Have you heard of dry aged seafood?
We get it. It sounds strange. We all want fish that tastes like it just came out of the ocean and aging fish seems like something one shouldn’t do. However, dry aged meat has been a thing for a long while and it has become even more popular lately. Dry aging seafood has been done for thousands of years in Asia, the Americas, and other places. Dry aging seafood gives us two key benefits. One, it allows the user to prepare the seafood when they want to. In general, seafood is harvested in large quantities over short periods of time, making it necessary to can or flash freeze seafood. The other key benefit you get with dry aging seafood is good taste. Really!
What you get with dry aged seafood is tender morsels that slip right off the bones. Dry aging seafood, as it does for meat, also helps develop flavors and the umami of the fish.
Just like flash-freezing seafood, dry aging also helps the chef not waste fish. In a restaurant, the pressure is on chefs to use fresh fish within a few days. Using either frozen seafood and/or fish that has been dry aged well eliminates this problem well. In fact, blind taste tests have shown that consumers prefer the taste of flash-frozen seafood over never-been-frozen seafood. We’re also really partial to our canned salmon and canned tuna, both of which offer enormous convenience, letting the user eat the fish whenever they want—from today to decades from now.
Restaurants, and really enthusiastic home chefs, can buy dry aging boxes, which retail for well over $5000 at the time of writing this blog. One way to achieve some of the above noted benefits of dry aging seafood without spending thousands of dollars is by salting the fish during the thawing process.
I learned to salt fish during the thawing process from one of our fishermen.
When our fishermen talk about what seafood recipes and meals they are preparing, I listen. They have great knowledge of the main ingredient and tend to be very practical and utilitarian in their preparations.
I salt each portion with a pinch or so of salt while thawing, wrapped in paper towel on plate in the fridge. We recommend thawing for 24 hours or so and the salt pulls the moisture out of the fish and adds flavor to the fish. You can thaw for longer when you salt the fish—just make sure to change paper towels every 12 hours or so—they’ll get wet for sure as the salt pulls out the moisture.
Another thing I learned from this fishermen, a big advocate for black cod with great knowledge of the white tablecloth restaurant scene, is a relatively low-stress and delicious preparation of our sablefish. I'm still tinkering with the proportions, but the "recipe" looks a bit like this:
An Easy Black Cod Recipe That Makes Use of Dry Aging Techniques
juice of 1 lime
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp miso paste
2 tbsp honey
2 tbsp gochujang sauce
2 sablefish (black cod) portions
Mixed above and marinate 24 hours or so.
I salt each portion with a pinch or so of salt while thawing, wrapped in paper towel on plate in the fridge.
Bake the black cod at 425F for minutes or so after marinading. One mistake I used to make was not scraping off excess marinade--the flavor will be in the fish I promise. I like to finish off black cod with a one-minute high broil to brown it--you can also sear the skin in a pan for a couple minutes before throwing in the oven. Even for those who don't like eating fish skin, I find black cod skin just as good as the rest of the fish, so make the skin fun, too, with some crisping in the pan. Since it is so loaded with heart-healthy oils, black cod is very forgiving to cook, so you don't have to worry so much about overcooking like most other fish. I end up serving this meal with stir fried veggies and udon noodles or rice. A pinch of kelp flakes from our Alaska friends at Barnacle Foods adds a nice finishing touch and I really enjoy the Zhong sauce from Fly By Jing. All together, this makes a special meal with relatively low skills required and not a ton of preparation.
And salting the fish in this recipe, as in other recipes, really adds some umami. It also gives you some flexibility as to when to serve the meal. This is an easy and affordable way to dry age seafood and enjoy flavors that pop.
