CURING FISH with SEAWEED - How to cure fish with Kombu

I'm Davin, that's Sam behind the camera, and this is Steve. Hi, I'm Steve. Today we're gonna cure Steve, who's a snapper, with this kombu. So kombu is super cool, most of you know. It's dried seaweed. The cool thing about kombu is all of this stuff right here is natural MSG. So MSG, as we know, is monosodium glutamate, and glutamate is contained in kelp, and sodium's contained in the ocean. And when you dry it out, you have this awesome natural MSG that occurs right here. So we're gonna use that to add a depth of flavor to the fish that one can only do using seaweed. So first things first, we're gonna break down the fish. We're gonna cut behind each collar, get the head off. Having a nice heavy knife to crush those bones is always nice. Yeah, he's not super stoked right now. Kind of hard getting a head in life. Then we're gonna cut along the shoulder to the spine, along the bottom to the spine, then straight off the bone. Through those tufts. So here, we're gonna use this part of the knife just to break the skin, and then this part just to gently feel the bones. The cool thing about cutting fish is the fish tells you where to go if you listen. You hear that little slide? You can also kind of feel that in your fingertip. We're gonna repeat the same process, just a little bigger. We're up into the spine. We're just gonna break this tail meat. Here we have mirin, which is a sweet Japanese cooking wine, and a little splash of Kuru Cellar's Sauvignon Blanc. We're gonna find just the right size piece of kombu. So we're just gonna dip this fish in the white wine. Make sure it has a nice coat. This is gonna do two things. It's gonna pre-season our fish, and it's gonna be just enough moisture to soften our kombu. The next piece of the dish is gonna be like a taco shop carrots. First, we're gonna slice some onions. These padrons are awesome. They're a lot like shishito peppers. Earlier in the season, you can eat them like candy. Later in the season, they start to become angry. So these peppers have the spice of probably a red jalapeno. They definitely take no prisoners. Also have some yellow banana peppers. We're gonna cut a few of these into the mix just so that it's not so ridiculously hot. Here we have seasoned sushi vinegar, which is apple cider vinegar, white vinegar, sugar, and a little bit of salt. We also have pickling spice and a few other secret spices. Now we have our carrots. We're gonna remove the tops. Now we're gonna add our carrots. So now we're just gonna take these off the heat and just let them steep. I love all different types of cooking, all different cultures, and I can never really make up my mind what I wanna be. I was trained pretty hardcore Japanese in the earlier days, but super interested in French and having Baja just to the south of us. There's just so much inspiration coming from there with what the chefs are doing and the product they have to work with. So that really gets me excited. I was just down there last weekend. Every time I come back, it's just crazy ideas bouncing around in my head. So this was a Mexican snapper, so we're gonna pair it with the Mexican carrots, but I still wanted to throw that kombu cure in there. The other reason for it is that we have kind of a smoky, salty flavor on the fish, obviously the fishy flavor. I'm gonna sear the skin crispy on there, which will bring out some of the oils. It'll be a really good, deep, fishy flavor. So we have a little bit of the acidity and the vinegar from here, a little bit of sweetness and a little bit of spice to balance it all out. We let this sit overnight. You can see how that firmed up the fish. See how much moisture has come out. Here's our kombu. You can see that it's fully rehydrated, and that's kind of cool because that means it's pulled some moisture out of the fish. So what we have now is a more intense flavor of the fish balanced by the flavor of the seaweed, the natural MSG, and a little bit of the white wine sweetness of the mirin. So we're not gonna throw this away though because we're gonna make kelp noodles out of it. Here's all those scraps that we saved from the rest of the process and the leftover fish dip. Now what we're gonna do is we're just slowly gonna simmer this so that it puffs up and takes on just a little more moisture. I always like to leave the bones in until the very last minute. For one, keeping the fish as whole as possible keeps the fish fresher and better because mother nature makes the best plastic wrap. And the other thing is, is I just always associate bones with flavor. It's just like cooking a good bone-in ribeye steak. That being said, now is the time to remove the bones. We're gonna come up and under and just break right here where you've got the bones that come off the spine. Right here is where the bone starts. You kinda wanna start at the top and this little guy always gets forgotten about. Just pull the bones forward and they'll kinda unlock. This fish having time to rest, these bones come out a lot easier. So we don't really wanna bring this to too much of a boil. You just kinda wanna let it simmer and steep and let time do the work. The stuff will kinda puff up is when you'll know it's ready. Here we have our seaweed. See it's absorbed more of our marinade. Roll it up. Different balances of how long you steep it and how thick you wanna cut it. We have a little bit of a softer seaweed. You can cut a thicker noodle. Just kinda depends what you're going for. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna place our little bird's nest of kelp noodles. We're gonna cut the fish sashimi style. Sear the skin so it's crispy. Now that we've got the torch on the skin done, we can fan this out to expose the raw lightly cured inside and then top it with our taco shop carrots. The crunchy garlic chili that we make by almost burning garlic, shallots, and peppers. Then we puree it with a little bit of oil and all that sweetness from the shallots and the garlic's caramelizing. Lastly, we've got this awesome sea lettuce. So now you have a kombu carrot snapper. Please like, subscribe, leave comments, preferably positive ones.