- This, to me, is the most respectful thing
that I can do to the tradition of sushi.
Not to try to copy it,
not to try to be something that I'm not,
but to to figure out what I am with local products.
(upbeat music)
We get our fish as locally as possible,
all sustainable seafood.
This is our delivery from Greenpoint Fish in Brooklyn.
There are two of these
steelhead trout from Hudson, New York.
The slime is a good thing because,
especially with fish in the salmonoid family,
it's a sign of freshness.
It's a protective layer of slime
that keeps them healthy in the water.
Steelhead trout, it's a salmon relative, genetically.
I think biologically, it's identical to rainbow trout.
The difference is that steelhead trout
have life cycles more like salmon
and they spawn in fresh water and then swim out to the sea
and spend most of their lives in saltwater.
If you were just to leave the scales on,
you're just cultivating bacteria growth.
More than anything in the water content in a fish,
you don't wanna dry it out really hard
but like the way that we store it, wrapped in the towels,
it doesn't seem like a dried fish.
It seems like a little bit concentrated.
There are so many fish just on the east coast
of the U.S. that are underappreciated,
Excellent on any sushi menu, but hard to find
because either fishermen don't think
they can sell them for anything,
they use them as bait or they're thought of as trash fish,
kind of an absurd term.
These are classic brand sports towels.
I have no idea why they're called sports towels
but we wrap our fish in them and they're phenomenal.
We would be lost without them.
These are essentially a substitute for a dry-ager.
This is Tuesday's trout, this is Saturday's trout.
And you can see some of the lines of the muscle underneath
as opposed to--
Right now this just looks very gray.
So this still has a few days to go.
(upbeat music)
And we're gonna take off, first, the stomach lining
and then we'll pull out all these pinbones along here.
These are $135 fish tweezers,
which seems absurd until you use 'em
and then you use other ones
and then all of a sudden it makes sense.
Now it's pin-boned, we can smoke it.
This is my rigged smoker.
I'm gonna light some apple wood.
This is a block of compressed apple wood chip.
It's ground finely and then pressed back together.
And it's made for cold-smoking.
When you light it, it produces a lot of smoke
but it only gets hot in this very localized area.
So for the steelhead trout, we smoke the whole fillet.
It goes for like 10-15 minutes.
Reserve the best parts for sushi and sashimi.
One of my main goals with Rosella
was to open a restaurant that had both the omakase side
and the the a la carte side, so that we can put rolls
and chirashi bowls and that, on the menu.
So that the trim, which is delicious
but maybe not perfect for a piece of nigiri.
So that that doesn't just get tossed
at the end of the week or whatever.
Our fish head paitan is the best example yet
of not wasting product.
Once you learn what you can do with fish heads,
it's very difficult to just throw them in the trash can.
This is Matt Kramer, sushi chef, artist,
he's our mussel-steaming expert.
(Matt laughing)
- So these are Prince Edward Island mussels.
It's northeastern coast of Canada.
These are gonna get rinsed.
While the mussels are soaking,
we'll go ahead and start the aromatics.
In this case, it's shallots, garlic and ginger.
And we'll start those cooking,
the muscles will get added to that
and then we'll steam them open with some sake.
- Matt Kramer and I met at Uchiko in Austin, Texas.
There's the friendship side of our relationship
which is great.
Working with him on a sushi bar is great in a different way.
It's like, one of the most consistent,
persistent, good natured people I've worked with.
The mussels nigiri started as an homage
to Dragonfly Sushi in Gainesville, Florida,
which is the first sushi restaurant where I worked.
Certainly the best sushi restaurant in Florida.
There was a dish on the menu that
they should never have gotten rid of
called the sake seared mussels and clams.
- Dump 'em into this sheet tray, where--
Now that the mussels have cooled down,
we'll go ahead and strain out
the liquid that we were steaming them in.
We actually reserve this, it will become the sauce
for our mussel nigiri piece.
Pulling the mussel out of its shell right now.
And then this is the beard that I'm gonna be removing.
Basically just a quick pinch, comes out just like that.
And then add it to the pot.
- I am proud of the mussels nigiri.
I do think it encapsulates us.
I also think it's
something you just don't find anywhere else.
(intense music)
We get Louisiana head-on shrimp
and we save the shrimp heads
to make a shrimp head chile oil
that is used on the shrimp nigiri.
The shrimp we use consistently comes from Louisiana.
They are white leg shrimp.
- Whereas I think it goes against this,
maybe common notion, that like, "Oh,
this gulf shrimp is of a lower quality."
This one, it's abundantly available and it,
I think makes a much more beautiful piece
than sometimes people give it credit for.
- I have to chime in here too.
Gulf shrimp are some of the few wild-caught shrimp
that are categorized as sustainable
by the guides that we use.
The flavor also, compared with botan ebi, ama ebi,
the spot prawns and that.
The word that comes to mind is a dirtiness,
but I mean that in a good way, like the rich--
The sort of shrimp that you would use for Cajun food,
where you get the deep, deep flavor.
- These heads, we are getting ready to turn into
shrimp head chile oil and we'll use olive oil as our base.
Aromatics, we have garlic, ginger, shallots,
arbol chiles and go-to gochugaru.
- The answer to why we use the bolder flavors...
I didn't really consider anything else.
It's just the food that I love.
The sushi that we make here, the food that we make here,
largely is just what I like most about food
and what I like the most about sushi
turned up as much as I can.
- Once the shrimp are headed and peeled,
we'll cut the tails off.
Just getting 'em to the right length for a sushi piece.
Right now, we're taking out...taking out the poop.
There's a little secondary vein.
- [Jeff] Why do you have--
You normally don't have any trouble
saying that sort of thing.
(Matt laughing)
- We're taking out the poop.
Right now, we're taking out the poop.
- The food here, it's a combination of a whole lot of work
and technical progress.
My desire to enjoy myself in restaurants in general,
my desire to share my love of sushi.
We're gonna make dashimaki tamago.
This is soy oil.
This is our go-to neutral oil.
Tamago pans are almost always--
Like this is a copper rectangular pan.
The 90 degree angles
are really bizarre at first to work with,
but then once you get a feel for the technique,
it's very helpful, but it's useless for anything else.
You want the pan to be at a temperature where
it sizzles as soon as you pour the egg in,
but doesn't brown it.
If it's too cool, the egg doesn't start sizzling
right when you drop it,
there's a good chance it's gonna stick.
Then you're in trouble.
The chef who taught me how to make tamago,
that was the first chef who hired me.
His name is Ton Lee.
He is one of the most patient,
talented chefs I've worked for, I owe a lot to him.
Yeah, now when I make tamago,
I can't help but feel him watching me.
If I were to mess up in front of him,
he wouldn't do anything other than shrug it off
and encourage me, but there's something about that to me,
that is much more powerful than being scolded.
The way we serve the tamago at Rosella
comes from my love of fresh tamago,
fresh dashimaki tamago is warm, if not hot.
So I started warming it in butter.
Once I started doing that,
maple syrup seemed like a natural addition.
People, night after night,
compare the tamago to French toast, which makes sense.
It's eggs and butter and maple syrup.
(upbeat music)
It's almost exactly 15 years since I've started making sushi
which was in early May of 2007.
I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.
This is scallop sashimi and pesto
with pickled green strawberries.
I didn't expect sushi to become my career,
I was in sports journalism before I was in restaurants.
I did what I needed to do,
which was push both as far as I could
and see which one I couldn't live without.
This is a cured and seared gulf shrimp
with shrimp head chile oil.
Something that I've been talking about more recently
is that I think it's good to identify
when you're good enough
to be able to do what you want to do.
I feel that way here.
I can make the food that I want to make here.
This is smoke steelhead trout from Hudson, New York,
as nigiri and in a roll
with dill cream cheese and tamago and cucumber.
If somebody looks at our menu
and sees that there are rolls on the menu,
determines that it's not authentic sushi, it isn't,
but also, what does that mean?
I have no interest in
trying to convince somebody that it is.
These are sake-steamed mussels from Prince Edward Island.
The reason that I stayed in sushi is because it's fun.
I stayed in this because the process
is something that I love.
If that weren't the case, this would just be torture.
(upbeat music)