This weekend I went grocery shopping. I came across some big clams and i bought some. I decided to make a few meals of pasta dishes with them. I also bought a dungeness crab and decide to use that too, in a dish that is a fusion of East and West.
Normally with clam and crab and pasta one would tend to lean towards something with a creamy and cheesy sauce akin to linguine alfredo. That would be too pedestrian. I wanted to preserve the delicate tastes of the clams and the crab meat. I wanted something briny to remind one of the sea. I didn't want a heavy cream but a light sauce to allow one to taste the rich umami from the seafood. An idea lit up in my head. Use a bit of the Chinese big head vegetable.
big clams; also in the picture is jullianne cut big head vegetable and cuttlefish
Chinese
big head vegetable is a very salty preserved turnip for used in cooking. I used just a very small amount here to substitute salt. Since I am at it, I decide to really go to town with East and West fusion. I also used dried shiitake mushroom.
this big head vegetable would last many years
you can see why it is called big head vegetable
you typically want to slice it very thin because it is very very salty
here is
a chinese classic dish made with this wonderful cooking "condiment"
just a small pinch of the big head vegetable and one shiitake mushroom is enough for each serving
Using of the big head vegetable is analogous to using capers or olives. It is no surprise the novel recipe works. In this dish, I added no salt. The salt came from the big head vegetable, the shellfishes themselves, and that in the parmesan cheese.
dungeness crab i shelled for the meat - it is very important to save the juice and tomalley for used in the dish
I prepared many slight variation of this dish. Some I added Japanese dried scallop to the mix.
precious japanese dried scallop - only one is needed for a serving
the crab meat, its juice, and tomalley is to added in last after the pasta
here you can see the slices of clam meat and slices of cuttlefish
I made about 5 meals of this with slight variations. So delicious. If a restaurant serve me something this delicious, it would get 5 out of 5 stars from me. Sadly my experience dinning out seafood dishes is seldom this good. Well, the devil is in the details. Most restaurants just don't bother to capture the essences of the seafood, like the juices of the clam, crab, and the crab tomalley.
Actually I used Italian spaghetti instead of linguine. It is something I have on hand and they are very well priced. The only difference is the mouth feel. I always pay good attention so the pasta is just al dante.
in this dish you can see the slices of shiitake mushroom
this version has some fresh mussels added
I was watching one of the many not so good food shows on PBS recently. One chef touts that the clams he is cooking with is something like 80 years old as he proceed to point out the growth rings on the shell. I thought to myself, interesting, and on the surface it seems to make sense. However I was somewhat skeptical - yes, I am a born skeptic.
On this subject matter
here is some interesting reading.
Seems that the age of a clam is much more complex than just counting the number of rings. Still the poor big Manilla clams I ate may be 10 years old according to the site. I got it. For Manilla clams as well as other clams there is annuli as well as other (like tidal and seasonal) growth rings. The largest I bought appears to be about 7-8 years old.
you can see the major bands separated by the fainter bands
What is shocking is the typical age of
geoducks. I would feel guilty to eat something this old. I have never try geoduck.
a collection of geoducks from Port Gamble, Washington shows some ages exceeding 100yr
