Acouple of centuries ago, lobster was considered a food for the poor in North America, fed to slaves and servants. Thirty years ago, monkfish was a junk fish, to be thrown back if caught, or perhaps used for animal feed.
Both of those sea creatures are now prized items on restaurant menus, of course, and another fish with a bad reputation, but bountiful numbers and a low price tag, is catching the eye of some chefs on the East Coast: Bluefish.
High in oil and quick to take on a trademark fishy smell, this favorite catch of hobbyist fishermen—if for no other reason than that it’s easy to catch—also is a fun fish to cook, chefs say.
Getting customers to try it is another story.
“It’s not a very popular fish, but the people who like it love it,” says Ryan Angulo, chef of Buttermilk Channel, a restaurant set to open in Brooklyn, N.Y., this month. “And the price on it is ridiculously cheap.”
He plans to offer specials for each day of the week, and on Wednesday it will be a variation of a traditional bluefish dish from the Portuguese communities in his native Rhode Island. He makes a stew of linguiça, fennel, onions, garlic, cranberry beans, kale and fish fumet. On top of it he serves the fish, skin on, cooked quickly, seasoned just with salt, on a cast-iron grill to create several textures.
“You have crispy skin, flaky fish and creamy beans,” Angulo says.
“If bluefish is fresh it doesn’t have that overly oily, fishy taste,” he adds. “But it only has a shelf life of a couple of days before it takes on a heavier taste.”
Anita Lo, executive chef of Annisa in New York, also says there’s a small window of opportunity for working with the fish.
“Bluefish is really best the day it comes out of the water,” says Lo, an angler herself, who once caught a bluefish so big that it broke her fishing rod. Like many, she prefers snapper blues, the smallest size of bluefish, over the larger cocktail blues and the behemoth choppers.
“They’re not quite as oily as the bigger ones,” she says of the smaller fish, which are generally between 6 inches and 10 inches long. “They’re still rich, but you can serve them like sardines. I like to marinate them in sweet miso for a couple of hours and serve them broiled, Japanese-style, with shiso.”
She doesn’t serve bluefish to customers she doesn’t know well. Usually she gives them as extra midcourses to people she likes.
She did offer them as a special once, and got flack from one customer who said: “Don’t you know this is trash fish?”
Bluefish is on the regular menu at fine-dining seafood restaurant Oceana, where executive chef Ben Pollinger offers bluefish escabèche with roasted pumpkin and fennel salad as a first course.
“I think they’re just a tasty fish,” says Pollinger, who frequently fishes for them when vacationing on the New Jersey shore. “But they’re so oily that if you don’t use them in two days they get really strong.”
Pollinger prepares a marinade of olive oil, sherry vinegar, garlic, chiles, cilantro and a little sugar. He heats that and pours it over the fish to cook it.
He lets that sit overnight and then serves it with pumpkin cooked with garlic, onion, chile flakes, coriander and fennel seed, as well as a salad of shaved fennel dressed in lime juice and olive oil. He garnishes the dish with saba, the cooked grape must that, if aged, becomes balsamic vinegar.
Brian Voltaggio, chef of Volt in Frederick, Md., puts bluefish on his tasting menu, which is ordered by his more adventurous guests. He cooks it in ways similar to how he prepares mackerel, curing it with salt and sugar as well as cracked coriander, pepper, cumin and fennel. He toasts the spices and adds basil and oregano. Curing helps firm up the fish’s flesh, he says. He then hot-smokes it and serves it at brunch.
“Bluefish is a great grilling and smoking fish,” says Nick Oltarsh, chef of Lobby and Room restaurants in Atlanta. “It’s got tons and tons of flavor.”
That means he can serve it with other robust flavors, so he brushes his bluefish fillets with aïoli and then grills them, serving them with house-made, sweet-and-sour pickled watermelon radishes, baby carrots, baby beets and watercress.
“It’s such an unctuous fish, it goes well with pickles,” he says. “They provide a foil to the richness of the fish.”
In another preparation, he serves it grilled with a salad of shaved fennel, orange and radish in a citrus vinaigrette. He also hot-smokes it and serves it with wild greens, asparagus, heirloom tomatoes and a house-made dressing of sour cream, buttermilk, mayonnaise, granulated garlic, onion powder, vinegar, mint and other herbs.
“It smokes very quickly, and what could be better to smoke than an oily fish?” he says. “You can cook it through and it still retains its moisture.”
Despite chefs’ love for bluefish, making it attractive to customers is more of a challenge, but at Temple Bar in Cambridge, Mass., chef Tom Berry’s Nantucket bluefish cakes are a hit.
“We served 2,000 of them at the Nantucket Wine Festival,” he says, “and people were blown away that it was bluefish.”
He smokes the fish over black-currant tea leaves, jasmine rice and apple chips.
“The tea leaves make an enormous difference,” Berry says. “They give it a nice, light, aromatic smoke.”
He cooks the fish through, and then peels off the skin and flakes away anything that’s dark or looks like a blood line because that’s where the gamy, fishy flavors lie.
He makes an aïoli mixture flavored with the Japanese spice mix togarashi. He mixes pieces of bluefish with the aïoli and adds toasted breadcrumbs, sautéed celery, bell pepper, red onion, raw scallions and cilantro. He mixes it together, keeping large chunks of fish rather than making it too pasty. He packs it into cakes, using just enough bread to hold it together.
“I don’t bread the outside,” Berry says. “It sears up really nicely just with that mix. I don’t even use oil to cook them, just a neutral pan spray.”
He cooks them on a griddle or plancha and serves them with microcilantro, the togarashi aïoli and curry oil, along with daikon pickled with shiso and beets.
Jonathan Seningen, chef of Hook in Washington, D.C., and a Maryland native, has been fishing bluefish since he was about 5.
“It’s one of my favorite fish to eat,” he says. “Fresh out of the water, it’s one of the best fish to make ceviche with. It’s incredibly tender, incredibly buttery.”
The bluefish he gets is usually a day or day and a half out of the water, so he brines it for about six hours in soy sauce, sugar and water. Then he smokes it at about 200 degrees Fahrenheit for about two and a half hours, and then brushes it with a honey-soy sauce blend and smokes it for 10 or 15 minutes more.
When he gets very fresh bluefish, he cooks it on a plancha with sea salt and serves it with potato gnocchi, roasted turnips, escargots and parsley pistou.
Seningen gets his bluefish already filleted, but David Varley plans to get them whole. Varley is the chef at Bourbon Steak, a Michael Mina restaurant opening in Washington, D.C., in December.
Varley, who also is a fisherman, says the key to good bluefish is bleeding them immediately after they’re caught, and then quickly gutting them and icing them.
He says if you can gut and cool the fish fast enough, it will last for a couple of days.
“Otherwise, if you don’t serve it that night, all you’re going to do is turn a lot of people off to a really good fish,” he says. “The most important thing is to check to make sure it’s absolutely pristine. If the blood line is still bright pink, you know the fish is fresh.”
The moment Varley gets the fish in his restaurant he ices it down and then does what he calls “deep skinning,” removing a thin layer of flesh along with the skin, something that he can afford to do with inexpensive bluefish, “because it’s not a $30-a-pound turbot.” Deep skinning assures that all of the blood is removed.
He wipes off the excess salt with a saké-soaked towel, and vacuum-packs the fillets with kombu seaweed. He says the seaweed, which the Japanese use to cut fishy aromas, “imparts an extra level of funk, because that’s what people expect in a bluefish.”
He likes to hot-smoke it and serve it with salads, although he also cold-smokes it and has even served it as a tartare.
Raw is the only way that Todd Ginsberg serves bluefish.
“On the rare chance that it’s extremely fresh, it’s a great fish to eat raw,” says Ginsberg, who’s the chef at Tap in Atlanta.
He serves it with a soy-chipotle dipping sauce and a side of radish or turnip pickled in white vinegar, sugar, water, horseradish and mustard seed.
“People don’t often associate bluefish with refined food,” he says.
But that also was once true of lobster and monkfish.
