A new ‘Blue Food’ cookbook champions fish and other seafood for any meal

NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Zimmern and Barton Seaver are what you’d call seafood fanatics. Or blue food evangelists. They want us to eat more things from the water, even first thing in the morning.

“Seafood for breakfast is delicious,” says Zimmern, a chef, writer and TV host. Seaver, a chef and National Geographic Explorer, agrees — he argues that some lean protein with omega-3 fatty acids is a great way to start the day.

“Seafood belongs in all places at all meals at all times,” Seaver says.

The two — in collaboration with the ocean food advocacy nonprofit Fed by Blue — have combined for “The Blue Food Cookbook: Delicious Recipes for a Sustainable Future,” part cookbook and part educational resource to help make food from oceans, lakes and rivers less confusing for many people.

“Seafood, categorically, is a food that needs a little help getting into more people’s diets across more demographics,” says Seaver. “That was the intent of this book — to be inviting, but also to give people a sense that, hey, maybe it’s time to look anew at seafood.”

The two use “blue food” to describe the category, which embraces more than just ocean food but also freshwater animals, as well as algae and marine plants. The authors argue that picking blue food doesn’t have to be baffling, expensive or hard to cook.

“There’s so much confusing information out there,” says Zimmern.

Labels don’t always help

Is wild caught better than farmed? Is fresh better than frozen? Zimmern and Seaver discuss the pros and cons of each, but that’s not really what they care about. The labels don’t always help: Thanks to technology on trawlers, frozen fish can be fresher than unfrozen.

More important: Where is your fish from and was it sustainably caught?

“The Blue Food Cookbook” stresses that the fish at the center of any dish can be swapped out with a similar animal in the same family. If there’s no fresh, good-looking haddock at the store, try halibut or pollock.

The authors say consumers may be shying away from buying fish and marine plants because of blaring headlines about depleted oceans, labor abuses,
antibiotic use and radiation. They argue those issues are dwarfed by what’s happening on land with chickens, cows and pigs.

“To be very clear, there’s a lot that we yet need to get right about seafood. But there is so much that’s also going right currently, so many innovations that we’ve created that have really opened the door to this new perspective. And that’s what Andrew and I seek to celebrate,” says Seaver.

The 145 recipes in the book go from high-brow caviar to a humble tuna noodle casserole, and bounce from North African flavors to Nashville hot catfish. One dish — a panzanella — seems to perfectly encapsulate their approach; it takes frozen, pre-made fish sticks and adds heirloom tomatoes, fennel and onion to make a new twist on a rustic Italian salad.

Zimmern recalls fondly when, in his childhood, Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks started to appear, and he would dip them in mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together. “It was one of my favorite things ever,” he says. He may have become a James Beard Award-winner but he doesn’t look down on the often-derided cafeteria staple.

“Anytime we have a meal that doesn’t rely on a Big Ag version of beef, pork and chicken, we’re making a vote to save our planet,” Zimmern says. “If America ate another seafood meal a week, we would be doing such a benefit to our economy.”

Dueling recipes

The book includes cooking techniques; tips on buying fish; and must-have pantry items. There are recipe sections for bivalves, small silver fish like sardines, preserved and canned seafood, seaweed, flaky white fish like cod, the salmon family, meaty dense fish like carp, steak fish like swordfish, fillet fish like branzino, and shellfish and cephalopods, like octopus.

The authors offer dueling recipes for crab cakes, linguini with clam sauce and clam chowder, playfully laying out their cases for why their version is supreme.

“We both firmly believe there’s no one way to do something that’s right,” says Zimmern. “And in an effort to sort of poke fun at all of those other chefs and food writers who were like, ‘No, this is the only way to do X,’ we decided that we’re going to have multiple versions of the same things in our book.”

As for breakfast, the authors look to ideas from Japan, China, Thailand, India and even England, where smoked herring is traditionally eaten. It’s not so foreign a concept; in New York, salmon lox on a bagel is a common breakfast.

Seaver even suggests bringing seafood in for lunch at the office, an idea often considered too smelly. “There’s plenty of chilled seafood dishes in here that don’t need to be microwaved to piss off the whole floor.”