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Andrew Zimmern and Barton Seaver are what you would call seafood fanatics. Or blue food promoters. They want us to eat more things made with water, even first thing in the morning.
“Seafood for breakfast is delicious,” says chef, author and TV host Zimmern. Seaver, a chef and National Geographic Explorer, agrees — he argues that some lean protein with omega-3 fatty acids is a great way to start the day.
“Seafood is included in all meals everywhere, all the time,” Seaver says.
Both – in collaboration with seafood advocacy nonprofit fed By Blue – has combined part cookbook and part educational resource for “The Blue Food Cookbook: Delicious Recipes for a Sustainable Future” to help make eating food from oceans, lakes and rivers less confusing for many people.
“Seafood, clearly, is a food that needs a little help incorporating it into the diets of people in more demographics,” says Seaver. “That was the purpose of this book – to invite, but also to make people realize that, maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at seafood.”
Both use “blue food” to describe the category, which includes not only seafood but also freshwater animals, as well as algae and marine plants. The authors argue that choosing blue food doesn’t have to be surprising, expensive, or difficult to cook.
“There’s a lot of confusing information out there,” Zimmern says.
Labels don’t always help
Is catching wild animals better than farming? Is fresh better than frozen? Zimmern and Seaver discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each, but they don’t really care. Labels don’t always help: Thanks to technology on trawlers, frozen fish can be fresher than unfrozen fish.
More important: where is your fish from and was it sustainably caught?
“The Blue Food Cookbook” emphasizes that the fish at the center of any dish can be replaced with a similar animal from the same family. If there isn’t any fresh, good-looking haddock at the store, try halibut or pollock.
The authors say that loud headlines about depleting oceans, labor abuses, antibiotic use, and radiation are making consumers reluctant to buy fish and marine plants. He argues that these issues are dwarfed by what is happening to chickens, cows and pigs on the ground.
“To be very clear, we still need to get a lot right about seafood. But there’s also a lot going right currently, we’ve made a lot of innovations that have really opened the door to this new perspective. And that’s what Andrew and I want to celebrate,” Seaver says.
The 145 recipes in the book range from high-brow caviar to simple tuna noodle casserole and North African flavors to Nashville hot catfish. One dish – a panzanella – seems to perfectly encapsulate his approach; It takes frozen, pre-cooked fish sticks and adds aged tomatoes, fennel and onion to create a new twist on a rustic Italian salad.
Zimmern fondly remembers when, as a child, Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks would appear, and he would dip them in mayonnaise and ketchup. “It was one of my favorite things ever,” he says. He may have become a James Beard Award-winner, but he doesn’t disdain the oft-ridiculed cafeteria.
“Whenever we get a meal that doesn’t rely on Big AG versions of beef, pork, and chicken, we’re voting to save our planet,” Zimmern says. “If America ate one more seafood meal a week, we would benefit our economy so much.”
dueling methods
The book covers cooking techniques; Tips on Buying Fish; And must have pantry items. There are recipe sections for bivalves, small silver fish like sardines, preserved and canned seafood, seaweed, flaky white fish like cod, the salmon family, fleshy dense fish like carp, steak fish like swordfish, fillet fish like branzino, and shellfish and cephalopods like octopus.
The authors offer dueling recipes for linguini with crab cakes, clam sauce, and clam chowder, and playfully state their cases for why their version reigns supreme.
“We both firmly believe that there is no one way to do anything right,” says Zimmern. “And in an effort to make fun of all the other cooks and food writers who said, ‘No, this is the only way to do X,’ we decided we were going to have multiple versions of the same thing in our book.”
As far as breakfast is concerned, the author weighs in on ideas JapanChina, Thailand, India and even England, where smoked herring is traditionally eaten. This is not such a foreign concept; In new yorkSalmon lox on a bagel is a common breakfast.
Seaver also suggests bringing seafood to the office for lunch, an idea that is often considered too smelly. “There are plenty of cool seafood dishes that don’t require microwaving without peeing all over the floor.”