The Tinned Fish Cookbook | Bart van Olphen

The Tinned Fish Cookbook: Easy-to-Make Meals from Ocean to Plate - Sustainably Canned, 100% Delicious

By Bart van Olphen

Intro:                            Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Bart van Olphen:           My name is Bart van Olphen and my latest cookbook is the Tinned Fish Cookbook.

Suzy Chase:                   For more Cookery by the Book you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the quarantine question round. Where are you living?

Bart van Olphen:           I live in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

Suzy Chase:                   What restaurant are you dreaming of going to after the quarantine?

Bart van Olphen:           Well, I have one very favorite restaurant here in Amsterdam, which is called Caron, Café Caron. It's French cuisine, bistro. Traditional but really, really good.

Suzy Chase:                   When do you think they'll be opening up?

Bart van Olphen:           Well, they're speaking of opening terraces from the 1st of June. So yeah, in a couple of weeks from now. Opening the whole restaurant, this is another thing. Not sure yet.

Suzy Chase:                   Oh, June's not far off though. You're so lucky.

Bart van Olphen:           No, no, it's true. It's like three weeks now. Yeah, three... It's now the 6th of May. Yeah, it's something what they think they will announce tonight on the evening news. So yeah, exciting. Not just for me to eat food, but I mean, all those entrepreneurs, all these small restaurants and bars they need to right? They will be bankrupt, if not. So we need to support them. Yes.

Suzy Chase:                   What dish is getting you through this time?

Bart van Olphen:           Well, the positive part of this era, of these weeks is that you certainly have a lot of time to cook and to do groceries. So yeah, I cook a lot with my kids and one of the things, and it sounds a bit like maybe posh or luxurious, but they just opened up lobster season here in the Netherlands. So we had classic lobster hollandaise yesterday with fresh asparagus, which are in season right now, too. So yeah, it's not the thing I eat every day, but it was fun and it was really good.

Suzy Chase:                   So let's talk about your cookbook. After years in the restaurant business in France and the Netherlands, you learned that every fish had a story, and traveled the world to live, to cook, and to fish together with the most amazing sustainable fishing communities. In 2008, you were named the world's most sustainable seafood entrepreneur. Can we first talk about taking care of the oceans?

Bart van Olphen:           Actually, how I became aware I was in, I think it was 2002, maybe a year later when I opened my fishmongers in Amsterdam. And actually I opened a fishmongers because I worked in Paris and I saw so many different species and they're all lovely, and they has amazing stories when the fish supply came in. So I thought, okay, I bring these stories, I bring these fish into Amsterdam, open my fish counter, my fishmongers, and then someone of the WWF came in and told me, "Are you aware of the fact that like 80% of our oceans are over-fished?" And that sounded really un-logical to me. My impression always was like all these small, beautiful fishing boats entering the ports in Spain, and you ate like next to it on a terrace, a fresh piece of fish, but that's not the case.

                                    And from that moment also what I realized is that seafood is the only food we still massively consume out of wild. It's the nature what gives us this delicious fish. So we need to listen to our oceans. And that was actually the moment that I started to travel and to search for these sustainable fishing people, these communities. Yeah, so we need to be aware. Over 80% of our oceans are over-fished or fished to the limit. We only can consume out of 20% of them currently. So yeah, that's a sad story.

Suzy Chase:                   What was your favorite fishing community that you visited?

Bart van Olphen:           What I found the most fascinating ones are often the ones in developing countries. They need to fish to live, right? It's not that commercially driven in the way we do it here, for example, in the US or here in Europe, where we trade fish. There people need to fish for living.

                                    So I've got two amazing ones. One's I can mention. One is the Maldives. It's the only country in the world where they only fish for tuna by pole and line. Small atolls, which are islands in the middle of the Indian ocean. And they go out fishing on a dhoni, which is the typical traditional local name for a tuna boat. And they catch the tuna one by one. It's amazing. Another one is in your country in Alaska, at the Yukon river. It's a really remote fishing community Unalakleet the Yupik community. And they catch the most delicious salmon of the world. But if you're there, you end up in a community of like 900, 1000 people, and it's all about fishing and they live by subsistence for the rest of the year. So it brings you back with two feet on the ground. This is how we would say it in Dutch. Fishing for living, for eating, but we should not over-fish because if we over-fish, we won't have any fish left by tomorrow.

Suzy Chase:                   Where these recipes and the cookbook inspired by dishes you ate in fishing communities?

Bart van Olphen:           Absolutely, some of them. Well, the great thing about cooking tinned seafood is it's... we're not suddenly cooking different species, right? So we're cooking tuna, we're cooking salmon, we cooked sardines and anchovies. It's the similar fish then when I cooked it in my three star Michelin restaurant in Paris. The difference is that the fish is already cooked for you. So cooking tinned fish is more a mindset change, then suddenly cook a totally different thing. So what I wanted to say is that what I cook in the Michelin starred restaurants, you can translate it into a dish made of tinned seafood.

                                    When you travel, often people ask me, "What is your favorite fish dish?" I cannot tell you the right answer because every time when you travel somewhere else, it's the surroundings, it's the way how they cook. How we interact gives the dish so much more value, so much more flavor, maybe more from a romantic point of view, then the ingredients. One example, mas huni. So I just explained you about the Maldives. Maldivians are the most heavy seafood consumers in the world. They eat like 150 kilograms per year, which is a lot. If you go there and you're on the local Island, you'll have lunch... breakfast, dinner it's all fish, fish, fish, but it's also all tuna, tuna, tuna. And then the national dish is called mas huni, which means fish and coconut.

                                    And actually what they do, they squeeze a red onion and chili and curry leaves together with some lime juice and salt, they really massage it and squeeze it. And then they add fresh coconut, grated coconut, and tuna, grated tuna. It's like tuna in a tin. And it's fantastic. It's fantastic. So this is typically a local dish, but you also will find other dishes like the classic tuna melts or stuffed paprika. So when I travel, I take the recipes back home. It's amazing what you can learn from local communities.

Suzy Chase:                   Okay. You just mentioned your Michelin star restaurant. And I read something, tell me if this is true, when you were a young child it was your dream to work at a Michelin three starred restaurant.

Bart van Olphen:           I was collecting Michelin guides already when I was six. So I've got 60 different guides. The first one I've got is 1908. And there was a chef called Roger Vergé and Moulin de Mougins, which is in the South of France. And he had this fence in front of his kitchen, and I asked my mom when I was eight years old, "Could you please drive to that fence?" And I was just standing there looking into the kitchen at a 20, 30 meter distance just to observe how these chefs we're working. So ever since it was my dream to work in gastronomy. And I loved it. I mean, but those were the years, Bocuse and Michel Guérard, and all of these big... Saint Laurent where I worked in Paris. So more the classic ones. It has changed. But it was a dream since I was six, seven years old. Yes, definitely.

Suzy Chase:                   You know what my favorite thing is about tinned fish? You don't have to descale or get rid of the guts or clean them.

Bart van Olphen:           Cooking tinned seafood is a really easy, fun thing to do. Affordable. But one of the things is that you start at the point that the fish is already cooked for you. So when you open this tin, you see maybe a bit of pale non-colored piece of fish, texture is soft. But having these two things in mind, you can create this amazing fish dish without gutting or filleting. You would just add like a bit of structure, like a bit of lettuce, some colors, some acidity, and some sourness. And with a few steps, you can create something really, really well without actually cooking the fish itself.

                                    But also you can use the fish cooking, but always add it at the end of the recipe. That's something often when we cook fish, fresh fish, you would start with the fish to get it maybe with the veggies, and then end up with the whole dish. With tinned fish, don't think about cooking the fish. It's just adding the fish at the latest point. So when making a pasta puttanesca, for example, of course you give this flavor of the anchovies to the sauce, but at the very end, you only add the tuna. There's nothing more easy than cooking tinned fish.

Suzy Chase:                   You wrote in the cookbook, "Walk into a random supermarket in Southern Europe, and you'll be amazed by the extensive selection of tinned fish products." Now, with the advent of COVID-19 and food shortages, do you think Americans will see more jarred or canned fish on the grocery store shelves?

Bart van Olphen:           I hope so. I hope so. I really compare the US to what the Netherlands was like four or five years ago when I started this challenge, actually. I often visited Southern European countries like Portugal and Spain and France. And it was amazing to see what kind of seafood in a tin they sold. It was the highest quality. Like if you buy a ventresca de atun, which is that the belly part, you need to ask a key at the cash desk to open this little box, to get this tin of 20, 30 euros, dollars, out of that box to take home with you. So it has a much more higher quality perception in these countries. Why? Because they know how to treat fish in a tin. So what happened in the Netherlands, but also in the US, is that the cheaper, the better. We always seen this product as a secondary product.

                                    You Americans, the number one seafood product sold in the country is a tin of tuna. Well, in most of the cases, to be honest, it's not a good product. So we need to appreciate better quality. We need to be ready to pay maybe a little bit more for it. Maybe a tin of $1.50 will be $1.60. First because we need to make a choice for a sustainable product, but secondly, also for the quality. And if you have a right quality product, you can make amazing fish dishes. But there is a way to go. And I think it can go quite quickly, but you need to be aware of the fact there is good quantity and bad quality. If you cook with a bad quality tin of sardines, you would never do it again. If you would cook with a fantastic tin of sardines, you would eat it every day.

Suzy Chase:                   In the cookbook you cover tuna, salmon, anchovies, sardines, mackerel, herring, and then you have an interesting sort of extras chapter that includes cod liver. Can you tell us about cod liver?

Bart van Olphen:           If you would have asked me, what is your favorite fish out of a tin? I would say cod liver.

Suzy Chase:                   Really?

Bart van Olphen:           It's fantastic. It's so oily. It's how you would, in the past, I'm not eating that anymore for animal welfare, but if you would eat foie gras, goose liver, you would treat it the same way. So you would add a bit of sweetness to balance that very oily flavor. It's fantastic. It's so flavorful and it's really nutritious. It's so healthy. I mean, forget your fish oil capsules. Just eat a tin of cod liver every week and you're done. It's fantastic. The structure is amazing. The flavor is amazing. It's different. Yeah, I don't know how to say, just give it a try. It's not in my cookbook, but one of the dishes I cook already for years is to serve it in a bit of reduced orange juice. And you serve it with some sesame oil, maybe some pink peppercorns, and that's it, on toast. It's fantastic. You really should give it a try.

                                    And the recipe I made in the book was with a miso and herring. I learned how to make a miso and cod liver paste from a fantastic Japanese chef and Shiogama, which is around two hours from Tokyo. And this gentlemen was 86 years old and he taught me how to do it. And that's the recipe in the book. It's fantastic.

Suzy Chase:                   I'd love to go over a day's worth of tinned fish with you. So what would you suggest for breakfast and then lunch and dinner.

Bart van Olphen:           Okay. For breakfast, it's an omelet. So I made scrambled eggs and salmon on toast. And you have lovely salmon in the US. That's one other thing, Suzy, I need to make you aware of. Okay, 52% of the world's fish consumption is farmed, from farm sources. If you go to the shelf in a supermarket of tinned fish, 100% is wild. And you won't find it in the frozen category, or you won't find it in the fresh, but you will find it in the tin division. It's all wild and wild, in my opinion, tastes always better.

                                    And you have fantastic wild salmon. So that's the reason I serve you a breakfast of scrambled eggs and salmon on toast. And then I'll take you from there for lunch to the Maldives. I've explained it already to you, mas huni. Everyone should try mas huni. It's the new generation of tuna spreads, but no oil. So it's healthy and full of flavor. You taste the tuna. You taste this coconut. It's fantastic.

                                    And then when we go to dinner, how often do we make curries? A good thing about making curry is you slowly cook the fish in the curry. So the reason why it won't dry out... tin fish is a great substitute for fresh fish in a curry, for example, or I'll make you a pasta puttanesca. It's one of my favorites. It's obvious one, but to make a good pasta puttanesca is one of my very, very favorites too. Because every ingredient almost in this dish, is out of your pantry. So you have your canned tomatoes, you have your canned tuna, you have your canned anchovies, you have your capers in a jar, you have your dried pasta. So one can survive with a pasta puttanesca.

Suzy Chase:                   Yesterday I made your recipe for sardine hummus on page 92. Can you describe this recipe?

Bart van Olphen:           Well, easy. It's creating like a hummus. Of course with chickpeas, and you add the tahini, and the clove, and the lemon, parsley, a bit of spiciness, maybe some chili flakes, Tabasco if you like, and then you add the fish because in this case, these oiled sardines, they already give so much taste. So you just have these on top and you eat it together. So it's like a classic, maybe a bit my way of hummus with sardines on top.

Suzy Chase:                   So now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?

Bart van Olphen:           Well, my very favorite, but it's more from a designer's perspective, is the book of Salvador Dali, Les diners de Gala. And he always wants to be a chef, but he didn't succeed to enter the cookery school. So then he became an artist, or maybe he was already at that time, of course you're born as an artist in my opinion. But then his dream was still to make a cookbook. So in 1972, he made a cookbook for his wife, for Gala, and it's called Les diners de Gala. And it's amazing. It's over the top. It's over the top. If you see the images, it's '70s, but in the '70s already over the top. So that's from a designer's perspective. Well, how it looks like, it's a coffee table, I can dream with that book. But I won't choose a recipe out of it.

                                    Julia Child, especially also in your country, made people happy to cook and let people realize that cooking is not difficult at all. And it's fun to do. So I think from a mental point of view, she made people really happy and it opened many doors I think, to how we would eat today. She was a revolution, I think. Yeah, and if I look at YouTube and I see her on television in black and white, even in black and white, the dishes are amazing. Yeah, it's fantastic.

Suzy Chase:                   Where can we find you on web and social media?

Bart van Olphen:           Well, you can find me... I've got a YouTube channel, which is called Bart's Fish Tales. Here I travel, you see a lot of my travels, cooking together with the local communities. Obviously these months, it's not happening. And I cook in my studio in Amsterdam. And the objective is to show people that cooking fish is not difficult at all. In only a few steps, you can create an amazing fish dish. And a similar thing I do in Instagram for anything is five years ago, I started on Instagram with the shortest cooking show on earth, was a 15 seconds cooking show, when Instagram still had the limit of 15 seconds in video. Now it has one minute. And on my Instagram also on Bart's Fish Tales, I share my stories and my recipes, and all you need to know about seafood, sustainable seafood.

Suzy Chase:                   Well, thanks Bart for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.

Bart van Olphen:           A pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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