The Chef: Rob Levitt (The Butcher & Larder)
That was just the day before, so the mollusk was still pretty fresh. Levitt had searched the Asian markets in and around Chicago and checked with two fish companies before finally finding abalone through a third fish purveyor. Some species are now endangered, but farmed abalone is generally sustainable—if not always easy to find.
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Levitt had never worked with abalone before, but he’d tasted it earlier this year at a restaurant in New York, where it was thinly sliced and paired with shaved beef tendon as an antipasti course. “It’s not a strong flavor,” Levitt says. “It’s more of a texture, and it has this very light, pleasant sea flavor. . . . The texture, when it’s sliced thin, is like calamari. Almost like overcooked calamari—it’s got that chewiness to it—but it’s a lot more pleasant than overcooked calamari.”
The dish overall was good, Levitt said, but he didn’t taste the abalone quite as much as he would have liked to. “You definitely taste the bone marrow; you definitely taste the marinade and the chiles and the lemon and all that stuff. And you get a little bit of the texture from the abalone,” he said. “As a dish it’s really tasty. I would eat it. I just did.”
Remove abalone from shell (reserve the goo left in the shell) and marinate about two hours in:
Steam abalone for six minutes and cool. Once cooled, trim off all the weird-looking black stuff around the edges. Slice as thinly as possible.
