- [Stuart] Anchovies have gotten a bad rap over the years.
You're putting poor-quality anchovies on poor-quality pizza.
It's as simple as that.
Unfortunately, that's most Americans' experience
with anchovies.
I think that most San Franciscans don't realize
that we have a local anchovy scene.
(upbeat music)
- So right now we are in the middle
of California anchovy season.
The anchovy is part of the foundation of our oceans.
Are things healthy out there or are they not?
When we have a lot of anchovies here,
we know that everything's looking good.
The birds are happy.
The salmon are happy.
Everyone's happy.
Anchovies have an extremely short shelf life,
which is the reason the majority of the anchovies
that are caught are salt-cured.
The fat content and the oil content
in these anchovies is gonna make them go bad
relatively quickly.
So for us, it's very important
that it's a fresh offering every day
from its live form to the restaurant.
Morning. - [Erik] Morning.
- [Kenny] How are you? - [Erik] Good, and yourself?
- Doing well. Good to see ya.
- You as well.
- I just need 30 today.
- Sounds good.
- Erik runs the San Francisco bait receiver
and is also a commercial anchovy fisherman.
He's also helped us create this market for fresh anchovies
for the San Francisco Bay Area restaurants.
- We started at 3:00 this morning.
Since we are a live-bait company,
our goal is to keep everything alive.
So timing is, you know, imperative with these.
So the way we unload is we connect the tube
to the side of the boat, and then it's called "crowding."
We just crowd them out.
Slide down the slide and go into the pens.
The more gentle you are with these fish, the better for 'em.
So yeah, everything's kind of on a timeline with these fish.
We have this net here that goes all the way
to the bottom and it holds them.
It's like a holding pen.
They hold about 1,500 pounds.
We don't try and put too many in here
'cause if you put too many,
they take all the oxygen out of the water and they die.
So it's a fine line.
- These are normally
from the water to the restaurant store within two hours.
There will be restaurants that will have this
on their lunch menu today by 11:30, 12:00.
- When I opened State Bird,
Kenny was the fish purveyor that I started to work with
because he was a bit of a renegade.
He was very strict on how fish was landed in San Francisco
and truth in labeling.
- I'm a restaurateur before I'm a fish monger.
I found it surprising how difficult it was
for the fishmongers of the Bay Area
to be able to answer those questions.
Who caught it?
Where did they catch it?
Why did they catch it?
And is there enough for them to catch?
It's fish that's coming from every corner of the globe.
Fish is constantly mislabeled in order to make the sale.
So the only way to change that was to become it.
So we became wholesale.
And we slowly started to change the industry.
Thank you, Christian.
They look great.
There's some mixed ones in, but Stuart
and everybody on the team is gonna be super happy.
The type of fish I work with has to start
with I know the captain, I know the boat,
I know the gear method that was used, and I know that
that fish was caught on purpose.
All of that information is printed on the invoice.
I'm just gonna get some ice on this,
get 'em in the walk-in, and then get myself staged,
and then we'll start our drive.
For a chef steward, the goal is to get the anchovies
into the restaurant before they go into rigor mortis,
which usually starts to set in
in about a two-hour window from harvest.
- It was about 15 years ago
that I started to work with local anchovies.
I was working with another purveyor at the time,
and every delivery was different.
They were 8, 10, 12 hours out of water
by the time they were coming to the restaurants.
One day they arrived in the kitchen, and they were epic.
They were really, at that time,
less than an hour out of the water.
And I just remember getting on the phone
and going, "What happened?
Like, tell me your steps here,
because whatever just happened,
like, the Earth just stopped for a moment."
From that day on, the goal was we need to rethink logistics.
- [Kenny] Corner.
Good morning.
- [Staff] Good morning!
- [Kenny] How's everyone doing?
- [Stuart] What's up, Kenny? - Good morning, chef.
- [Stuart] How are you? - How are you?
Good to see you. - Good to see you, yeah.
- [Kenny] There's some really, really nice ones in there.
- You know, anchovies obviously get a bad rap
for being an oily and kind of salty fish.
And as you can see here, I mean, that is not the case.
I mean, look at these.
It's a healthy, fresh anchovy.
These are the perfect sized anchovy,
and you can really, really see the size difference.
These are the perfect ones for the boqueron.
And then these are what we call "baby anchovies."
And so we'll use these anchovies
for dishes like purgatory or fries with eyes,
any type of hot dish.
When you eat 'em, they just sort of melt in your mouth.
I often like to kid
that when I smell the anchovies, (sniffs)
I can hear seagulls off in the distance.
This is so spectacular to San Francisco.
I mean, I don't know if there's a more local fish
that we have in our waters.
So let's keep it up, man. - I appreciate it.
I'm gonna keep driving.
Friends, good to see everybody.
I'll see you guys soon. - [Stuart] See you, Kenny.
- Bye, guys. Have a great day.
- The idea of what we're trying to do right now
with the anchovies is that we're trying to capture time.
So the anchovy protocol works like this.
We know from our purveyor that the fish are gonna arrive
in our kitchen two hours out of water.
It's happening.
So that transformation,
and this is kind of one of the great thrills
of when we're butchering anchovies
when they're this fresh is that they actually are going
into rigor mortis.
So we want to preserve this moment right now.
when the anchovies arrive in the restaurant,
the entire team kind of stops what they're doing,
their projects, and they start to kind of gather,
and we set up stations.
Right here, obviously, is the cutting station.
And then we'll leave a few on for fries with eyes, right?
So we'll do like a little tempura fry with those anchovies.
So, you know, we cut, we head and gut
and scrape the bellies.
Then the fish go to finger scaling.
What we're doing here is
is that we've got cold water
and we're just running the fish.
And what they're doing is just taking their thumb
and just rubbing the scales from tail to head off.
We have not found a better way to do this.
We've tried different methods, but really,
it comes back to every anchovy is hand-processed.
The next step is that we're making the brine.
In the brine, we have freshly sliced garlic and jalapeno,
fresh-juiced lime, salt, water, and then basil.
I mean, nothing says summer more than basil.
Mm. Perfect.
Perfect.
(lively music)
The next stage is that we weigh up the anchovies
and then we go through a double saltwater slushie.
And this is one of my favorite parts of the process
because it's like the full transformation of all the work.
So we take the anchovies,
and these have been scaled, gutted,
and you can see how clean they are.
And what we do is we just throw 'em right in.
And this is key.
I kind of up and down, and then I wash 'em.
Really give 'em a good, thorough rinse.
I go into the second one,
really bringing the temperature down on these fish.
The whole process of this is keeping the temperature
of the anchovies really cold.
Shake that out, and you can really see
how glowing these anchovies are now.
They're not slimy, we've removed anything from 'em,
and they're just so fresh.
So from this process,
we take it and they go into the brine.
(lively music)
At this moment, we have managed to stop time.
(water splashing)
The whole process is about honoring the integrity
of the fish.
Now that these fish are in the brine,
we'll put this in the walk-in
and they'll sit on the bone in the brine for 48 hours.
And what happens is that they start to pickle.
It's as simple as that.
We're gonna label 'em and put 'em in the walk-in.
So today's Tuesday.
On Thursday, these will be ready to process and pack in oil.
48 hours later, we pull the fish out,
we strain the brine off, and we start to remove the spines.
Very simply, we just apply a little pressure
from the belly and the backbone, and we open up the fish.
We grab the spine delicately to keep the fish intact,
and we pull it out.
And what you're left with is a clean spine
and a clean anchovy.
And at this point, they're ready to eat.
Everything has got value in our kitchen.
The bones, we save the basil, the jalapeno, all the garlic,
and we'll take this and we'll dehydrate all
of these ingredients now that they're super flavorful.
We'll take the spines,
and these are like pickled anchovy spines,
and we'll grind them up in a mortar and pestle
and we'll make like an anchovy salt, bone salt.
So I'll take some spines, grind them up,
and I'm gonna add to that a little bit of jalapeno,
a few garlic pieces.
I'm gonna throw some basil leaves
and maybe a little stem in there as well, right?
And this is essentially like the dry version of the brine.
Mm. Hmm.
Amazing.
Now we just made our own sort
of anchovy-flavored potato chip.
Seen here first, 'cause I've never done this before.
Mm.
We figured it out.
We just cracked the code on camera here.
(Stuart laughing)
We take the fish and we pack 'em in grape seed oil.
After 7 to 10 days,
that's when I think the optimal timeframe is
to serve the fish.
I started to notice this softness that would happen,
and the anchovies, really, the flavor just comes out
after they've kind of blended
and really allowed to sit in the fat.
The fat is key.
We noticed that there was a trickle down effect.
That protocol started to apply to so many other ingredients
in our kitchen.
And it's changed me as a chef.
And now anchovy protocol exists for all the fish purveyors
in the Bay Area who want to sell quality fish,
who stand by that.
Here are the boquerones.
The inspirational dish is kind of a classic Spanish dish,
pan con tomate.
And I love to just throw these boquerones right on it.
We have here heirloom tomatoes.
These tomatoes we're gonna take
and make a very simple sauce with it.
Grate a little bit of garlic into the tomato.
And then we take just a few drops of sherry vinegar,
a little Tabasco hot sauce, just a few drops,
extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper.
This is kind of the hallmark for everything that we do
during the summer here.
The jewel in the crown
for anchovy dishes is this focaccia toast.
Everything in that dish is equally as fresh
as the anchovy itself.
And the star of the show, of course, are these anchovies.
This is my favorite dish in the world.
(bright music)
- It's such an honor when a chef and a fisher connect
because that means that we've closed that loop.
And there's nothing more rewarding for Erik
than to go to State Bird, to go to Anchovy Bar
and see his product on the menu.
- There's not a day that we bring anchovies in
that I don't think that they're worth the work.
We need to eat the diversity.
So for anchovies, yeah.
I look forward to the season every April.
We get to our last delivery of anchovies,
and we're like, "All right."
We sort of celebrate that too, right?
Because everything is good for a time period.
- He delivered a approachable product
to the diner who normally would turn their nose up
to an anchovy.
And now he's built an entire group of people
who are seeking out this small, little, tiny, silver,
oily fish that nobody wanted,
and now it's found a home
in some of the best restaurants in the world
because of what he's been able to do.
- I go back to the anchovy, which is just 10 to 15 grams,
and how important and how many lessons
that little fish has to teach us as chefs.
(bright music)