I confess, I have a weakness of the soul. A dark longing stalks me, a desire I can never satisfy and yet one I desire all the same.
It’s seafood, of all sorts except white fish. Particularly smoked salmon, prawns, sea bugs, and mussels.
I consider myself a relatively competent home cook, many people express delight at my food and find reasons why I should do the cooking for events. Yet I fumble at the edges of understanding when it comes to my dark lust for something that tastes like the seafood I used to love.
The extent of my learnings thusfar are essentially that kelp (kombu particularly, which amusingly is illegal in my county to import as food. Fancy that) and salt and msg sort of approximates a vague ocean character when used as a stock base and soforth. Or ground and added to a dish.
So I’d be really keen if we could exchange what we know on hitting similar notes in food. I’m not of the school of thought that wants things to sub one to one, for example while crumbed, fried, tofu doesn’t taste anything like schnitzel it can serve a similar roll in a dish which is otherwise appropriately flavoured. Or while a slurry of caper juice, msg, lemon zest, salt and olive oil does not in any sense represent an anchovy using it in sauces or dressings in place of the poor dears fleshes out the character in a similar manner.
So please, share what you’ve learned! Here is my fumbling at smoked salmon similarities: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CC1wJx0RKmYM__-TTcg9FR-xcM5wHp-rxJpJlhRYAGw/edit?usp=sharing summarised:
Rough ratios:
120 mL soy sauce
75 mL neutral oil - vegetable oil
150 mL water
70 mL lemon juice
45 mL kelp buds ground
7.5 mL liquid smoke
2.5 mL MSG
20 mL caper juice
10 mL maple syrup
as a marinade for some base. Salt roasted carrot is woefully inadequate (a popular suggestion from people high on copium) and I would suggest instead maybe daikon leached of flavour in water and coloured with some beet juice?
I've tried several times to make celeriac "fish", boiled in whatever stock you fancy as suggested in various recipes. Every single time though it comes out as soft, wonderfully textured fish-like flesh... completely shot through with awful, bad-tasting lumps of gristle. I still don't know if I'm doing something wrong in the preparation, if my local supermarket sources really terrible celeriac, or if my standards are just too high. Wondering if anyone else has tried this, and had a better experience?
I sometimes get celeriac from the commie farm. I'll have a shot, this seems like the white fish stuff I'm not terrible keen on myself but if I remember I'll let you know!
To be honest, I eat a whole food plant based diet and readjusted my desires and expectations. I always thought fish and seafood were kind of gross so maybe I am not the most reliable alternate maker and I tend to mostly eat desi and persian food. I think for something like schnitzel you need to mix the tofu with gluten flour to make it into more of a cutlet.
All that said
What about other kinds of seaweed like dulce? I have whole dulce and dulse flakes and for me they add a nice sea flavor to things. Something I like to do is freeze-thaw cycle a block of extra firm tofu which makes it flakey, slice it into filets, marinate it in brine and dulse (and other seasonings) then press a nori sheet onto one side and a very thin slice of lemon on top and I bake them nori side up. You could do a similar thing for salmon by using thicket slices, leaving out the lemon, scoring it with a knife and adding more dulse and beet juice.
For other seafood things the ones my partner likes are the king oyster mushroom "scallops" and Hearts of palm calimari.
dulce
Idk if I've ever tried this, sounds like a sweet idea 🥁🥁🔔 (no cymbal emoji? travesty!).
I'm not about whole food diets :P I mostly eat one because it's cheap and I'm too lazy to read ingredients on premixed sauces and the like and just assume everything includes something carnist but when I spent weekends cooking you bet I'm making weird pseudo eggs for ramen with sodium alginate, or experimenting with flavour additives to make an impossibly umami veggie stock. I am a hedonist through and through and intend to wear my body out subjecting it to sensations. I just, you know, also have a soul.
king oyster mushroom “scallops”
This is interesting, further reading? I was always a seafood platter on my birthday child and stuff like christmas lunch is traditionally a seafood meal in aus so being able to do this stuff matters to me. Like it would be great if one day instead of ruining my family's christmas by making them not eat meat if they want to share it with me I could save it.
