Summer of Ceviche: How to create an alluringly spicy-cool and balanced aguachile, vegan or otherwise

By Leslie Brenner

[Editor’s note: This is Part 3 of a multi-part series. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.]

In the hands of an able chef, aguachile — northwest Mexico’s take on ceviche — can be so enticing. Yet try a recipe pulled off the internet, even from one of the most trustworthy cooking sites, and chances are it will be so acidic it scrapes the enamel off your teeth, and so chile-hot, you can’t eat more than one bite.

A recipe on one of those respected sites starts by blending three stemmed and seeded serranos with 3/4 cup straight lime juice and salt; two more serranos (plus some ground pequins) are added later.

What’s wrong with that?

The chiles, for starters. Five? Why not 10? The resulting aguachile may well be inedible either way.

That’s because all serranos are not created anything like equal. They can range in length from about one to four inches, and in Scoville heat from 10,000 to 25,000 units. One serrano can be powerfully spicy. Or relatively mild. So calling for a specific number of them without providing opportunities to taste and adjust is absolute folly.

All serranos are not created equal!

Much smarter is to start with a small amount of serrano, then gradually add more, if needed. That way you won’t wind up wishing you could subtract. Our recipe lets you do that.

RECIPE: Hearts of Palm Aguachile

Then there’s the lime juice. As we explained in Part 1 of this series, lime juice’s acid needs to be tamed to make a good ceviche, one that’s not harsh and twangy. That is, it needs to be diluted with a measure of something less acidic — orange juice, water, coconut water or something else.

READ: Summer of Ceviche Part 1

But wait — what exactly is an aguachile, anyway?

Let’s back up and talk about what makes an aguachile an aguachile, and how they’ve been evolving.

In Sinaloa, their birthplace, traditional aguachiles are shrimp ceviches spiked with wild chiltepín chiles; their sauce is a suspension of chiles in water — hence the name, which means “chile water.” Michael Snyder wrote an excellent piece about them for Eater a couple years ago.

The dish has captured the imaginations of chefs and other cooks far beyond Sinaloa. While shrimp versions are popular wherever aguachiles are found, as the dish has evolved, all kinds of seafood are getting the aguachile treatment. In Mexico City, chef Gabriela Cámara has two octopus aguachiles on her menu at Contramar — one green, the other red. Stateside, the Los Angeles restaurant Holbox has one starring Baja bay scallops. In New York City, Enrique Olvera’s Cosme offers one with hiramasa (amberjack), along with rhubarb and shiso.

In Dallas, where I live, Molino Olōyō chef and co-owner Olivia Lopez (who is also Cooks Without Borders’ Mexican Cuisine expert) has featured fluke in a spectacular aguachile with watermelon, green habanero and coriander at a couple of recent pop-up dinners, and kampachi with peaches in one at a recent take-out pop-up.

But aguachile is not just for seafood: There’s a beef aguachile on the menu at El Carlos Elegante (my favorite Mexican place to bring out-of-town visitors), and I recently enjoyed a Wagyu steak aguachile at a delightful Tex-Mex spot, Las Palmas.

And in the hands of careful chefs, deliciousness is the goal, not creating something so searingly spiced that only chile daredevils will enjoy it.

An aguachile for vegans

Aguachiles made with hearts of palm — palmitos in Spanish — have been popping up all over the internet. Made well and balanced properly, they can be wonderful: The texture of the hearts of palm almost mimics scallops or halibut. Adding slices of avocado adds richness. The best ones are not just great vegan aguachiles, but great aguachiles.

Unfortunately, as with seafood aguachiles, far too many of the palmito versions call for a lot of straight lime juice, and a stupidly precise number of chiles — four on that same respected cooking site that used five in the seafood aguachile. If you used four of the serranos currently residing in my fridge, the result would be inedible.

Our palmito aguachile recipe takes a soft approach — and its sauce is so delicious, you may want to drink it from the plate. We start with two parts coconut water, one part lime juice and a handful of cilantro, add a little salt and blitz it with one-quarter of one seeded serrano. Yep, just one quarter!

Taste it. If it’s spicy enough, you’re good to proceed. Want more heat? Add more serrano and blitz again. Repeat until you’re happy. The sauce has lovely body thanks to the cilantro; and it’s visually appealing, to boot. As you can see on the photo at the top of the story, the chile and herbs are suspended in the clear liquid. It looks the part of aguachile.

Next you arrange sliced hearts of palm on a platter with radishes, sliced avocado and ribbons of cucumber; slivers of red onion that have soaked in water to soften their flavor are nice in there as well. Pour the sauce over, and garnish with some chile threads, if you like.

But don’t feel like you need to go vegan with this sauce; it works well as an all-purpose aguachile bath. Substitute quickly blanched shrimp for the hearts of palm, and it’s differently delicious. Or use both palmitos and shrimp. Or skip the palmitos and use thinly sliced sea bass or other white fish, letting it “cook” about five minutes in the sauce before serving. The world is your oyster.

And yes — you could use oysters!

Whatever you use, tostadas make a nice accompaniment.

RECIPE: Hearts of Palm Aguachile

RECIPE: Tostadas

---

Want free recipes delivered to your inbox? Sign up below!

Summer of ceviche: Two ways to let umami take your ceviches to the next level

Snapper Ceviche with Dashi and Seaweed

By Leslie Brenner

[Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of a multi-part series. Here’s Part 1.]

If you’ve eaten ceviche in Peru, or dined anywhere in the world with a serious ceviche program, you’ve probably heard of leche de tigre — “tiger’s milk.” A marinade and sauce that can also be sipped after you’re done eating the ceviche, it’s one of the most delicious tricks up the sleeves of the Peruvian ceviche masters — Peruvians even spike it with pisco (Peru’s national liquor) and drink it as a cocktail.

Leche de tigre is brilliant for introducing umami into a ceviche, while at the same time smoothing out the harsh acid of the lime juice. You’ll see it as an ingredient in many ceviche recipes, along with a sub-recipe, as it’s not something you can buy: It’s fish broth combined with lime juice, fish trimmings and cilantro, maybe garlic and/or chile. Perhaps some red onion, which is also used in the fish broth. Oh, yes — first you’ll need a recipe for fish broth. And in order to make fish broth, you’ll need fish frames and heads.

In other words, most home cooks will skip that recipe.

It’s easy to see how restaurants can manage to make fish broth for leche de tigre; they can start their ceviches from whole fish and use those heads and frames for big batches of broth. But for most of us at home, part of the appeal of ceviche is that it’s not just fresh, cool and expressive, but also relatively quick and easy.

So how to add umami into the equation without going to all that trouble? Two interesting — and very different — ways to go are dashi or tomatoes.

Ingredients for dashi (kombu and katsuobushi, or dried bonito flakes), and the finished stock

A Japanese touch

I thought about dashi, the simple, easy-to-make stock that’s the foundation of Japanese cooking, because it’s packed with umami, redolent of the sea, and quick and easy to make. In fact, it only involves two ingredients besides water: kombu (a type of seaweed) and bonito flakes. You can keep both on hand in the pantry, and it only takes 10 or 15 minutes for a batch. You can freeze the leftover dashi, or use it later to make a quick miso soup.

Dashi as a ceviche ingredient makes sense culturally, because there’s a strong Japanese influence in Peruvian cooking — known as cocina nikkei — thanks to Japanese immigration to Peru beginning in the late 19th century. And dashi’s ingredients — seaweed and bonito — are both found in Peru’s Pacific.

While I’ve seen various ceviches that use Japanese ingredients — including shaved bonito (or katsuobushi) as a garnish — I haven’t seen any recipes that use dashi in the marinade.

It works beautifully, imparting a gentle sea-kissed umami to the fish. I chose red snapper from the Gulf of Mexico for this ceviche because that’s what looked beautiful that day, but you could use sea bass, or any firm-fleshed white fish. Wakame seaweed and cucumbers play nicely with the fish, and you can finish it with furikake — the Japanese condiment that includes sesame seeds, salt, red pepper and nori seaweed.

RECIPE: Snapper Ceviche with Cucumber and Seaweed

Tomato power

Taking advantage of tomatoes’ awesome umami power feels just right for the season. Sure, you can dice tomatoes and toss them in with whatever fish or seafood you’re using, or use halved cherry tomatoes, which also add pretty color. But why not include some puréed tomato in the marinade?

In Central Ecuador, there is a tradition of including puréed tomatoes in the marinade for a ceviche of blanched shrimp.

Here I poached the shrimp in a quick broth made from their shells, along with cilantro and red onion. I strained the broth, combined it with chopped tomato, lime juice, salt and arbol chile, then blitzed it for the marinade/sauce. Slivers of red onion and sliced cucumbers garnished the ceviche — which I served with tostadas. (In Ecuador, it would be more likely to be served with plaintain chips, but the tostadas are really nice.)

The sauce, meanwhile, is so delicious my husband and I drank every drop.

RECIPE: Ecuador-Inspired Shrimp Ceviche

Finally, here’s an easy raw-fish ceviche that requires no cooking except zapping an ear of corn in the microwave for 60 seconds (or giving it a quick dunk in boiling water). Starring tomatoes, avocado, yellow bell pepper, scallions, cilantro and barely-cooked corn kernels, it’s a full-on celebration of summer. The tomato takes two forms: It’s puréed in the marinade as well as diced with the other garnishes.

This time it was rockfish that spoke to me from the fish case: it was fresh and gorgeous. Snapper or sea bass would be fabulous, too; choose what looks most appealing.

RECIPE: Rockfish Ceviche with Tomato and Corn

Note about the safety of raw fish

FDA guidelines stipulate that any fish other than tuna species (including bigeye, yellowfin, bonito/skipjack and bluefin) and farmed salmon must be frozen before it’s safe to consume raw; freezing it kills any possible parasites. However, as this excellent Serious Eats article explains, the risk of infection from raw fish is very low. Personally, I would never eat raw farmed salmon, because of well documented problems in their feed (and I don’t like their flavor.) The phrase “sushi-grade” is meaningless. If you’re nervous about the safety of eating raw fish, it’s best to choose something that’s been frozen.

READ: Summer of Ceviche, Part 3

---

Curious about how this article came to be? Check out our weekly Substack newsletter where we develop ideas and deliver extra recipes. Here’s the issue that birthed this ceviche series.

Sign up for free Cooks Without Borders recipes delivered to your in-box!

Explore Cooks Without Borders South American Recipes

Explore Cooks Without Borders Mexican Recipes

It’s the summer of ceviche! Here’s how to mastermind a great one

By Leslie Brenner

[Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a multi-part series. Updated June 22, 2023.]

There’s nothing more enticing than a gorgeous ceviche.

Maybe it’s one starring satiny sliced scallops, bathed oh-so-briefly in coconut and lime, consorting with velvety avocado slices. Or maybe it’s luscious bonito, with cancha (toasted corn nuts), sweet potato and cucumber. Or vermilion snapper, with flecks of tomato and cilantro and slivers of red onion. Or a vegan one, featuring hearts of palm, chile threads and radishes.

At their best, ceviches are cool, vibrant, alluring and expressive. The fact that they’re so exciting and inventive in their ostensible birthplace, Peru, is arguably the reason Lima has become such a culinary hot spot over the last decade. Peru’s northern neighbor, Ecuador, is all-in with ceviche culture, too, as is Mexico — including with aguachile, a type of ceviche. As chef Douglas Rodriguez pointed out in The Great Ceviche Book (2003, revised 2010), variations are also enjoyed in coastal towns throughout Central America, South America and the Caribbean.

Dazzling ceviches have broken out of Latin America in recent years. They first started appearing in the U.S. in the late 1980s, and they had some time in the spotlight when Rodriguez opened Patria in New York City in 1994, followed by Chicama in 2000. Now, once again, ceviches and aguachiles are having a major moment. (Not in your town or country yet? Let’s talk again in a month or two.)

On the other hand, there are legions of lesser versions rattling around in the world. At their most careless, ceviches can be pretty awful — too harsh, too acid, too relentlessly twangy. That’s because the basic recipe is raw fish plus lime juice (with some chile and salt). The lime juice, which is intensely acidic, “cooks” the fish by transforming its proteins, thereby firming up the flesh.

So what do the Peruvians and Ecuadorians know that most of us don’t?

They know how to tame the lime juice.

Here’s the great thing: If you understand how to do that, you can throw together incredibly elegant starters that’ll wow your friends and family with very little effort, usually without even turning on the stove. Perfect for summer! They can star raw fish or other seafood “cooked” with (tamed!) lime, but seafood that’s been literally cooked (maybe shellfish, squid or octopus) is welcome, too. There are even duck ceviches, and versions starring beef. Meanwhile, plant-based ceviches are happening — including in Peru. Gastón Acurio, the country’s most famous chef, gives recipes in Peru: The Cookbook for Artichoke Ceviche, and Ceviche de Champiñones (mushroom ceviche). “You can make ceviche with button mushrooms or any other type of vegetable,” he writes. “Ceviche is a blank canvas, not just a recipe.”

Ceviche’s canvas is open to all kinds of cultural inspiration and improvisation, thanks to the dish’s origin story and evolution.

In Peru, citrus-bathed raw seafood cebiches (that’s the original spelling) were first eaten in the 16th century. According to Maricel E. Presilla’s authoritative Gran Cocina Latina, bonito and baitfish (such as anchovy) were marinated in juice squeezed from Seville (bitter) oranges, the first citrus to be brought to the New World from Spanish colonists. In the second half of the 19th century, Japanese immigrants brought their culinary ideas to Peru, resulting in today’s cocina nikkei, and Chinese immigrants contributed theirs, with la cocina chifa.

But there are antecedents elsewhere in the world, such as the Philippines, whose kinilaw is “cured” in vinegar. Catalan people in Spain were marinating fish and seafood in lime, orange and vinegar as far back as the 14th century (escabeche!). Presilla refers to pre-Inca archeological sites on the coast of northern Peru where passion fruit and tumbo seeds were excavated “side by side with hot pepper seeds and the remains of shellfish and fish bones.” Not a citrus-juice situation, but it suggests fruit-juice-and-chile-marinated fish; tumbo is an acidic fruit.

All of which is to say that with so much cross-pollination, ceviche is a culinary canvas on which cooks of every culture can feel comfortable painting.

You can certainly use the recipes that follow — one with this article, and others in upcoming installments of this series. I’m super excited about them, so I hope you do. But once you grasp the lime-softening principal and gain a sense of the possible range of ingredients (coming in future installments), you’ll also have what you need to improvise based on whatever fabulous seafood catches your eye and whatever other ingredients appeal. Stunning success is practically assured.

The principle

I had my first ceviche-taming lesson about 10 years ago, when my friend Bradford Thompson (a James Beard-Award winning chef) visited us at our home in Dallas. We’d invited him for dinner, and he showed up with ceviche components, including gorgeous diver scallops. I can’t remember what else was in the particular ceviche he threw together (he can’t either), except that it definitely relied on coconut water — yes, to soften the lime juice. The result was spectacular: suave, soft and lightly tangy, and tasting gently of the sea. And the texture of those scallops — which only got a quick coconut-lime bath — was magnificent.

It was an ocean apart from the usual white fish cooked in straight lime to toughness.

I adored that ceviche, but somehow it took me a decade to synthesize why it was so good: not simply because the coconut water made it nice, but because the coconut water diluted the lime.

My hunch was confirmed when I turned to the very first recipe in Acurio’s Peru — Ceviche Classico. It starts with white fish fillets (sole, croaker or grouper) cut into 3/4-inch cubes and seasoned with salt and pepper. They cure for one minute, then you add chopped garlic and chiles, lime juice and chopped cilantro — along with ice cubes. Ice cubes! What do the ice cubes do? They melt as you stir them into the ceviche, diluting the lime juice.

In Gran Cocina Latina, one of Presilla’s 10 ceviche tips is adding ice cubes “to tone down” lime juice’s acidity. Remove them, she advises, before the ice melts completely, “or it will water down the flavor.”

While you ponder the power of frozen water to finesse fabulousness, help yourself to a recipe inspired by Bradford’s scallop ceviche that leans into coconut water to tame the lime. While Bradford didn’t recall the other ingredients, he did remember that it used twice as much coconut water as lime juice. (That’s a ratio that chef Rodriguez also used in his signature Honduran Fire and Ice tuna ceviche at Patria, which appears in The Great Ceviche Book.)

If you can find fresh dry-pack sea scallops — the ones that have no chemicals or water added — this dish is a great place to start. As with all ceviche and other raw-fish recipes, make sure you’re buying the freshest possible product from a trusted purveyor, use it the day you purchase it, and keep it well chilled until you use it.

RECIPE: Scallop Ceviche with Coconut and Avocado

But wait — is it safe?

FDA guidelines stipulate that any fish other than tuna species (including bigeye, yellowfin, bonito/skipjack and bluefin) and farmed salmon must be frozen before it’s safe to consume raw; freezing it kills any possible parasites. However, as this excellent Serious Eats article explains, the risk of infection from raw fish is very low. Personally, I would never eat raw farmed salmon, because of well documented problems in their feed (and I don’t like their flavor.) The phrase “sushi-grade” is meaningless. If you’re nervous about the safety of eating raw fish, it’s best to choose something that’s been frozen.

READ: Summer of Ceviche, Part 2

READ: Summer of Ceviche, Part 3

---

Curious about how this article came to be? Check out our weekly Substack newsletter where we develop ideas and deliver extra recipes. Here’s the issue that birthed this ceviche series.

Sign up for free Cooks Without Borders recipes delivered to your in-box!

Explore Cooks Without Borders South American Recipes

Explore Cooks Without Borders Mexican Recipes

Shrimp Louie, a retro West Coast delight with an entertaining history, belongs on your table this summer

By Leslie Brenner

When I was a seafood-loving child growing up in Los Angeles back in the late 1960s, one of my favorite family excursions was going to dinner on the Santa Monica Pier. About halfway out, on the south side of the pier, was a laid-back, checkered-tablecloth seafood joint that offered two of my favorite foods in the world. One was house-made potato chips that were crisp on the edges and soft in the middle. I can’t remember what they served them with, only that they were incredible.

The other was a seafood Louie. I may be rewriting history — that was a long time ago! — but the way I remember it, you could choose between Crab Louie, Shrimp Louie or Crab and Shrimp Louie. I always went for the the combo. What landed before me was a magnificent assemblage of iceberg lettuce, plump shrimps, pieces of Dungeness crab (in and out of the shell), tomato wedges, hard-boiled egg quarters, a wedge of lemon and a pitcher of Louis dressing. How royal!

Somehow, the Louie salad (also spelled Louis, like its sauce) has fallen out of fashion, but I’ve always kept it in my rotation: A shrimp Louie has always been one of my favorite summer dinners to make at home. It’s easy, it’s delicious, it’s satisfying and it’s cold.

Interested? Here’s the recipe.

On the rare occasions I have access to Dungeness crab, I’ll make it a crab Louis; otherwise shrimp is dandy. (I always buy wild shrimp rather than the farmed stuff from Southeast Asia, which often suffers from poor farming practices.) 

You may be wondering, what is the origin of seafood Louie, and why have I never heard of it? Really it’s a West Coast/last century thing, so if you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s probably either because you’re younger, or not from the West Coast, or both.

History of the Crab Louis

The crab Louis dates back at least to the early 20th century; it was likely born either in Washington State or California’s Bay Area. Either would make sense, as both are home to delicious Dungeness crab.

The exact origin is hazy. It is known to have been served at the Olympic Club in Seattle in 1904, when — according to What’s Cooking America — the legendary opera singer Enrique Caruso kept ordering it “until none was left in the restaurant’s kitchen.”

But this excellent short documentary segment — “Cracking the Case of Crab Louie,” from a show called “Mossback’s Northwest” shown on Seattle’s local PBS station — debunks the Caruso tale, pointing out that Caruso never visited Seattle. The segment also points to the earliest known appearance of a recipe in the Pacific Northwest for Crab Louis: in the Portland Council of Jewish Women’s Neighborhood Cookbook, published in 1912. The recipe called for lettuce, crab meat, hard-boiled and a dressing made from oil, vinegar, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, English mustard, salt and paprika. (Apparently those ladies did not keep kosher!)

The Davenport Hotel — some 270 miles inland from Seattle — is another possible birthplace. The hotel’s restaurant, The Palm Court, states on its website that its founder — Louis Davenport — had his chef, Edouard Mathieu, create it. It’s still on the Palm Court’s menu, “served according to the original recipe.” Interesting to note that as described on the menu, that signature dish has the same ingredients as our basic recipe — “Crisp butter lettuce topped with fresh Dungeness crab leg meat, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, and our famous housemade Louis dressing.”

San Francisco also lays claim to Crab Louis’ invention. In a 1914 book called Bohemian San Francisco, author Clarence E. Edwords gave a recipe for the Crab Louis from a restaurant called Solari’s. There’s no lettuce, tomato or hard-boiled egg involved; it’s just crabmeat dressed with Louis dressing: mayo, chili sauce, chow-chow, Worcestershire sauce and herbs. The St. Francis Hotel is sometimes mentioned in Crab Louis’ origin story as well.

Louis’ evolution

Although James Beard — who was a native of Portland, Oregon — adored Crab Louis and reportedly included recipes for it in at least three of his cookbooks, the salad had a hard time gaining traction away from the West Coast. Clementine Paddleford did not include it among the more than 600 recipes she collected for What America Eats, her exhaustive 1960 survey of dining habits across the country.

It was, however, in both Craig Claiborne’s 1961 The New York Times Cookbook and the 1964 edition of Joy of Cooking. Both were basically crabmeat mounded on lettuce, with Louis dressing spooned over.

A rendition included in Time-Life’s famous American Cooking series (“The Great West” edition, published in 1971) looks and sounds more enticing. This one has you toss crabmeat with the dressing and set the dressed crab in half an avocado, arrange bibb or Boston lettuce leaves around it and garnish with tomato and hard-boiled egg wedges.

Since then, written mentions of the salad — whether in books or on menus — are few and far between. Perhaps you can still find it here and there on the West Coast.

In 1996, I had the opportunity to cross the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth II, invited as a first-class passenger. That included dinners in the Queen’s Grill — where you could order whatever you wanted, whether or not it was on the menu. Everyone enjoyed playing “stump the kitchen,” but stumping those polished servers wasn’t so easy. One night I asked for a Crab Louis: Of all the things I could think of eating that moment, that sounded the best. The elegant waiter, who had seemingly never heard of the dish, nevertheless didn’t miss a beat. “Certainly, madame,” he said. “And how would you like that prepared?”

“Oh, the usual way,” I said. “A bed of Boston lettuce, with Dungeness crab heaped on top, wedges of tomato and hard-boiled egg, and that Louis dressing that’s pretty much a Thousand Island.” A few minutes later, a gorgeous one appeared. Absolutely royal.

---

Sign up for free Cooks Without Borders recipes delivered to your in-box!

Recipe for Today: Ginger, garlic, fish and greens in parchment takes us to our happy place

By Leslie Brenner

How does this sound: a dish that’s light, easy and quick to prepare, that features whatever fish looks best in the market, that’s super healthy and creates no mess to clean up? And what if it’s not only perfect for a weeknight, but so delicious and lovely to behold that you’d happily present it to someone you truly wanted to impress?

Well, that’s how we felt too, the first time we made the gingery halibut parcels from Andrea Nguyen’s Vietnamese Food Any Day. To achieve it, toss sliced baby bok choy in sesame oil, set a portion’s worth on a sheet of parchment, top with fish (the award-winning author suggests halibut or salmon), spoon onto it a quick sauce of ginger, garlic, oyster sauce, soy and a touch of oil and seasoning, scatter on slices of scallion, wrap it up, and slide it into the oven. Fourteen minutes later you have something wonderful.

How wonderful? I’ve made it four times in the last six weeks. It’s crazy that this simple combo of ingredients turns into something this delightful; the whole is much more than the sum of its parts on this one. Every fish I’ve used so far — halibut, petrale sole and striped bass — cooked perfectly in that package. In that 14 minutes the bok choy achieves ideal texture, the flavors all come together and the sauce envelops all in gingery, umamiful happiness. Salmon will be next. Or scallops. Or snapper.

I like to serve it with brown rice, spooned right onto the parchment to mingle with the sauce; jasmine rice is wonderful with it as well, and gets to the table much quicker.

Enjoy your Recipe for Today!

If you like Recipe for Today, please share it on your social channels or email it to a friend who will enjoy it. Thank you!

Shrimp and grits from Marcus Samuelsson's new 'The Rise' is the best we've ever eaten. Ever.

I’ve eaten my share of shrimp and grits in my time. OK, maybe more than my share. As a longtime newspaper food editor, then a restaurant critic for 8 years, I’ve eaten more than my share of everything.

Among all those shrimp and all those many grits, the best rendition I’ve ever eaten — by far — was one I prepared in my own kitchen just last week. The credit goes to Marcus Samuelsson, in whose new cookbook — The Rise — I found the awesome recipe.

I’m in process of cooking my way through the book in order to write a review, but I wanted to share the dish with you while okra is still in season (it will likely end very soon). The recipe — which Samuelsson calls “Papa Ed’s Shrimp and Grits” — was inspired by, and serves as an homage to, Ed Brumfield, executive chef of Red Rooster, Samuelsson’s restaurant in Harlem.

Most of the shrimp and grits I’ve eaten have been a basic low-country style, the shrimp poached in a rich gravy and spooned over cheesy grits. Toni Tipton-Martin sheds valuable light on the history of the dish and its styles in her much lauded (and wonderful) book Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking:

“Shrimp and grits are everywhere on restaurant menus, but harder to find in African American cookbooks unless you know what you’re looking for: The historian Arturo Schomburg called it ‘breakfast shrimp with hominy.’ In Gullah-Geechee parlance, it’s gone by names like shrimp gravy or smuttered shrimp. Casual Louisiana Creoles might call it breakfast shrimp with tomatoes.”

It is the more tomatoey, Creole direction Samuelsson takes for the dish in The Rise; it includes a small dice of okra, as well. The lively sauce, smoky with paprika and spicy with cayenne, is bright and piquant enough to beautifully balance those cheesy, rich grits. (Are you hungry yet?) It’s much like a quick shrimp gumbo served on grits.

My favorite shrimp and grits ever is not difficult to make. It calls for fish stock (we used shrimp stock, a substitution that’s acknowledged in our adaptation of the recipe). Because we’re in the habit of buying shrimp in the shell and freezing the shells for the purpose, we were able to whip up a quick shell stock before making it; you’ll find the method toward the end of our shrimp, andouille sausage and gumbo recipe. I suspect purchased low-sodium chicken broth would also work, as would clam juice diluted in with water and chicken broth in a 2:1:1 proportion.

Though I used fresh okra, as the recipe specifies, if you can’t find fresh, I also suspect frozen would work fine. (I like to buy an extra pound of beautiful okra during the season, which I trim and freeze in a zipper bag, just to have for such moments. It freezes beautifully, so if you do see it, consider grabbing some extra.) Just let it thaw before you dice it.

If you make this dish, I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. I could even imagine, if okra is still around then, making it the centerpiece of a Black Food MattersThanksgiving dinner.

RECIPE: Papa Ed’s Shrimp and Grits

Dreaming of a Mexican beach vacation? This vibrant aguachile from Colima will (almost!) take you there

You might have to squint real hard to pretend your patio — or a picnic table at your city park — is in fact a beach in Mexico. But take a bite of this gorgeous, suave shrimp aguachile and it’s not hard to feel thousands of miles away.

In the last few years in the United States, aguachiles have eclipsed ceviches as the raw seafood treat grabbing attention; in Mexico, they’ve been popular much longer. Unlike ceviches, which involve a relatively long soak in lime juice for the raw seafood, aguachiles get just a very brief bath in serrano-spiked citrus (aguachile means water infused with chiles).

The dish was born in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, as an excellent story published last year in Eater explains. And though you find aguachiles in restaurants from Mexico City to Houston to New York City to Los Angeles using just about every type of seafood, including scallops, tuna, snapper and yellowtail, on Mexico’s west coast where they were born, they are all about shrimp. (Not from the start, though, as Michael Snyder’s Eater story explains.)

Chef de Cuisine Olivia Lopez’s aguachile at Billy Can Can in Dallas

It was an aguachile that helped revive me after two and half months of confinement, when Thierry, Wylie and I ventured out to a restaurant a few weeks ago. We dined on the patio at Billy Can Can, our favorite modern Texan dining saloon (which I helped open in 2018 when I worked for the company that owns it.)

The dish was gorgeous and bright; I loved the way the dabs of avocado purée played with the lime and chile, and the shrimp had beautiful texture and flavor — unlike the rubbery, eraser-like creatures that over-soaked ceviche shrimp often become.

I asked Olivia Lopez, the restaurant’s chef de cuisine who created the dish, to tell me about it. She got a dreamy look in her eye as she started talking about making aguachile back home in Tecomán, her hometown in the state of Colima — which is about 700 miles south of the part of Sinaloa where aguachile was born. Her friend Nayely would make it, and they’d take it to the beach, where they’d enjoy it, with toastadas, along with coconut water or beers.

Billy Can Can Chef de Cuisine Olivia Lopez | Photo courtesy of Billy Can Can

Colima is one of the most important lime-growing states in Mexico, she told me (the other is Michoacán), and on the road from their home in Tecomán to Playa El Real, “all you see are lime trees and palm trees. And a lot of lizards.”

For Billy Can Can’s aguachile, Lopez blanches the shrimp before their lime-serrano soak, as her customers don’t love the idea of raw shrimp, she says. To compensate for that and prevent over “cooking” from lime, she adds olive oil to the sauce.

We were thrilled when she generously offered to share her recipe with Cooks Without Borders. But could we have it the raw shrimp way, just as Lopez makes it for herself at home — the way her friend Nayely did in Tecomán? Lopez was happy to oblige.

Happily, it’s very easy to do. And it’s so spectacularly delicious that we will be making it frequently — as frequently as we dream of a beach vacation in Mexico, which is to say constantly.

In our version, raw, butterflied shrimp get a quick 10-minute dunk in lime juice with a little salt and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. (“Yes, they use that in Mexico!” Lopez says.) The marinating juice then gets puréed with serrano chiles, cilantro and avocado, and the beautiful, emerald-green sauce that results gets tumbled with the shrimp. Transfer it to a platter, dress it up with sliced cucumber, avocado and red onion, and Playa El Real is yours. You can find tostadas in a Latin-American supermarket, and probably young coconuts for coconut water as well.

One small detail: The aguachile is meant to be eaten immediately, so the shrimp doesn’t get overcooked in the lime. It did take Lopez and her friends a few minutes to get to the beach with it, but that’s OK, she says; you just want to be sure to eat it within an hour.

Honestly, once you behold that gorgeous dish you’ve made in your own kitchen, I don’t think you could wait that long.

RECIPE: Aguachile, Colima-Style

From Paris' trendiest tables to yours: Whelks with basil aïoli are a snap to make

If you've been to Paris in the last few years (I just got back!), you know that bistronomie – laid-back bites in relaxed, new-style bistros – is Parisians' favorite way to dine these days. Expensive, elaborate menus dégustations (tasting menus) are pretty much for tourists and rich old fogies. OK, perhaps that's an exaggeration, but that's how it feels.

Thierry, Wylie and I dined bistronomie-style each of four nights when we visited Paris earlier this month, and twice we found bulots – the small sea snails English-speakers call whelks. They seem to be having a moment! I'd seen and eaten them occasionally in decades past on plateaux de fruits de mer – chilled seafood platters – where they'd sometimes be mingled with oysters and clams on the half-shell and steamed or boiled bigourneaux (periwinkles). 

"Bulots mayo," is how they were announced on the blackboard menu at Jeanne A – a terrific little bistro in the super-hot 11th arrondissement. I had to order them (6 euros) – for the three of us to share with our other starters. 

They came chilled in a coffee cup, accompanied by a little pot of good, house-made mayo. So much fun! A couple nights later, there they were again – listed under "zakouskis" at Le Servan, which offered them with mayonnaise au piment for 8 euros. (Le Servan, by the way, was wonderful – the best meal I had in Paris this trip, also in the 11th.) 

Ding ding ding ding ding! A lightbulb went off over my head: We can make bulots at home! Why? Because I know where to find them – and very inexpensively: at Jusco, an Asian supermarket with a fabulous seafood selection, in the Dallas suburb of Plano. In fact, I'd picked some up (about $6 per pound) to toss onto a seafood paella just a couple weeks before my France trip.  

As I researched bulots on my return, I learned a few things. First, that they're also called buccins, though I've never seen them called that on a menu. Second, that they're traditionally served in Provence with aîoli – the super-garlicky mayo whose name has been appropriated by American chefs who want to make gentler flavored mayos sound chic.  And third, that whelks is a term applied to several different types of sea snails, which explains why they don't always look quite the same – some are striped or ridged; others are spotted and smooth.

In any case, they couldn't be easier to cook. First, give 'em a 10-minute soak in cold water, so they release any sand, and rinse. Then boil them in heavily salted water for 20 minutes. That's it. I went a step further and tossed some sliced onion, thyme and bay leaves to the water as it came to a boil, and added a splash of white wine – a court bouillon on-the-fly. 

But first I whipped up some aîoli – a real one, with lots of garlic. It's easy to make in a blender. I flavored half of it with chopped basil. Or you could add chopped or puréed roasted red pepper. Or you could serve the bulots with mayo from a jar, dressed up with a squirt of harissa from a tube. But even plain mayo – home-made or store-bought would be swell.

With the aïoli – and glasses of chilled rosé – they were outstanding, a fabulous pre-dinner nibble, ideal for laid-back entertaining. Serve 'em warm, or chilled, or room temp – with toothpicks, which you need to coax the meat out of the shell. Delicious fun indeed. Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

Please let us know if you find them in your neck of the woods – and how you like 'em!

Guest cook: Susie Bui shares her fabulous Hanoi-style catfish dish, Cha Ca La Vong – a cult favorite

View fullsize

The first time I heard of Cha Ca La Vong, it was on Susie Bui's Instagram feed. Back in November, she had posted a photo of her dad's version of the dish. I couldn't tell what it was exactly, but it was gorgeous – with tons of dill, and turmeric-stained morsels of something, and onions, all being pushed around in a wok. You could just tell looking at it that the flavors were vivid and wonderful.

And there were so many other delicious things on her feed, seemingly that she had cooked: shrimp and egg whites, Chinese style; hu tieu hoanh thanh (Vietnamese wonton soup); beef with mushrooms, chives and bean sprouts; tom kho tau (braised shrimp in roe). 

I'd never met Susie – or at least never in the normal way. I'd seen her and talked to her back in 2009, when she and her brother had a restaurant in Dallas, Lumi Empanada and Dumpling Kitchen. (Dallasites, do you remember it? It was in the wood-frame house on McKinney that later became Belly + Trumpet.) Her brother, married to a Brazilian woman, was the reason for the empanadas. I was an incognito restaurant critic, just starting out in Dallas when I reviewed the restaurant, and it charmed me. But because I was incognito, I didn't introduce myself. 

Susie had never run a restaurant before, let along owned one; prior to opening Lumi she was a marketing coordinator for Brinks Home Security. But she had a real flair. "Somehow," I wrote in a three-star review, "despite her lack of experience and the craziness of the concept, Bui has managed to pull it off with panache and a serious sense of style and fun." Plus a number of the dishes were terrific: Chinese five-spice duck and leek dumplings; traditional Vietnamese crab and asparagus soup; a crazy-good Thai-style blue-crab fried rice.

The restaurant didn't last long (despite the positive review,) and Susie left the restaurant business, and in 2014 she left Dallas for San Francisco.

The day before she left, though, something interesting happened: At a Dallas wedding, she met Tony Perez. "We kept in touch," she says.

And then some: In July, the couple plans to get married, in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. 

Susie has since returned to Texas, but not Dallas – she and Tony live in Houston, where he has a sandwich shop. Susie works for Samsung – out of the company's Mountain View, California office. (She only has to pop in every couple of months.) 

So, to get back to Susie's Instagram feed, everything she was cooking looked so delicious. By the looks of her posts, it seemed she visited Dallas with some frequency, so I invited her over as a guest cook for the blog. To my delight, she accepted.

On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, she showed up at our house, with Tony and their friend Phong Tran in tow. So much fun to meet them, cook, hang out, talk food – and then feast on the results.

Cha Ca La Vong wasn't a dish I'd ever heard of before, and it turns out it has an fascinating story. "It's very popular in just one part of Vietnam," says Susie. "Hanoi. They even have a street named after it." 

Susie has never had the dish in Vietnam, but Phong has, two years ago, at the legendary restaurant named for the dish, Cha Ca La Vong. "It was the first time I tried it," he says; he only learned about it when he was researching what to eat in Hanoi. And it blew him away. "It was probably one of the best dishes I had in Vietnam when I was there."

Later I did some reading, and learned it's a dish with cult status. At more than 100 years old, Cha Ca La Vong is not the only place in Hanoi that serves it. In fact, there's a whole street called Cha Ca after the dish. 

Susie's parents are from the north; her dad, a wonderful cook, she says, taught her to make the dish.

Susie took stock of my kitchen (yes, I have cheesecloth! Yes, I have a mortar and pestle! Yes, I have rice paper!), then she put Tony and Phong to work grinding the galangal. It's a gnarly root that looks a bit like ginger root, but it's about 9,000 times as tough. They peeled it with a sharp paring knife, then pounded it with the pestle in the mortar, taking turns because so much elbow grease is required. "You can do it in a food processor, too," Susie said, but she enjoyed watching the boys do it the old-fashioned way. That would go into the rub for the fish. When I saw how hard it was to grind it, I knew I'd use a food processor.

Meanwhile, Susie showed me how to make our two dipping sauces: An all-purpose nuoc cham (fish sauce, lime, garlic, sugar and Thai chiles), and a funky-intense spin on it, mam ruoc cham, made by stirring pungent, fermenty fine shrimp paste into nuoc cham. Tony can't stand anything with shrimp paste – he ate too much of it once, the first time he met Susie's family, he reminisced, and he hasn't been able to manage it since. It's super-intense if you taste it on its own – and even the dipping sauce is pretty funky. But Thierry and I both loved it, especially with all those fragrant herbs in rolled up with the fish. The combination yells "wow!"

The nuoc cham, easy and approachable – and made from easily-found ingredients – will definitely go into my regular repertoire. To make it, we, just stirred together fish sauce, lime juice, garlic and sugar and Thai chiles, then adjusted the taste. For the Cha Ca La Vong, we just added a tablespoon of the shrimp paste. (If you're skipping the pungent version, you might want to serve double the amount of nuoc cham.)

Once we had the sauces ready and Tony and Phong had accomplished their galangal-grinding duties, Susie made the marinade for the catfish.

Oh, a word about the fish. I'm prone to bouts of angst and 4 a.m. brooding, and I worried about it. Do people want to eat catfish? My friends who are native Southerners love it, and I've always enjoyed it – whether fried Southern-style or steamed or fried Southeast Asian-style. Is it ecologically responsible and healthful? A quick check on Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch app assured me that American-raised catfish (which is what you will probably find) is a "best choice." This month's GQ magazine has Mark Bittman raving about catfish, which he calls "the one American fish we should all be eating." They're ugly customers, he points out. But "they're among the best-tasting, most sustainable fish you can find – white, flaky and tender, farmed with clean and smart techniques." Good to go!

OK, that marinade. Susie added a few tablespoons of water to all that ground galangal (what an interesting perfume it has!), then gathered it up in a cheesecloth and squeezed all the juice into a bowl. She then stirred in spices: ground turmeric, garlic powder, onion powder, sugar, mushroom seasoning and olive oil. She cut the catfish into pieces, coated them with the yellow marinade and let them sit for half an hour.

While they're marinating, I want to tell you about the mushroom seasoning. It's an ingredient Susie loves to use lots of dishes: soups, sauces, stir-fries – basically any dish in which other Asian cooks might use MSG, which Susie doesn't like to use. I didn't have an easy time finding it in a sprawling Chinese supermarket; I had to show three different employees a photo Susie sent me of her package. Finally one staffer led me to it: They had gigantic (17.5 ounce) envelopes of one brand, and it was expensive – more than $12. I bought it.

Between that and the Vietnamese herbs I sought, it was quite a goose-chase! 

Later I brooded about the mushroom seasoning, as it turned out the one I bought does have some MSG in it, listed last in the ingredients – after dehydrated mushrooms, vegetable powder, corn starch, salt, sugar and nucleotide. (The brand Susie uses does not, so check the ingredients if you're looking for it.)

The brand of mushroom seasoning Susie Bui uses does not include MSG in its ingredients.    Photo by SUSIE BUI

 Not that MSG is necessarily so bad, but I don't love using it, or other products with lots of additives. Here's the good news: I wound up developing a substitute that works really well: powdered shiitake mushrooms, in combination with soy sauce. (Incidentally, that was a breakthrough that led to a whole slew of other kitchen breakthroughs – I will write about that very soon!) Anyway, our recipe for Cha Ca La Vong lets you use one or the other.

Half an hour after the marinade went on, Susie laid the fish pieces on a baking sheet and slipped it into a 375-degree oven, to help seal the marinade into the fish before we'd fry it. (In Hanoi, they grill it rather than baking before frying, says Susie. Maybe I'll try that once we're in grilling season.)

While the fish is roasting, that's a good time to boil the rice vermicelli, rinse it with water to cool and put it in a bowl, then set the table: dipping sauces, rao thom, vermicelli, roasted peanuts and rice paper. Make sure you have your sliced onion, scallions and dill ready at hand near the stove, along with a couple of platters.

After its 15-minute roast, we pulled the fish out of the oven, and Susie heated peanut oil in a large skillet, then fried the fish pieces (in a couple of batches) in the hot oil, transferring them to a platter when they were cooked. Then she poured out all but a couple tablespoons of oil, and stir-fried the onion and scallion, then added the dill. All that went onto a serving platter, then the fish on top, and then, as a garnish, roasted, unsalted peanuts.

To the table, yippeee!

Thierry rustled up a bottle of chilled rosé, I filled a shallow bowl with warm water for the rice paper wrappers, and the party began.

For our first tastes, we each dipped a rice paper in the warm water, piled herbs, lettuce, cucumber, a little vermicelli, a piece of fish with some onion, scallion, dill and peanuts on top.  Here's what mine looked like:

Then you fold the left and right sides of the wrapper over the ingredients and roll it up, burrito-style. Working with those super-thin, stretchy rice paper skins takes a little practice – don't overfill!

Success! Dip it in one of the sauces, and wow. So wonderful. Dip it in the other sauce, different – and also wonderful, so herbal and fragrant; all that dill and turmeric add up to something very unusually delicious, especially when you get that crazy funk from the mam ruoc cham.

After that, Susie made a rice-paper-free salad-bowl version, piling lettuce, herbs, fish, etc. in a small bowl, drizzling sauce on top and eating it with chopsticks.

Stylin'!

Up for trying?

The whole Cha Ca La Vong set-up definitely involves some serious shopping, whether in Asian groceries or online. And some adventuresome kitchen prep. But it's such a fun dish to serve at a casual dinner with friends; it's so interactively delicious.  And it's not something you're likely to find in any restaurant – unless you hop on a plane and head to Hanoi.

Yeah, I knew you were ready for the adventure. Here's the recipe:

If you make it, we'd all love to hear about it – please tell us how it goes in a comment!

Roasted branzino with citrus and thyme is a snap to make

View fullsize

A whole roasted branzino: Doesn't that sound dreamy? And how about whole branzino roasted with sliced lemons, limes, oranges and onions, and twigs of fresh thyme? What would you think if I told you this was one of the easiest fish dishes you could possibly make – and also one of the most impressive? 

You'd say "sign me up" – am I right??!! 

OK, so first, branzino. You might know it as Mediterranean sea bass, or – its French name –  loup de mer. Some people call it branzini, which is also the plural of branzino in Italian (Italian pals, please correct me if I'm wrong!).  It's a delicately flavored fin fish with soft, white flesh – and it's surprisingly easy to cook. Even if you tried to ruin this dish, you'd probably fail. And roasting is my favorite fool-proof way to cook it. 

First, go to the store. Ask the fishmonger for whole branzini. One smallish one – about three quarters of a pound – per person is ideal. Two biggish ones are just right to serve three, which is what I used to do before the kid left for college. Ask the fishmonger to scale, gut and clean them, and snip off the pectoral fins (those are the ones on the side of the fish near the gill). If they forget to, you can do that at home -- just give them a snip with your kitchen shears or scissors. Tell the fishmonger to leave the heads and tails on, as it makes a nicer presentation. Unless you're the kind of person that can't bear to see them – then off they go. Roasting them on the bone results in the best flavor, and flesh that stays super-moist, so resist the urge to have them filleted.

View fullsize

OK, you've got your branzini. When you're ready to roast them, give them another rinse in the sink, focusing on the cavity. Pat them dry. 

If you're a confident cook, you don't even need a recipe for this; it's that simple.  Drizzle a little olive oil in a glass baking dish or other roasting pan. Scatter some sliced onion on the oil, then lay the fish over the onion. Season the fish inside and out with salt and pepper, tuck some fresh thyme and a few thin slices of citrus (lemon, lime and orange or any combination) inside their cavities, scatter more thyme, onion and citrus slices over them, drizzle with a little more olive oil, and roast in a 400 degree oven for about 35 minutes. 

View fullsize

Transfer them to a serving platter and fillet them at the table. You can be totally casual about it (as we do for family dinners), or – if you're serving them to guests (a double recipe makes a great dinner party for four) – you can fillet each, transfer to a plate, sprinkle with a few flakes of Maldon salt and freshly ground black pepper and offer a bottle of your best, fresh, fruity olive oil to drizzle over that lovely white flesh. 

What to serve with it? Some simple blanched-then-sautéed rapini or green beans, sautéed zucchini or spinach. Or start dinner with a simple arugula salad with shaved parm and good balsamic vinaigrette and follow with the fish, maybe with some roasted potatoes. 

OK. I'm making myself hungry. Do try this and let us know how it goes!

Cedar-plank salmon: Nearly naked is the way to go

Wild salmon. Just hearing the phrase makes me yearn for it. 

For fish lovers, wild salmon is one of the most delicious things on the planet. But all too often, people fussy it up too much, or cook it too aggressively. In my kitchen, I love best to poach it gently, or cook it slowly skin-side down in a pan with just a few drops of olive oil and a sprinkling of sea salt. Often I give it a quick turn to cook the other side for just a moment, then finish cooking it skin-side down. Cooked gently like this, it stays delicate and tender. And there's a bonus: It's easier to control exactly how done you'd like it.

When salmon on the grill sounds like the greatest thing possible, I reach for a cedar plank. The internet is giddy with recipes for cedar-plank salmon gussied up with honey-mustard glazes or citrus-ginger marinades or herb-and-garlic oils. You know what? They can keep 'em. To my palate there's nothing like the flavor of the wild fish enhanced only by the fresh woodsy cedar, salt and pepper and a little smoke. It's such an incredible luxury. 

View fullsize

And it's incredibly easily accomplished. Soak the plank two hours in water. Lay the salmon skin-side down on the plank, season with sea salt and pepper and set it on a grill over white-hot coals. Cover and wait 20 minutes. 

View fullsize

Remove the cover, transfer the fish to a serving platter or wooden board, and prepare to swoon. You can serve it with lemon wedges. Or not. 

One other thing: If you're nervous about the done-ness, you can use a thin knife to check the progress after about 15 minutes, gently separating the flesh at the thickest part. You want it still a little translucent in the center, and opaque on the edges. But you know what? In my experience, 20 minutes has always been exactly right. 

Thrill of the chill: Poached arctic char with dill sauce tastes like summer in Scandinavia

View fullsize

Oh, wait – it's not summer yet? It's certainly heating up! And when the going gets hot, Scandinavian-style cold poached salmon makes a delicious centerpiece for a dreamy chilled dinner or lunch.

Traditionally, this is done with a whole salmon – and that's fantastic for feeding a crowd. But what if you just want to do a salmon fillet? What if it's just dinner for two? Or what if you go to the fish counter and beautiful arctic char fillets are on sale? 

Grab that fillet and get ready to poach. It's so easy and yield such great results that if you've never done it before, you'll wonder where the technique has been all your life.

View fullsize

Lay the fillet skin-side down in a smallish roasting pan (or a fish poacher, if you happen to have one, which I don't). Cover it with cold water and add enough salt to make it taste like the sea. You don't need to add other flavorings to the water, as the both char and salmon have enough lovely flavor on their own; char's flavor is a little more delicate. Bring the water to a simmer, turn off the heat and let the fish sit in the hot water for 25 minutes. Transfer it to a platter and chill it. That's it. Garnish it with slices of lemon and sprigs of dill, if you like. 

You probably don't even need a recipe, but here it is:

A 1 1/4 pound fillet serves two or three; poach two fillets if you want to serve four to six. 

Serve it with a mustardy fresh dill sauce, and asparagus and boiled red potatoes – both are which delicious if they happen to crash into that dill sauce. I nearly forgot: cold cucumber salad's great with it, too!

View fullsize

Here's how to make the cucumber salad: 

And the dill sauce . . . 

View fullsize

And here's the best part. Make the fish and the dill sauce (and cucumber salad, if you're doing that...) in the morning, or the day before. Then you just pull 'em out of the fridge and serve. How's that for chill?

Bouri de Bizerte – roasted branzino – is the centerpiece of a culinary excursion to Tunisia

View fullsize

Our friends Habib Loriot-Bettaieb and Nicola Longford are both wonderful cooks – he's French-Tunisian; she's a Brit. We'd been bugging Habib for ages to cook something Tunisian for us, and last weekend we prevailed: He and Nicola invited us to their townhouse near the Dallas Farmers Market for a night in Tunisia. Cooks Without Borders' second guest cook event!

The centerpiece of the dinner is bouri de Bizerte – "a typical Tunisian dish," says Habib, as he seeds and slices peppers, "perhaps from the northern part, with the French loup de mer." That's the Mediterranean sea bass you may know as branzino. "Bouri is the Tunisian word for it," Habib explains. "It's from the town of Bizerte, where there's a very old harbor. My nanny Zina used to fix stuff like this." 

View fullsize

(Habib is somewhat camera-shy, which is why the visual focus is on the food.)

The dish – simply roasted loup de mer with potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions and saffron – is ideal for entertaining, as you can ready everything in advance, then pop the baking dish in the oven and forget about it for 25 minutes. Have a salad or other appetizer ready, and when you're ready for the main course, just transfer the fish and vegetables and the lovely sauce they create to a serving dish.

For the peppers – felfel in Tunisian – Habib uses Anaheims; they're very similar, he says. 

View fullsize

Habib's bouri de Bizerte, almost ready for the oven. Habib later told me he prefers to slice the vegetables differently, a change that's reflected in the (re-tested) recipe.

The dish is easy to assemble. In a baking dish or roasting pan, arrange the fish (whole fishes, heads and tails removed, cut in four) with parboiled Yukon Gold potatoes, quartered onions and Roma tomatoes and the sliced peppers. Add some water infused with a luxurious dose of saffron and some melted butter, a good dollop of olive oil, ground cumin, salt and pepper, toss it all gently to coat the fish and vegetables with the spices and such, then lay lemon slices on top. Then pop it into a 400 degree oven. Want to get started? Here's the recipe:

View fullsize

For a first course, Nicola improvises a salad she learned from Habib's stepmother: sliced oranges with radishes, red onion, cured black olives and mint.

View fullsize

Habib and Thierry are opposed to it. "Anything sweet is dessert," Thierry insists; Habib agrees. Nicola and I feel otherwise: The salty cured olives and perfumey mint are so nice with the oranges, and the salad is refreshing and beautiful.

Are you siding with Nicola and me? Use a small, sharp knife to slice a flat spot on the top and bottom of each orange, then cut down and around the sides to remove the pith before slicing it. 

Here's the recipe:

Happily, Habib has his own Tunisian salad to offer. (The more the merrier!) It's a simple dice of tomatoes, onions and cucumbers. Dried mint adds the Tunisian touch, and naturally a dose of good olive oil is involved. Habib uses English hot-house cukes, which he peels, but when I make the salad a few days later to create the recipe, I use small Persian cucumbers, and leave the peel on for a bit more color and texture; I also add Aleppo pepper. You can use either kind of cuke, and any kind of red pepper. Habib and I both used Roma tomatoes, but when we come into tomato season (soon!) I'll make it again with some great heirlooms. 

Habib's Tunisian salad

Oh, another thing: The salad is just right served solo as a starter, but when I recreate it for recipe development purposes, I find myself facing a big bowl of it just as lunchtime rolled around, so I serve it (to myself!) on romaine leaves. That's really nice too, as you can pick up a romaine leaf and eat it with the salad.

Ding! That must be the bouri de Bizerte – ready to serve. Don't forget plenty of crusty bread – you'll want it to sop up those delicious juices! With its gentle spices, it's wonderful with crisp white wine – French Picpoul de Pinet is Habib's favorite with it – or a light red, like a Côte de Rhône. 

I love this dish because you get the wonderful flavor of the fish roasted on the bone, without having to fillet a whole fish at the table, and the saffron and cumin infuses the potatoes and other vegetables with exotic perfume. You do need to remove the bones from each piece and be careful when you eat it – maybe not the dish to serve when you have your boss over for dinner!

"Everybody makes this dish, all over the Mediterranean," says Habib. A slight exaggeration? Perhaps. It's definitely a winner.

Ten-minute dazzler: This ginger vinaigrette turns simple fish into a modern Asian show-stopper

View fullsize

Red snapper with ginger vinaigrette

I wish I could remember exactly what inspired this dish. I'm pretty sure New York chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten published a recipe for salmon with ginger vinaigrette somewhere, at some point, maybe in the 1990s – was it in a cookbook? A cooking magazine? I can't find any trace of it, no matter how much I Google. Did I dream it?

In any case, what I loved about the sauce was that it starred lots of julienned ginger – more ginger than you usually see on one plate. I made it once, Thierry and I both fell in love with it, and I made it many times after that, tweaking and changing it over the years. Lime juice, fish sauce and scallions (not in the original) now come into play. It didn't take too long to realize it's spectacular on just about any kind of fish: Not just salmon, but tuna, halibut, snapper, scallops, shrimp – even fish with serious personality, like mackerel. 

Did I mention it's super-easy to make, and fabulously healthy? It's ideal for a light and festive dinner for two, or as the centerpiece of an elegant dinner party. 

View fullsize

The genius of it is the ginger vinaigrette, which comes together in no time flat, but you can even make in advance, which is especially handy if you're entertaining. Just whisk together lime juice, rice vinegar, fish sauce, soy sauce, olive oil and toasted sesame oil, then add sliced scallions, chopped cilantro and julienned ginger. If you're making it more than a few minutes ahead of time, wait till the last minute to add the cilantro.

View fullsize

Seared halibut in ginger vinaigrette

Last weekend I found some gorgeous halibut fillets on sale (it's usually so expensive!). After a couple days of seriously exaggerated eating, I wanted to make something light, lovely and easy for a relaxed dinner at home with Thierry. Halibut sounded luxurious, to boot.

It's really easy to overcook halibut, making it kind of dense and hard. But if you salt and pepper it, sear it in an oven-proof skillet in a little hot olive oil (four minutes skin-side up, two and a half minutes skin-side down), then finish it for three minutes in a 400-degree oven, it comes out absolutely perfect: lightly seared on the outside, silky and wonderful on the inside. Its delicate flavor is gorgeous with the ginger vinaigrette, which you just spoon onto a couple plates while the fish finishes in the oven. Set the fillets on top of the sauce when it comes out. 

We had it with roasted asparagus and radishes, which took on a whole new dimension as it crashed happily into the vinaigrette on the plate. Loved it!

View fullsize

But it doesn't have to be halibut, and it doesn't have to be seared. Grilling season is starting, and just about any kind of grilled fish sings with this, from tuna to snapper to mackerel – or skewered shrimp! Ditto fish done in a pan (scallops, salmon) or roasted in the oven (branzino!). 

Intrigued? Here's the halibut recipe:

Or maybe you want to try it with a different kind of fish. And you know what? I'm thinking it would also be great on grilled or seared chicken breasts. Here's the recipe for just the vinaigrette:

Please let us know you you like it!

Taco party! Quick and snazzy ways to dress up freshly made corn tortillas

View fullsize

Now that you know how to make wonderful hand-made corn tortillas (just mix masa harina with water, and you're nearly there!), you'll want to wrap them around everything in sight. 

If you feel like really stretching out and cooking, you might prepare a special taco centerpiece, like lamb barbacoa or carnitas.

But maybe you want to go super-easy. Have a stress-free taco party! Here are some ideas for fillings:

•Pick up a rotisserie chicken at the supermarket 

•Stop by your favorite barbecue joint and buy some sliced brisket or pulled pork 

•Use that leftover steak in the fridge: Toss it in a hot skillet or grill pan, then slice it in medium-rare strips, for bifstek tacos. They're great dressed with chopped onion, cilantro and any kind of salsa.

•Boil up some pinto beans for vegetarian tacos. Just soak beans overnight, drain, cover with water, toss in half a peeled onion (or a whole one), a couple cloves of unpeeled garlic, fresh thyme or oregano (optional), dried or fresh bay leaves (optional). Bring to a boil, lower heat then simmer till they're tender. Add salt to taste when they're done.

•Pick up some shelled and deveined shrimp from the supermarket and toss them on the grill or grill-pan. Or grill fish fillets.

•Have some leftover confit duck legs burning a hole in your fridge? (Ha!) They make great tacos. I haven't tried them with salsa verde, but I'm thinking it would be great. Or you could go sweet and add a dab of chutney and some chopped cilantro.

•When Thanksgiving rolls around, consider leftover turkey tacos

•Leftover braised short ribs make great tacos,, too. So do leftover stews (beef, pork, lamb, veal, chicken), pot roast, chops, leg of lamb

View fullsize

Really, your imagination is the limit. In their book Tacos: Recipes and Provocations, Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman have recipes for smoked salmon tacos (with cucumbers, cream cheese and lime) and pastrami tacos (with pickled mustard seeds and pickled cabbage).

More tips:

•Have a couple of good salsas on hand, like a roasted salsa verde (easy to make), a store-bought salsa roja or homemade pico de gallo (diced onion and tomato, chopped cilantro, minced serrano or jalapeño chile, a little salt, a big squeeze or three of lime). If you're feeling more ambitious, try Stupak's amazing salsa borracha. 

View fullsize

•Set out bowls of any or all of the following: lime wedges, guacamole, crumbled queso fresco, sliced avocado, cilantro leaves, sliced radishes, chopped olives, chopped white onion, sliced scallions, sliced or diced cucumber

Oh, one more thing: Do yourself a favor and hand your hands on one of these inexpensive ($8 to $12) insulated fabric taco warmers. Stupak and Rothman tested every type out there, and concluded these work the best. I have to agree: Mine kept our tortillas warm for at least an hour. Maybe they would have stayed warm longer; I don't know – we ate them all too fast. They're easy to find online; I lucked out when my generous friends Keven and Georges gave me one as a gift last weekend.

View fullsize

OK, then – let's invite some friends and get that tortilla press going! 

Gribiche, gribiche, gribiche: A different take on the sauce that jazzes up everything

View fullsize

Boiled shrimp with four-minute egg gribiche

Last month I wrote about a modern take on sauce gribiche, promising to follow up right away with more about gribiche. Forgive me – I got sidetracked by a startling hummus development! 

So, back to gribiche. I don't know how long gribiche has been around, but I do know August Escoffier gave a recipe for it in his 1903 Guide Culinaire. You've gotta love the way recipes were written then:

"Crush in a bowl the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs, and work them into a smooth paste, together with a large tablespoon of French mustard, the necessary salt, a little pepper, and make up the sauce with one pint of oil. Complete with two teaspoons of parsley, chervil, and tarragon (chopped and mixed), as many capers and gherkins, evenly mixed, and the hard-boiled whites of three eggs, cut in short, Julienne strips. This sauce is chiefly used with cold fish."

A few notes: First, this is the 1969 American English translation of the French; today it would no doubt say "Dijon mustard" rather than "French mustard." Second, I love the phrase "the necessary salt." Third, by "make up the sauce with one pint of oil," I'm pretty sure he meant whisk the olive in slowly, as in a mayonnaise – though I was surprised not to find vinegar or lemon juice in the recipe. "Gherkins": no doubt Escoffier was referring to cornichons. 

Anyway, the effect would have been like a chunky mayo – and that's what sauce gribiche meant for the better part of the century. (Excuse me while I geek out on culinary history; if I'm boring you, just skip down to the modern part!) 

Fast forward to The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, which the late great Judy Rodgers published in 2002. In it Rodgers included a recipe for Four-Minute Egg Gribiche. 

View fullsize

"This one is inspired by the mustardy gribiche the Troisgros brothers drizzled over beef carpaccio," she wrote, "and crowned with a pile of crispy hot fried potatoes, as an alternative to the familiar raw-egg steak tartar. " She goes on to describe the grillions of things you can do with it, from serving it with grilled fish or poultry to slathering it on sandwiches to putting it in potato salad.

Her version is much more like a mayonnaise than my modern take is. But it's much zingier, herbal and zesty than mayo, with wonderful texture.  Here's my adaptation of Rodgers' recipe:

It requires more a bit more concentration and technique than my easy modern version; you need to whisk all that olive oil in slowly so the sauce emulsifies (getting that mayonnaise consistency) and doesn't "break." But for some people it'll be worth it: Thierry loved it even more than he did my new-wave version. 

Roasted romanesco with four-minute egg gribiche

And if right about now you're thinking it would be fun to live with me because I cook, think again: I must have fed him gribiche twenty times that weekend! That day for lunch we had the gribiche three ways: with boiled shrimp (excellent); with boiled asparagus (wonderful) and with roasted slabs of romaneso (also very good!). Insanely weird all together: We had gribiche coming out of our ears! But that shrimp would be really nice as a main course for a Sunday lunch, or as a starter at a dinner party (the shrimp can be served warm or chilled). Or it would be great with cracked crab. Or roasted ham. Maybe even a roast tenderloin of beef. 

I'm not providing formal recipes for those very simple things, but happy to walk you through the three I made:

Roasted romanesco (feel free to substitute cauliflower): Slice the romanesco into slabs about 1/2-inch thick, place on a baking sheet, brush with olive oil, sprinkle on a little salt and pepper and roast in a 425 degree oven for about 20 minutes, or until just tender. Serve with sauce gribiche – the four-minute egg version or the new wave version. 

Boiled shrimp: Devein the shrimp, but leave the shells on. Drop them in court bouillon or boiling salted water and cook just thill they're pink and firm, about three minutes or so, depending on their size. Drain and serve. To make a quick court bouillon, fill a medium sauce pan about half way full with water, add a few glugs of white wine, half a sliced onion, a peeled and sliced carrot, salt, a few black peppercorns, celery leaves, thyme and parsley, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 15 or 20 minutes. Don't worry if you're missing an herb or two. Serious people would tie the herbs and peppercorns in a bouquet garni, but I see no harm in the stuff floating around. To me it's easier to fish out the shrimp than look for the cheesecloth. 

Boiled asparagus: Trim the bottoms, and use a vegetable peeler to peel the asparagus to an inch or three below the tips. Simmer in a pan of salted water until the asparagus are floppy but still firm-ish, about four minutes for average-size asparagus – longer for jumbos and quicker for pencil-thin. Don't want to peel? Roast them instead: 17 minutes in a 400 degree oven, et voilà.

View fullsize

Best potato salad ever – thanks to new-wave gribiche

Oh: I almost forgot to mention. I had friends over for burgers last weekend, and made a batch of new-wave gribiche to see how it would do in a potato salad. Success! Here's an actual recipe:

Sauce gribiche makes every simple thing you cook instantly delicious

View fullsize

Seared barramundi with gribiche

How about an easy-to-make sauce that can turn the simplest grilled fish into a dazzling dinner party dish? Or that can dress up boiled or roasted asparagus? Or that you can add to sliced boiled potatoes to turn them into the snazziest potato salad ever?

That's the beauty of sauce gribiche: It can make every simple old thing deliciously new again. 

Poached leeks. Poached chicken. Boiled shrimp. Cold cracked crab. Fried or pan-fried soft shell crabs. Steamed mussels. Thick roasted slices of cauliflower. Sliced rare roast beef or lamb or ham. The possibilities are, you know, endless.

Traditional sauce gribiche is a mayonnaise made with hard-boiled egg yolks instead of raw ones, dressed up with herbs, capers and cornichons. (It's French, which is why it's called "sauce gribiche" instead of "gribiche sauce.") That old-style version is just as tedious to make as mayo, too, as you have to dribble in the oil while you constantly whisk, being careful not to let it "break." (Don't worry, though: Our new-wave version is super easy!)

The traditional style of gribiche bears little resemblance visually to the new-wave versions turning up in restaurants these days, though the ingredients are the same. The reason? Instead of whisking the ingredients into an emulsion, you quickly stir everything together. Using soft-boiled eggs instead of hard-boiled ones, and lots of herbs, brings it irresistibly into the 21st century in terms of looks and taste. 

View fullsize

Grilled jumbo asparagus with gribiche and bottarga from Gjelina: Cooking from Venice, California

I stumbled on one as I flipped through Gjelina: Cooking from Venice, California – the new book from chef Travis Lett. Lett uses it to sauce jumbo asparagus that he first parboils, then grills; the dish is finished with lots of grated bottarga, dried cured mullet roe. I love bottarga, and I happened to have some in my fridge, so I made it – and loved it. (Note: in case you happen to make it, boil the asparagus longer than he tells you, or it will be crunchy-hard. Also, I substituted panko for the garlic crouton crumbs that added a bunch of extra steps to his recipe, and the panko worked great.) But bottarga is hard to come by, and it's expensive, so before I added it to the dish, I tasted it without. Good, but not great. It wanted a little more zing. I decided to develop a recipe that would be zingy enough to jazz up simple, plain food without the help of bottarga. 

I pretty quickly hit upon the answer: cornichons. Traditional gribiches include them, yet Gjelina's did without them (probably they would taste weird with the bottarga). Adding them did the trick: It was much more vibrant. I made a batch and tried that on asparagus I cooked simmered in salted water till tender:

View fullsize

Asparagus with new-wave gribiche

Bingo! This was perfect! I also used it to sauce barramundi, a delicately flavored fish with nice body. I did nothing fancier than put salt and freshly ground black pepper on the fish, and seared it gently in a little olive oil. Wow – it was really good, something I'd happily serve at a dinner party. 

Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

View fullsize

Seared barramundi with new-wave sauce gribiche

I didn't stop there. I also found a version in one of my all-time favorite cookbooks, Judy Rodgers' The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I'll tell you about that – and more about gribiche – in my next post!

Celery, endive and crab salad: a delicious way into a winter dinner party or Valentine's dinner for two

You're having friends over. You've planned your main course, and the nibbles over drinks for starters, and the dessert. But what, oh what, should you start with when everyone sits at the table? 

This time of year, it often comes down like this: For a main course, I'm making something rich or hearty – like a stew or braised meat or poultry, or a roast of some kind.  So to start, I want something light, but not inconsequential. It would be lovely if it could involve greens. A winter salad? 

This salad of celery, Belgian endives and radishes – with crab meat for a bit of luxury and lemony dressing to keep it fresh – is elegant, pretty and fresh: just the ticket. 

You can slice the radishes and celery in advance, so the salad comes together in no time flat when you're ready to dine. 

Or maybe you're cooking a Valentine's dinner for your sweetie? Make half a recipe, and serve it – with a glass of crisp Sauvignon Blanc (maybe Sancerre!) – as a prelude to a steak or roast chicken. Sound good? Let's do it!