A golden 24 hours
“Eating seafood, you gain its vigor,” says Zhang Liren. And freshly caught fish offers the most vigor and vitality.
When you try to offer the freshest seafood, the journey from sea to table is a race against time. Take northern Taiwan: the fishing boats continually stream in all afternoon. After their hauls are unloaded, at 2 or 3 a.m. they are brought to Taipei Fishery Marketing on Wanda Street in Taipei’s Wanhua District to be sold in bulk. By the early morning, fish dealers have already brought the day’s supply to traditional markets and supermarkets throughout the city.
“You want to eat fish within 24 hours of being caught. That’s its ‘golden period,’” says Zhang. Freshly caught fish have a fresh sweetness, texture and vibrancy to which frozen fish can’t compare. “Once seafood hits ice water or is frozen, its texture and flavor becomes entirely different. That’s because the process of freezing damages the cells of the fish, causing them to lose their water content. As a consequence, defrosted fish lacks pliancy.
But since Taiwan has been blessed by nature to have fresh supplies of seafood, Taiwanese cuisine tends to use the simplest methods of seasoning and preparing fish.
Sashimi is a restaurant’s toughest test of seafood freshness.
Zhang points out that most sashimi from frozen fish must be cut in thick slices, for it will break apart if thinly sliced. But raw fish is tougher, and it needs to be sliced thinly in order to break down its cellular structure and create a tender and delicate mouthfeel.
Another technique is simply to apply some salt before steaming. It’s an excellent way of highlighting the seafood’s original flavor.
“Salt is best able to reawaken the original flavors of food,” writes Zhang Yongjie in For the Love of Food. In the book she clearly explicates the role that salt plays in preparing seafood and how that seemingly small addition of a simple seasoning can make all the difference: “People who live by the sea understand well that salt, which is derived from the sea and from the sun, is the best seasoning for drawing out food’s original flavors.”
Salt undisputedly has the effect of bringing out flavor, but the lemon slices that commonly accompany seafood are much more controversial.
Zhang Liren and Zhang Naiwen, both of whom are fish suppliers, alike say that lemon has the effect of reducing a fishy smell, but truly fresh seafood doesn’t have that smell to begin with. What’s more, once fresh seafood is doused with lemon, its delicate sweetness will be obscured.
Lobster, abalone, sea urchin, fish… the sashimi platter at Amimoto restaurant in Yilan’s Toucheng is full of oceanic flavor and vitality.