Their fats are more like the polyunsaturated oils of plants than the fats of other animals. Fish, especially cold-water fish, have oily, unsaturated fats that remain fluid at low temperatures. If a fish is spanking fresh, you can sometimes catch a surprisingly plantlike aroma, says McGee, continuing the tutorial. When the fish is cooked, as taxanthins give rise to fruity, floral tastes. He rubs his hands together to warm them and develop the traces of scent he has picked up from the fish, then cups his hands around his nose: “Unmistakably salmony.” The scent is believed to be partly due to their fats and partly to the pink as taxanthins salmon acquire from eating crustaceans, which in turn create them from the beta-carotene they’ve obtained from algae.
BROMINE CONJURE SHOP SKIN
He runs his hands over the skin of an iced locally caught king salmon that will be dinner tonight for family and friends in nearby Palo Alto.Wild salmon has an aroma all its own that appears to arise from a particular diet, notes McGee. But its bromophenols can magically conjure up sea air. A nice fresh fish is never smelly or “fishy,” says McGee. Oceanfish accumulate the phenols in their tissues by eating algae or other algae eaters. “Think of waves dashed on rocks,” says McGee. In coastal areas, these bromophenols are propelled into the air by the action of waves. It’s the smell of bromophenols synthesized by algae from the bromine in seawater. Also,judging from McGee’s example, you have to follow your schnoz.Īs you step through the door into the cool sanctuary of IMP’s fish market,there’s a slight briny edge to the air that instantly recalls the seaside. To understand the character of fish as food-what makes it taste and smell the way it does, why you like it, and why you sometimes don’t-you must bear in mind the adaptations fish have made to life in water.
So McGee’s new On Food and Cooking, 10 years in the making and almost twice the heft of the original, now includes an entire section on fish.įish,especially ocean fish, as McGee points out in his new book, live in a very different world from ours and that of the other animals we eat.The rules are different from those for cattle, pigs, and chickens. Now we’re buying tuna rolls in supermarkets. Sales of sushi in the United States have been booming, says Sakata. Fishing has become “a more important and visible industry.”Fish stocks worldwide are under pressure as never before, “so national governments put more resources into research because of problems with sustainability and developing aquaculture.” Seafood consumption,meanwhile, is rising, driven in part by health concerns and America’s love affair with sushi. Twenty years later, “there’s been an explosion of information on the subject,”McGee says. How many people have studied both physics and English literature at Caltech, earning a hybrid bachelor of science degree in literature? McGee has become the go-to guy for such questions as: How much oil can mayonnaise absorb?Why do red beans cause gas? How do you deal with an overdose of wasabi?When it came to fish, though, the original On Food and Cooking had little to say.
Somehow he seems uniquely up to the task.
In fact, he’s made a career of turning huge amounts of arcane food science, centuries of history and culture, and wonderfully oddball,just-for-the-heck-of-it facts into a good read for curious cooks and eaters. He likes nothing better than surfing journals the likes of Cereal Chemistry, Poultry Science, and The Bulletin of the Japanese Society of Scientific Fisheries. Tall, bearded, and unapologetically bookish, he’s America’s premier food wonk. McGee is the author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen ,a doorstop of a book that first appeared in 1984 and became an instant classic. McGee, who is wearing a regulation-issue hairnet, bows over it and draws a deep, appreciative breath. The sea bream shimmers with freshness in its box of shaved ice.
Sakata mentions in passing that both fish are bought by the French Laundry, Thomas Keller’s four-star temple to cuisine in Napa Valley. Favored for sashimi, it’s quite lovely, with silver skin, luminous yellow stripes, a tail that blushes deep pink. “It makes wonderful broth.”Ī golden threadfin bream, itoyori in Japanese, also catches McGee’s eye. “In Japan we call it aka-yagara, which means ‘red arrow,’” says Glenn Sakata, IMP’s general manager. “Look at that, with that schnoz, and a whip coming out of its tail,” he says, stooping over what turns out to be acornet fish, a long, bony creature with a fluted tube for a snout, a strange rear end, and an altogether alarming red color. workers are inspecting shipments of gleaming ice-packed fish at IMP Foods, a company in San Mateo, California, that supplies sushi-grade specimens to Japanese restaurants and a coterie of some of the most famous-and famously picky-American chefs.
0 kommentar(er)
