The Wall Street Journal-20080112-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Food - Drink -- Eating Out- A New Shell Game- Endangered in the wild- farmed abalone proves to be delicious
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Food & Drink -- Eating Out: A New Shell Game; Endangered in the wild, farmed abalone proves to be delicious
In a new year beset by bad news about a political murder, the falling dollar and the rising price of oil, here's a heartwarming story in which even the appetite of a newly rich China for a limited natural resource plays a positive role.
You remember the abalone. The saltwater univalve with the ear-shaped shell, iridescent inside, contains a rock-clinging creature which, when pounded thin and tender, like a scaloppine, holds pride of place at Chinese banquets. It was also a sought-after delicacy in California until overfishing, poaching and rampant gorging by protected sea otters sent the price out of sight.
Even the highly regulated sport-scuba harvest I witnessed in the 1970s off La Jolla, Calif., was suppressed, commercial fishing of abalones was banned and right-thinking gourmets wouldn't eat the vanishing gastropod. It seemed that the genus Haliotis had had its day as a legal seafood.
Enter the Chinese, ravenous for the possibly aphrodisiac bao yu, some of which could grow as large as a dinner plate. After some catastrophic failures, they now lead the world in abalone aquaculture. Today, abalone are farmed from Taiwan to coastal France to the cold waters off the coast of California. You can order them on the Internet as easily as Viagra. And they are once again popping up on U.S. restaurant menus, at relatively affordable prices, especially around San Francisco.
Thomas Keller has served abalone scaloppine style at the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif. At the ambitious neo-Catalan Manresa in Los Gatos, Calif., for a supplement of $10 on the four-course $95 tasting menu, Chef David Kinch offers abalone and slow egg, gem lettuce and bread crusts. Koi Palace in Daly City, Calif., sells abalone from all over the world, including the Middle East and South Africa.
Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, the mastermind behind super-sushi Nobu outposts on both coasts as well as Milan, London and Las Vegas, has developed several abalone dishes, including a shabu shabu hotpot with caviar and egg sauce. His infatuation with the limpet-like creature is visible in the pattern of the chandeliers at Nobu 57 in midtown Manhattan.
My infatuation with abalone -- aka ormer (English Channel Islands), ormeau (France), Seeohr (Germany) awabi (Japan) perlemoen (South Africa), orecchia del mare (Italy) and abulon, the Spanish source of our word abalone -- began 30 years ago in La Jolla. Working on a column for Natural History magazine, I helped the dive team of the University of California San Diego, the Sea Deucers, tenderize their catch. Basically, this meant cleaning up the "foot," the animal's muscle meat, and beating it into submission so that we could chew it and enjoy its delicate marine flavor.
What does it taste like? Many people compare it to veal, and the Sea Deucers breaded and fried it as if it were a Wiener schnitzel. But there is another aspect to the abalone experience: the texture. This is basically an al dente shellfish, but the rough-and-ready wild-red- and-green-lipped abalones we brought back to shore were chewy. No doubt about it: Several years of holding on to a submarine rock had had its isometric effect on what we ate.
That was then and now is now, when younger and more-tender farmed abalones are almost invariably what you are likely to get, unless you consort with poachers in New Zealand and they give you some of the paua they pry from the ocean floor with stealth and special iron tools.
The new abalone came as a revelation to me after that initial experience last century. The shells fell from my eyes, so to speak, in a splendid downtown San Francisco restaurant called Aqua. On the lunch menu, I caught sight of this: Davenport abalone with house-cured pork belly, chanterelle, smoked garlic, Manila clam jus.
At $30, it was the most expensive item on the menu, but only $2 more than the Tombo tuna and veal cheek bourguignon with celery root, parsnip, bacon and truffle jus. Laurent Manrqiue and his chef de cuisine, Ron Boyd, produced a remarkable example of the surf 'n' turf genre. Delicious and . . . witty. The play of textures among the abalone, mushrooms and pork belly made for a sophisticated fugue of slippery foods with tastes combining essences of sea, forest and farm.
Those Davenport abalones were tender, soft as a sofa, but their name comes from Davenport, Calif., home of U.S. Abalone, one of about 15 abalone farms operating in California. U.S. Abalone has its saltwater- filled concrete tanks inland in Santa Cruz County, south of San Francisco. Fresh ocean water is pumped in regularly, the growing mollusks feed on kelp, and the more of them there are, the sooner their price will fall to lobster levels.
Meanwhile, poachers have less and less incentive to raid wild populations of abalone. Will this produce a dramatic upsurge in the unfarmed population?
And what about the sea otters? With more abalone around, will they wax fat and breed like mink? I wonder what they taste like.
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