Brining Fish! The French Laundry/Per Se Cookbook Teaser, Part 1 (Also, Shad SUCKS!)

 Hi everyone!  So Nate and I recently purchased The French Laundry/Per Se Cookbook, and my review is coming soon.  I want to give it my full attention, so I'm taking my time with it.  (Some cookbooks, like trashy novels, can be read in a day.  Others, heavier works, take time to digest.  TFL/PSCB is the goddamn Infinite Jest of cookbooks.)

However, as I read it, there are little things I'm picking up and trying out, so by way of a teaser (and so my final review isn't 30 pages long), I thought I'd cover a few of the things I learned along the way.  

The first topic I want to get into is brining fish.  I've brined plenty of fish in my day, usually sword, which tends toward dryness if it's overcooked, which is painfully easy to do.  But in TFL/PSCB, Keller says they brine pretty much all fish in a 10% brine.  They go between 10-30 minutes, depending on the thickness of the filet.  Then, they leave it uncovered to air dry overnight, which they say enhances browning (and it totally does).  I tried it on a few different things, and I'm here to tell you about the results.

Experiment 1: Swordfish

10% is way weaker than my usual swordfish brine, for which I use the salt/sugar ratio from Fergus Henderson's brine, as covered in The Whole Beast, a book which, if you don't have it, say it with me, it's not my problem.  Amazon has it used for less than 20 bucks.  That ratio is a gallon of water, 2 and a quarter cups of salt, and 2 cups of sugar.  That's a really, really strong brine, around 20%.  The ten percent brine actually was a better match for the mild flavor of swordfish, and I went the whole 30 minutes.  The result?  Nicely seasoned swordfish, that took color in a hot pan really easily.  Results: good.

Experiment 2: Black Bass

I wanted to see how it worked on something with some skin.  More to the point, black sea bass has about the most difficult skin to get crisp I've ever dealt with.  It's like, John Dory, difficulty 3.  Salmon, difficulty 5.  Loup de mer, difficulty 7.  Black bass, difficulty 9.  So I brined the thin filets for 10 minutes, and then let them rest overnight.  The results were outstanding.  First, the skin took color really well, and didn't need too much babysitting.  Second, while it did buckle initially, after gently pressing the filets back flat with a fish spat, it sat well.  Third, no squeegeeing was necessary, the skin was totally air dried.  Fourth, this was the single best piece of skin-on fish I've ever had, ever, from a crispness standpoint.  It didn't just crisp up, it became like glass.  It actually shattered when I put a fork through it.  It was like a potato chip.  Just outstanding.   Results: transformative.

Experiment 3: Black Bass Shelf Life

Okay, so it was apparent to me that this was the greatest way to cook skin-on fish in the history of the universe.  But how practical is it, from a restaurant standpoint?  Was it worth putting a whole day of shelf life on your filets before you even start selling them?  On the other hand, the brine probably staves off spoilage, at least a bit.  I decided to have a race.  I took another pair of black bass filets, and brined one, and didn't brine one.  Then, I let them go until my fridge stank like a [metaphor redacted for sheer awfulness, but it involved a salacious act with a dead mythical sea creature].  I pulled out the two filets, and the unbrined one was rank, and the other one was fine.  However, when I cooked the good one up, it had gotten far, far too salty, and the texture had changed.  Perhaps wrapping it really well would have helped, but then I'd be concerned that as the filet bled water, the crispness would be lost.  So yeah, on the one hand, letting the fish go for an extra day before you start serving it wouldn't be a bad thing at all, the salt does indeed impede spoilage.  (Although I wonder if that would still be true for a fish that gets ammoniated, like skate or shark.)  On the other hand, the brined fish had a stability problem of it's own, in that it continues to shrink, and concentrate the salt, so if you're not moving fish, this probably isn't the best plan.  Must be nice for those places that have tasting menus and are reservation only.  This might not work for a slow restaurant.  Results: inconclusive, but interesting.

Experiment 4: Shad Roe

While I was shopping for this, I saw an interesting item on the ice over at Mt. Pleasant Seafood.  A roe shad.  A big, ugly, ungutted fish.  Now, shad roe is a popular item here in the lowcountry, mostly among extremely old people.  Now, as is evidenced by the name of the blog, I quite like caviar, which is technically roe, so I have always wanted to try it, but restaurants that sell it are few and far between.  I bought the fish and brought it home.

Getting the roe out was easy.  I took it, gave it a 15 minute soak in my TFL/PS fish brine that I always have now, and let it dry overnight.  I rolled it in some Wondra and pan-fried it in some butter and bacon fat, which seemed like the way everyone was doing it.  Then, I served it up over some grits and kale, dressed with that same bacon.  Doesn't that look lovely?

How was it, you ask?  Well, if I could have done one thing different, it would have been to throw the shad roe in the garbage, and just eat the grits and greens.  Or maybe replace the shad roe with a pork schnitzel.  Or a deep dried quail.  Or half an apple.  Or some marshmallows.  Literally anything.  Shad roe is fishy, mealy, and unpleasant.  But, it cooked up great and the seasoning was on, so I guess the brine worked out okay?  Results: crappy, but it wasn't the brine's fault.

Further Musings

Why, then, do people eat this crap?  It's a mystery.  It tastes like a combination of monkfish liver and cat litter.  But I have a theory...

See, I tried to cook the shad filets up, too.  And here's the thing: they are all bones.  They seem to have an extra row of ribs that run right through the filet.  I spent about an hour trying to pinbone it, and it was impossible.  To his credit, the dude at the fish market told me as much, but I'm stubborn.  I'm also a pretty good fish butcher, and am pretty good at cutting things other people find challenging, like triggerfish.  So anyway, I finally got them cleaned, and brined, and sauteed a few, and, hahahaha NOPE.

Still shot through with bones.  It turns out shad seem to have another row of rib-like bones, that skirt the filet on the skin-side, running directly parallel to the skin.  Almost impossible to detect, completely impossible to remove.

Look at that nonsense!  The flavor wasn't bad, but the texture was wildly unpleasant.  The only use I can possibly think of for shad filet, apart from cut bait, would be quenelles.  You know, for all those times people want to order pureed fish and pate a choux...  You know, I've still never tried real quenelles...  That would be a cool episode...

Anyway, I digress.  Don't eat shad roe, brine your fish, don't let your unbrined fish sit for days and days, and don't eat shad roe.  Look forward for another teaser article or two, and then stay tuned for the big French Laundry/Per Se Cookbook review in a month or two.

-JS

PS.  My review is totally gonna be better than Nate's.