The Community Platter

Words by Eric Keener

In the wake of the busyness that ensued from start to finish, and even in the days following, I still can’t shake the feeling that this past weekend was simply special. In order to share why this particular meal was such a joy to be a part of, I have to start at the beginning.

Covid-19 has challenged our goals as a brand that seeks to be educational, with in-person mentoring of aspiring divers, foragers and cooks. One year and a week ago was the 2019 Catch and Cook Competition in Monterey, CA. An event that had an amazing turn out, was well received by competitors and sponsors, written about by the dive community and ultimately, was the initial inspiration for Fin + Forage.

Since our launch in late June of 2020, mid-pandemic, we have had incredible friendships form and experienced wildly wonderful support from our partners. We have learned so much more than expected about diving, foraging and especially the seemingly endless amount that one needs to learn to be a half-way decent cook.

The team has been running (swimming?) hard and we feel we are settling into a community that has embraced the Fin + Forage platform and its utility. Unfortunately, due to the virus, it  has been difficult for us to find our stride in one of our 3 foundational pillars: community. Let me tell you, we have a LOT of ideas for community events and get-togethers, so it’s been difficult to find a way to satisfy our longing to be there for the community outside of articles, conversations and images. This is one of the paramount reasons that made this meal so special.

It started with a threat.

Unbeknown to me, the meal first started to come together when I threatened to give my good buddy Daniel G. (DG) food poisoning. I had just picked up a huge chunk of Guanciale from Daniel K. (DK) one weekend while he was camping with his family. About that time, DG had just landed a 150-pound Bluefin Tuna after a grueling 5+ hour fight on rod and reel. DG and I are part of a circle of friends that love to trade specialty and exotic ingredients. No money involved, just giving of that fantastic morsel, knowing that soon there will be a return gift. I told DG I had guanciale for him but purposely didn’t mention my huge anticipation of getting some BFT meat because it was such a special fish and I didn’t want to assume or ask – which was hard, because I was dying to get some. We arranged a time for him to stop by, and on his drive over to my house he called and said “you know, I didn’t hear you mention wanting any tuna.” I quickly replied, “if you don’t have tuna for me when you arrive, I think I’ll add some salmonella to your pork!” He pulled up with a wide grin. Before I could give him the 3-month cellar cured pork jowl in addition to some top notch garden veggies that another friend had given me an abundance of, he pulled out his cooler and handed me a large portion of meat. The marbling in the meat immediately gave it away… he was giving me Otoro… the belly meat. Perhaps the most sought-after meat in all of sushi. This tuna can go for about $50-$200 per pound depending on the time of year it is caught and how it is handled. Last year, a single fish sold for $3.1 M. Can you believe it? If you’re interested, read the Smithsonian article on that particular fish.

OK, long back story, but meaningful. It was such quality meat that I immediately decided to save it for a very special occasion. I thought about braided sushi, stained glass sushi (aka mosaic roll), who I would invite and under what premises. As per usual, I wanted as many foraged ingredients as possible, but I didn’t have any concrete ideas yet.

While in SoCal, I shot my first yellowtail and knew it had to make an appearance as well. The following weekend I shot a large olive rockfish, so I aged it a couple days and thought that I should start putting ideas to paper. I reached out to F+F head chef, Colin Moody and picked his brain. He gave me the number of his friend, Robbie. I called Robbie to ask what goodies he had access to, not realizing that this is the same Robbie who has a fleet of small semi trucks that I always see driving around town with a huge “Robbie’s Ocean Fresh Seafood” painted on the side. The next day, he stopped by my office and unloaded lobsters and spot prawns for us. The whole meal came together in serendipitous fashion.

Scallops

I strive to invest in my family, be a loving husband and good father, so time away from them is always calculated and measured. Usually it’s a morning of diving a couple times a month or an all-day heavy weight throw down in the kitchen once every other month. I decided that the next weekend after getting the fresh crustaceans, I’d make the meal before they go bad or I need to freeze them. I really don’t like to freeze food, so it was on. I spent the next 3 days scribbling on paper, coming up with ingredient lists, where to get the ingredients, what I needed to forage or get from the garden and where I could get scallops… wait, because of work, I can’t dive week days, so how am I going to get those delicious bivalves? I reached out to the one friend that I know is in the water nearly every day of the week, who also happens to be a solid diver, slayer of fish and one heck of a salty pumpkin. Giray was more than happy to meet the challenge. Scallops are after all, one of the hardest things in the ocean to forage for. I received a call Thursday night, just before the F+F board meeting, where a very tired Giray says, I got the goods man. He pulls up to my home in typical Giray style, his kayak laying on an egg crate, strapped to the top of his convertible car. He’s obviously beat from hard diving, but pulls out from a mass of kelp stuffed in a dive bag, 6 beautiful scallops for me. What a treat, and what a friend!

All Coming Together

I nearly forsook all of the effort so far because I was getting texts from friends saying that dive conditions were flat with 50 feet of visibility – best dive conditions of the year. I was tempted, more than tempted. I’m so thankful my very good friend Glen McDowell (a stunning photographer with decades of experience in almost all disciplines of photography) texted me. He said he has been doing so many architectural shoots lately and wanted to switch gears back to food. He asked if I was planning on making anything fancy in the near future, and that was it! Just what I needed to hear. I was ready to challenge myself in the kitchen with a few new ideas I hadn’t tried before, and I committed to full steam ahead.

On Friday after work, Chef Colin called me to let me know he made a special gift for me, and I should swing through Pasadera and grab it. I was greeted by the heat and delicious smells coming from his commercial kitchen full of sous chefs. He handed me a large box full of insane goodies, like edible 24k gold leaf sheets, freeze dried soy and yuzu nuggets, all kinds of different ornamental plates and bowls, tons of edible flowers and a long, gorgeous and razor-sharp Masanobu Seki by Mcusta – a type of knife I hope to one day own. We chatted for another 20 minutes about the meal before I reluctantly made an exit in an attempt to find and purchase the last few ingredients I needed.

I gave a call to my other chef buddy, Zach Wilson and asked if he was interested in being my sous chef even though he has decades of experience on me - he was kind and agreed to help and guide. We had a team!

By Friday evening, I had spent hours scouring websites, looking at various recipes, researching flavor combinations and techniques and bugging almost every one of my food mentors with a thousand questions. I even made my sushi rice after Jess and Squigs went to bed to save time on Saturday. I had 3 courses planned: Soup, Roll and Platter.

The soup was going to be a fairly traditional miso with lobster (recipe here). The mosaic roll was going to be incredibly ornamental and geometric, utilizing all the fish meats, mango, chives, paper layered cucumber, topped with spicy yuzu aioli and ikura. It would sit next to a whole fried spot prawn head, amaebe style with a rich and spicy slaw on the inside of the cavity. Then there was the platter… oh the platter. It comes with it’s own story.

The Community Platter

My career is in digital marketing consultation and digital design. When I first started exploring my passion for food last year, it was purely a pursuit of ascetics. Like the looks of the food were paramount, and I didn’t care so much what it tasted like. I knew next to nothing about proper cooking methods or techniques. I loved fine dining but was extremely ignorant to what went into that plate I just paid a hefty chunk of change for.  About a year ago, I had an idea to cook a fish fillet and try to make it harken to the essence of the spearo’s hunt, but in hindsight it was pretentious and more of an excuse for a poorly made meal. I made the mistake of posting it to a cooking forum with the “it resembles the marine environment” bit, and rightly so got fired on. The comments were harsh, blunt, and mostly unhelpful. Responses like that are also part of what birthed Fin + Forage. We aim and strive to be a welcoming and helpful platform that won’t ream you for questions some might consider stupid.  As a result of my experience on that forum, I leaned more heavily on chef Zach with questions about how to do this and what to pair with that. He gave me books and often reeled me in and reminded me to stop thinking about the plating, and only focus on the flavors. I found that particularly annoying, because my meals stopped looking so good… but to his point, they started to taste much better! I was motivated.

Motivation

Several of my friends have motivated me over the past year – one of the most significant being my good friend, Matt Bond. He has been cooking extravagant meals since he was 5 years old and is the type of home chef that blows most pro chefs out of the kitchen. He grows and forages nearly all the ingredients in his meals and somehow makes them insanely beautiful - full of technique and flavor. He is undoubtedly to blame for my drive to want to have the best quality ocean ingredients in my meals (read more HERE about how to make sure you bring home the best quality meat from the ocean). More interestingly, my drive for spearo competitions has nearly vanished in favor of simply enjoying the process of collecting ingredients. This was a change I did not expect that gradually took shape over the course of a few months earlier this year. I even deleted my account for the Diver of the Year competition, one that I was poised to do fairly “well” in. I was so caught up in wanting to get the “right” fish, that sometimes diving was not at all enjoyable and I’d go home frustrated that I couldn’t find that fish instead of stoked on the wonderful time I just had in the water.

Now diving is more enjoyable, and it’s not a huge deal if I miss a window of beautiful visibility to focus more on my family, the dive community and the eagerness to see Fin + Forage grow. OK, end of introspective ramble – back to the platter and what made this whole thing so meaningful.

The platter was a large community effort, a meal that despite Covid-19 restrictions on gatherings, was going to get made (with the help of many, sanitary hands). Unfortunately, we couldn’t invite everyone for social gathering sake, but it felt like they were there. The platter was not a course to be eaten individually, it was a share plate, one that I tried very hard to (this time) truly make look like an underwater scene filled with all the joy from a variety of delicious ingredients. There was whipped wasabi cream sprinkled with dehydrated soy that paired next to a sauce reduced from black garlic, yuzu, orange zest, ginger and soy. There were real ocean rocks next to “boulders” of mango lobster spring rolls and braided yellowtail sashimi. There was squid ink “coral” tuile (recipe here) and fronds of air fried purple garden kale. Golden tempura prawn columns, crumbled dehydrated yuzu “sand”, “seagrass” pea tendrils, “anemone” flowers, watermelon radishes, lobster tails, and little purple pomegranate “urchins.”  

Blessing in Disguise

The second course I had planned, the ornate mosaic sushi roll, was foiled due to the rice drying out and being entirely useless as sushi rice – it didn’t bind to the nori, nor did it spread well. I’ve made sushi rice a million times, but never the night before. I even kept it covered, but it seems that sushi rice works best when fresh, another area I need to learn more about. I was exceptionally disappointed. However, what started as a moment of failure, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Glen, Zach and I were starving and Glen was hard pressed for time. We already were hours beyond when we thought we would be done. He had been busy snapping photos as we finished plates and brought them out to his staging areas, and no one thought to take a break to eat. We brought out all the ingredients we had planned on using for the geometric roll, including that slab of pure, melty, buttery, delightful tuna belly. We sat and gorged until the rice was gone, the ingredients were depleted, and we were rejuvenated.

The Future

As I look toward what I hope the future holds, I see a family that loves to travel in our little vintage trailer, exploring mountains, beaches and oceans. Showing Squigs that the most important thing in life is loving one another, no matter what they believe or how they live. A team with a passion for cooking fun meals together for the new friends we’ve met. I see Fin + Forage as a growing hub where budding adventurers come to explore and learn new techniques from all over the world, enjoy incredible ocean artists and most of all, gather to celebrate the ocean and its bounty.

Best Fishes,

Eric