biophysics researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, we all should incorporate more seaweed in our diet.
He suggest that 5-10g of dry seaweed equivalents would be suitable for the many significant health benefits. I presume this is also a safe daily intake.
Eating beach-cast seaweed. In the above research, it also indicates that beach-cast or washed-in seaweed is unsuitable for consumption. No explanation was given.
However, I can see no reason why fresh healthy Kelp that has broken off from the anchored stem and has been drifting in the sea would not still be alive and healthy. After all, as marine macroalgae, it should stay happy and in good shape just drifting around in the ocean.
To give support to my argument, I quote The science of seaweed where they say:
“Given that all the substances that seaweeds need in order to survive are dissolved in the water, macroalgae, unlike plants, have no need of roots, stems, or real leaves. Nutrients and gases are exchanged directly across the surface of the seaweed by diffusion and active transport.”
The science of seaweed
Other seaweed foragers Milkwood and Collect edible seaweeds seem to agree with the safety of eating fresh beach-cast seaweed. “I would suggest that you can just use the stale looking stuff on your garden or in your compost. Just eat the succulent fresh looking pieces that have just washed in on ocean beaches well away from potential pollution.”
Washing. I am a beach lover, but I hate sand in my food. Consequently, I like to wash off the sand with salt water and then again with fresh water, at camp, if possible before preparing it for eating or drying for storage.
Drying. Drying is quick if the seaweed is hung up in a tree or yacht rigging in the sun and breeze. This can make the preparation of the weed for this recipe easier and less sticky-slimy-messy and makes it easily storable.
Rehydration. If fresh textured Kelp is required at a later stage, the dry (uncooked) shards it can be rapidly rehydrated to restore it original and ‘fresh’ texture and rather quirky slimy properties.
Similarly, the toasted/roasted shards hydrate quickly to recover the original texture, but without the slimy properties. So in both forms, they are very versatile.
In my experience, the slimy properties is lost if the seaweed is boiled and I don’t know what lesser temperature would make this change. ( I should do some tests with my dehydrator.)
Dry or fresh? For this recipe, I will describe it using the dry method, but I first used the fresh weed. Both methods worked well, but the dry method is easier, not sticky-slimy-messy and can be done at your leisure. It is also very good for bulk preparation of the caramelized Kelp shards for future eating pleasure. White salt crystals can form on the dry seaweed and this can be wiped off with a damp cloth.
Cutting. I start by cutting the blades from the stem. and then I cut fine slices across the blade to make the fine shards. At first, I used my freshly sharpened fishing kife on the fresh weed and it took a considerable time to prepare a feed. I later found that sharp scissors worked well, but there was a tendency for the ‘seaweed blade’ to become very slippery (with slime) and slide out of the scissor blades.
With the dry seaweed, I found that snipping was easy. There was no slime or slipping and multiple blades could be laid on top of one another and cut at the same time.
Multi-scissors. Then I remembered that I had accidentally purchased some multi-bladed herb scissors. “I thought I was purchasing a cheap pack of four scissors from Aldi for my metal foil cutting work, only to find that they were all joined together. I had never used them on herbs as I am ‘quite-handy’ with a knife.” These scissors were just great for bulk preparation of seaweed shards (either fresh or dried).
Even the scabbard for the scissors has a neat comb formed at the end that can be used to clear out any shards that get stuck between the blades.
Cooking fresh Kelp shards. I use this method when cooking by the sea. Add a little olive oil to a pan or wok and throw into oil and mix to coat shards with oil as the heat is applied. Cook and stir frequently until a little crunchy and until the desired caramelization is achieved.
Cooking dry Kelp shards. I use this method when cooking at home and it is more suitable for bulk preparation for future storage and quick use on demand.
Add the bulk dry shards to large baking pans and add olive and mix to coat shards evenly with oil. Any excess oil will be left behind in the pan. Add a cup of water and mix again. Then bake in the oven at 180C until the water evaporates off and the shards become a little crunchy and until the desired caramelization is achieved. Mix a couple of times during the baking.
Serve freshly cooked and store the remainder in an air-tight bag or jar.
Moist cutting. I also cut up the Kelp stems to include in the shards. These a thicker and harder to cut. However, I have found that the dry stem can be moistened with a little water. This softens the stems without allowing them to go slimy and slippery and they become very easy to cut.
This moist cutting method would be good to use on Kelp blades that are not quite the ideal thickness.
Whole scallops
Over the years I have discovered that the frill makes good eating. The frill is the part of the scallop that is normally thrown away in the production of ‘shop scallops’ that are just the scallops main closing muscle and is usually attached to a roe sack. When you have a chance to catch your own scallops, they will have ‘plump pale muscles’ that make the shop ones look like shrivelled little beige objects. “Here is another secret. The fresh ones taste beautiful, in raw condition, straight from the sea, but they jump about a bit while being eaten”
The frill is quite nice to eat. I cut out the little black organ that I think is the gut and they need plenty of washing to remove any sand or grit before cooking.
As a recurring theme on this page, I found that some restaurants in Aomori, Japan specialise in serving their scallops with frill attached.
Tim
