The idea of eating Asian carp to slow its predicted incursion into the Great Lakes has been bandied about with varying degrees of seriousness for a few years now. The carp are a hard sell in the U.S.: they’re unappetizingly ugly, and the peculiarities of their anatomy make it hard to harvest the meat. Still, after Asian carp turned up in the Mississippi and Illinois rivers in the aughts, they began finding their way into ethnic markets around Chicago, and today millions of pounds of the ugly, toothless, filter-feeding leviathans are shipped from Illinois to Europe and Asia. In February, at a Chicago “carp summit,” an official from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources said the state was investigating ways to open up new markets for the fish as a food source.
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But in late January, the carp caught the fancy of Chicago chef-turned-fishmonger Carl Galvan. Galvan handles sustainable and environmental fishery issues for Supreme Lobster and Seafood Company, the giant Villa Park seafood distributor, and his Twitter feed (@ChicagoFishDude), where he posts daily photos of fresh iced sea creatures, is a virtual online fish market monitored regularly by many of the best chefs in town. Galvan wondered what would happen if some of his boutique restaurant customers got their hands on the stuff and worked their mojo. Could they help Asian carp appeal to a larger market of eaters?
So in late January Galvan ordered about 100 pounds of the fish from Schafer, and off they went to ten fine-dining establishments, including Vie, Blackbird, SushiSamba Rio, Browntrout, and Cibo Matto.
“The pinbones are very strange on the fish because they run down the center, the side by the belly, and they go all the way through the tail,” said Perennial’s Ryan Poli. “When you try to take them out with tweezers, they tear the flesh.” The bones near the front of the fish divide into a Y shape (not unlike a northern pike’s), something many of the chefs had never come across before.
Paul Kahan’s crew didn’t try that hard. “After a few attempts at butchering, we were adequately creeped out and will not go any further,” he e-mailed.
Wrapping the fish in thin layers of potato and searing it in clarified butter not only protected it from drying out but allowed it to shine on its own terms. And guess what? It was a luscious fish. You might imagine that Foss’s elegant plating with pickled celery hearts, trumpet mushrooms, black garlic paste, and red wine butter sauce would be lipstick on a pig, but you’d be wrong.
Browntrout’s Sean Sanders is still wrestling with the idea. So far he’s worked with nine fish he’s bought from Galvan, paying out of his own pocket rather than the restaurant’s. He and his cooks have learned Chairez’s fillet technique, and he says he’s getting about an 8 percent yield. He has misgivings about the fish’s flavor and texture, yet he’s determined to somehow make a dish that’s menuworthy.
