Halibut Carpaccio, Breakaway Style

Summer seemed to fly by this year, and I didn’t even get around to making any carpaccio, one of my favorite summer dishes. I was thinking of just that when cruising around Monterey Fish, where the local (well, Oregon) halibut were looking mighty fine. The deal was struck.

One tricky part of carpaccio is slicing. How in the world do those restaurants get those thinner-than-paper translucent slices? Someone once told me: with a meat slicer, after lightly freezing the fish! I wasn’t about to go that route (though I am secretly jonesing for a small meat slicer). I’m actually not crazy about that uniform look, in which each slice is laid partly on the previous one, forming a circle — there something kinda fussified about it; it’s just way too much trouble, for very little payback, at least in my book. So I relied on the good old meat mallet to do its brutal magic. A couple of gentle pounds, with the fish in between pieces of Saran wrap, worked perfectly. Each piece comes out very differently, so I enjoyed the mosaic that eventually wound up on the plate, in the photo above.

Dressing: infused pickled ginger vinegar, fruity olive oil, and piece of very ripe plum smashed in for good measure. That got poured, gently, on each piece, followed by a few flecks of julienned pickled ginger. My shiso in a pot is cranking on the deck, so some of that got sliced up and tossed on as well. Finally, I sliced up a few skinny strands of dried persimmon, just for fun, and tossed those on, though I might have done that AFTER I snapped the picture! And a pinch of persimmon salt (made the usual way, with a piece of dried persimmon, whirred in the coffee grinder with some sel gris).

This is a really great first course, as part of a special meal. You could do something similar with other fish, especially tai (snapper), fluke, albacore, even conger eel.