The Easiest Possible Way to Make Famous Fish

Since we last spoke, Bo Nix did not dirt it as many times as I suggested he might, the Broncos did win by 3, and Ja'Quan McMillian obviously intercepted the pass. In making sure I spelled Ja'Quan's name correctly, I also noticed the second "i" in his last name, which threw me off some, and I learned that the "Mac" or "Mc" seen in many Irish surnames comes from the Gaelic word mac, meaning "son of." The more you know.

Before my trip out to Denver, I was looking for something simple to serve as relief from an introductory recipe intended to complicate the creation of one of the most simple foods to make. I figure the window to keep the limited number of readers that I have closes pretty quickly if I piss them off too frequently, and frankly, I needed something simple myself. Low and behold, I turned to two separate books to look for inspiration, Lucky Peach's "101 Easy Asian Recipes" and Eric Ripert's "Seafood Simple." Conveniently enough, I found two slightly different recipes for the same dish. God works in mysterious ways.

Before we get to those recipes, we should talk about these books and their creators briefly, mostly because I want to. The first, "101 Easy Asian Recipes," is a cookbook from Lucky Peach, which was a food and culture magazine co-founded by David Chang. The magazine itself ceased publication before the time that I took a vested interest in cooking, but I was aware of it through conversations with people who were similarly interested and general research on the Internet. The contents have basically been wiped from the web, but if you look hard enough, you can still dig up some great recipes.

As far as celebrity chefs go, I would have to think that David Chang is one of the more famous. He is on TV frequently, even shown on the broadcast of one of the Thanksgiving NFL games this year cooking the traditional postgame meal, and he has 1.7 million followers on Instagram. He is the man behind the Momofuku restaurants in NYC with a number of variations - Noodle Bar, Ssam Bar, Momofuku Ko - with Momofuku Ko earning and keeping two Michelin stars for effectively its entire existence. He has expanded some, with a version of Momofuku in the Cosmo in Vegas (), which I have been to more times than I can remember, and mostly now seems to be focused on distributing cooking stuff to retail stores, many of which you can find in the international aisle of your favorite grocery store.

Eric Ripert is less "celebrity chef" than we might think of one, appearing relatively infrequently on TV and in media, having about half as many followers as Chang on Instagram, and just generally being less likely to be heard of if you bring his name up in conversation. I would be fairly comfortable suggesting that Eric Ripert is one of my cooking heroes.

Honestly, what I find most appealing about Eric is his personality, followed very closely by his cooking. It is always hard to understand who really stands behind the public version of these people, but chefs can have a bit of a reputation for being crude, loud, abrasive, and arrogant, particularly the celebrity ones. Ripert is the opposite; he comes off as quiet, calm, and kind in a way that is rare for chefs who have had his level of success. If Gordon Ramsay is the Stephen A. Smith or Skip Bayless of cooking, Ripert is the guy with 1/20th the amount of celebrity quietly writing the same newsletter for 20 years with infinitely better wisdom and more ball knowledge.

As for his cooking, you can read a bit about my experience at Le Bernardin, where he worked as an executive chef and eventually became a co-owner, here. The restaurant represents everything that I see from him. Unfathomably simple, yet incredibly good. The "simple" in the "Seafood Simple" title of his book is almost redundant, as I rarely read a recipe of his that isn't such. He also still confirms the temperature of his fish by inserting a metal skewer, then pulling it out and putting it to his lip. He is the anti-me in the kitchen, and it is truly aspirational.

I got a bit carried away there, but fuck it. These recipes are fairly similar, but the marinades and methods differ just enough that this was fun to treat like a little experiment. Both of these people credit the famous Nobu Matsuhisa for this dish, and if you have been to Nobu and had it, you would realize why it was popular enough to get other chefs to write about it. While we are here, Nobu Las Vegas () and Matsuhisa Denver () are good. I could talk about these a bit more, but I am feeling I have already pushed the boundaries on this one.

Lucky Peach's method resulted in a flakier fish that fell apart more easily, while Ripert's results in a fish that retained its structure but had a heavier miso flavor in the mouth. Lucky Peach's method seemed to take on a better caramelization. Both good, but the truth is, my preference would have been somewhere straight down the middle: Lucky Peach's flaky and fall-apart fish with Ripert's heavy miso mouth flavor, leaning toward the caramelization or "burn" of the Lucky Peach method.

The most obvious difference in the recipes are the ingredient ratios. They have the same 1:1:2 ratio of mirin:sake:miso, though Ripert's method opts for twice the amount as Lucky Peach's and considerably less sugar in the marinade. This seemed to have an effect on the end result, but I must admit that a marinade is only as much of it is really applied to the fish, and it is not as if the fish is exposed to the entirety of the marinade in either case. I would be less inclined to believe that had the biggest impact on the outcomes.

The other obvious difference is seen in the cooking methods, where I think the impacts were more clear. The broiler sets the surface film quickly, dehydrates the outside some, and there is no high-temp pan sear to generate strong caramelization on the flesh-side of the fish. The Lucky Peach pan-to-oven method, through that pan sear, removes some of the surface marinade and replaces it with the limited oil and Maillard. It's a gentler finish in the oven, though still at 400F, as the heat source is much less direct.

When I do this again, I will test with Ripert's marinade, adding a few more tablespoons of sugar, use Lucky Peach's pan-to-oven cooking method until about 115F, then add a quick broiler kiss for a minute or two at the end. I used packaged-frozen white cod from Whole Foods for this; it is probably worth iterating on different types and qualities of fish, skin-on and skin-off.

Ripert includes a wasabi-lime sauce with the miso cod, which I opted to create and found delicious, as well. I love wasabi, and this one carries much of the flavor and a good bit of the kick you would expect. This is sort of just what Ripert does. Simple fish, simple sauce, elevated execution. A one plus one equals three situation, if you will.

He has a recipe for making the ginger oil which is essentially 1 cup canola oil and 1/2 pound fresh ginger, peeled and minced, blended together. That is a lot of ginger oil and theoretically a fuckton of peeling and mincing, so just use less of each and keep the ratio (~1:1 in grams) the same and you'll output less. I didn't have any creative plans for reuse of ginger oil at the time, despite it keeping for about 2 weeks, so I opted for the smallest amount possible, about 25g of fresh ginger and 30g of oil.

We needed a vegetable, and shishito peppers made sense in my head. I grabbed a 12oz bag of those and because we were doing things, tried those two different ways, as well.

(1) creates a softer shishito pepper with some oil that sticks around in those peppers, while (2) creates a crunchier pepper that is closer to eating it raw, which honestly seems fairly predictable and easy enough to reason through. It is worth noting that (1) uses an excessive amount of oil. If you are not interested in using and discarding that much oil for the sake of making shishito peppers, or you don't have gelatin and know this neat trick, maybe just use less oil or opt for (2).

A lot of bullshit for two simple fish recipes, but sometimes these simple recipes can carry far more instructional weight than their difficulty suggests. I should add that I did not do a fantastic job with the photos here. While watching some Reels and thinking about this blog recently, I recognized the value in making the content more appealing, but I also want to present it honestly. My goal is to represent cooking as it is for normal people with other shit going on in their lives, not potentially discourage interest by creating an unachievable reference point. We'll find a balance.

Just to be safe...

Seafood Simple
101 Easy Asian Recipes