Don’t miss out on winter BBQ, cold water treats


Winter barbecuing is fun, and warm. My love for slow-cookedmeat, smoked salmon or grilled hamburgers does not diminish duringthe winter months, and as long as the temperature is above 20 andthe snow is not coming down more than 2 inches per hour, you mightfind me grillin’ instead of chillin’.

The smoker may take a little longer to heat up, and there is nodoubt a challenge to barbecuing a 12-hour brisket when there’s only10 hours of daylight, but it’s so worth it. The happiest thinghappened this past summer when our son, a devout barbecuingdisciple, came home with about three years worth of pear wood froma tree job.

Oak and hickory are great smoking woods, but fruit-woods likepear, apple and cherry do something wondrous to pork ribs and fish.A side of salmon, cured, hot-smoked, and served with ahorseradish-chive cream will convince most to never eat it anyother way again.

Teaching how to prepare and appreciate food sometimes provides”aha! moments for students. I enjoy watching them happen, oftenremembering similar epiphanies of my own. The more adventurousteens, those who have progressed past the McDonald’s, pizza andchicken-parm stage, are willing to try strange things like oysters,salt-cod fritters or some other kind of fish besides friedflounder.

Don’t get me wrong; I love fried flounder, but I also loveblackfish, cod, haddock and pretty much anything with a fin or ashell. To us East-Enders, the idea of someone living east ofRiverhead not liking any of the above is as incomprehensible as,say, someone who lives in Texas not liking steak or ribs, and wetend to view them as poor and unfortunate.

I once had occasion to speak with Rudolph Speckamp, one of themaybe six or seven dozen Certified Master Chefs in the world. Iasked him what his favorite food was and his answer was “I love allfood, if it is prepared correctly. I was expecting to at least hearthat he didn’t like liver or calf’s sweetbreads or something elseequally “offal, but no, he eats anything. In my class, you can’tsay you don’t like something if you’ve never tried it. Not allowed.You gotta educate those buds as well as the brains.

As a young cook working the hotel circuit in the early 70s, Ispent two summers in Chatham, Massachusetts, on the elbow of CapeCod. I had been exposed to fresh seafood up until that time, butthose two seasons just took me to a whole new gastronomic level. Ichewed and swallowed my first raw oyster, one that had only beenout of the water for maybe an hour, and my life changed forever.The same thing happened when I ate my first Shelter Islandscallop.

Working on the Cape provided me with the opportunity to prepareand eat incredibly fresh fish, most notably haddock, which, to thispalate, is the most delicious white-fleshed fish that swims. It isprobably my love of fresh seafood that guarantees that I will notlive far from shore for the remainder of my days on earth.

Shelter Island oysters provided me with another wonderfulexperience in the late 1980s. I don’t remember exactly when it was,but the mariculture plant at what is now the Island Boatyard wentout of business. They had been experimenting with pumping upshellfish with nutrients, and when they closed up, they dumpedabout 80 bushels of those Schwarzenegger oysters right off thebeach, and all you had to do was go and scoop them up.

I knew that something of this magnitude would not be secret forlong, so I raced down and quickly gathered a spackle bucket full.It just so happened that it was one of the few summers that we hada garden with edible greens in it, so I made a sort of “Rockefellermixture of spinach, Swiss chard, sliced scallions and diced celerysaut ed in butter and seasoned it with Tabasco and Worcestershiresauce.

Actually, no one really knows the recipe for OystersRockefeller, except maybe the people at Antoine’s in New Orleans,the place where then-owner Jules Alciatore came up with the recipein 1899. His dying wish was that the recipe never be revealed.According to most, spinach was not in the original.

Anyway, I shucked some oysters and spooned a little of thecooked greens into each shell, plopped the oysters back on top andsprinkled some fresh Parmesan cheese and some seasoned bread crumbsover them. Ten minutes in a hot oven and all was right with theworld.

Oysters are now making a comeback of sorts. There are severaloyster farmers on the East End, and the bay is all the happier forthem, as oysters are tremendous water filters. “Boutique oystersare showing up on menus in upscale restaurants locally and inManhattan as well. As I have probably pointed out in a past column,Mark Kurlansky’s “The Big Oyster is, in this writer’s opinion, thedefinitive history of the oyster and its role in the development ofNew York and environs.

All right, maybe for you, grilling in January is a stretch, butthe somewhat slower pace allows plenty of time for seriousepicurean research. The winter may not offer in quantity what mostof the rest of the year does, but the cold water produces somemighty good eats!