Catch of the Day: Sustainability

We are inundated with so much distressing information every day about the state of our earth and the environment. But there are some, like Applewood restaurant’s David Shea, who are working to make this information more palatable — indeed, to even make it delicious.

That’s what Shea did this month at his 11th Street restaurant with a $95-a-head dinner to support sustainable seafood ($10 from each ticket went to the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation organization). He interspersed exquisite, generously portioned courses — reinterpretations of traditional fish dishes, and some startlingly new inventions of his own — with bite-sized talks about the crises facing our waters. 

Greg Yagoda, a self-styled expert on sustainable seafood who helped organize the event, told us that 70 percent of the planet is covered by oceans, but that just 1 percent of our waters are protected (compared with 12 percent of the land). With technology allowing us to fish farther out and deeper all the time, we are depleting the earth’s fish populations faster and faster. It is increasingly important that we as consumers make smart, sustainable seafood choices.

Shea, who serves only wild fish at Applewood, said of the event: “We wanted to involve people, to make them part of a process. We wanted people to enjoy themselves while supporting a good cause.”

He took seafood dishes that are traditionally “criminals” when it comes to sustainability and tweaked them to make them environmentally friendly.

The first course he served was fish and chips, paired with a California Brut. This dish is usually made with cod, which is extremely overfished — in other words, the fish are being caught faster than they can reproduce. In his version, he used Atlantic hake, in an ale batter.

“It’s a beautiful fish that fries beautifully and you can cook it like cod,” he explained.

Hake, a member of the cod family, was overfished in the past but is now abundant, Shea says. He uses fish that are hook-and-line-caught, avoiding the problems with bycatch (unintentionally caught fish) or habitat damage that result from bottom-trawling — the dragging of the sea floor with weighted nets, a method that kills everything in the net’s path.

“We have a disconnect to what happens below the water,” he said. “We would never allow people to do above ground what we do below the ocean.”

Next on the menu was a smoked Atlantic Spanish mackerel casserole, with a light Jacquère wine. Shea said that he didn’t know what fish he would use until the last minute, because he adapts the restaurant’s menu to what’s sustainable at a given time. The dish was a take on a tuna casserole, served with housemade pappardelle (along with rainbow chard, garlic puree and pickled mustard seeds). Because some tuna species, such as the majestic bluefin, are on the brink of extinction, Shea said he never uses tuna at all. Mackerel, though, makes a terrific replacement as it’s low in mercury because of its small size (the larger fish are, the higher they are on the food chain, and the more small fish, and toxins, they ingest).

The third course was sautéed Atlantic striped bass, served with cannellini bean stew, spinach, bacon lardons and marinated cipollinis. Striped bass is a fish whose numbers in the Chesapeake Bay were dangerously diminished in the late 1980s and 1990s, but which has now bounced back. While our striped bass was wild, Yagoda said they can be sustainably farmed as well because they are farmed in closed systems, with no risk of pollution or runoff.

Lastly was the dish that really knocked my socks off: smoked Alaskan sockeye salmon ice cream. I had no small amount of trepidation before tasting this ice cream, which was served with lemon-buttermilk cake and a Moscato d’Asti dessert wine. But it was phenomenal: like a schmear of lox and cream cheese transmogrified and gone to heaven. For his salmon, Shea relies on what he says is the only sustainable salmon fishery in North America, a family business that uses hand-sown nets and small skiffs, and allows enough salmon to pass through the streams before collecting them — so that stocks will not be depleted.

While it can be confusing to make sense of one’s choices when it comes to seafood, handy pocket guides and apps can make those choices easier. You can print out guides and download apps on the Web sites for the Blue Ocean Institute or the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The bottom line is for us as consumers to be as attuned as chefs like Shea is to seasonality and sustainability, in order to put less pressure on fisheries to extract whatever they can from the seas.

We have gotten used to “getting exactly what we want when we want it,” said Shea, and this is what has to change.