Sunday, March 20, 2011

Splat

I thought I'd never told you about the fine art of splat.

Abalone is $300 a kg I believe. For us, well, it's one of our staples. Sea-mutton, they call it here. Now if you're lucky and time the tide right and know where to go, you find greenlips shallow enough not to dive. If you're quick and lucky, you can have an ab knife under them before you can say Knockmealgarten and Ballykinderry Fair, and it's quite easy. Pop and they're in the bag. It helps if you have a hookah or aqualungs, of course.

Otherwise you end up working pretty hard... but diving down and wrestling with the beasts at 5-10 metres is the easy part, as far as I am concerned. The hard bit is when - After several hours in cold water swimming about energetically, and just bursting with zoomy energy as a result - I get home, fresh-water wash the gear, hang it up and then... strip down to the budgie-smugglers (AKA speedo) -- horrible sight, trust me, and about to get worse - and position myself on a far corner of the garden, with a board - a good jarrah plank - I shattered the woosy plastic I used, a knife, a steak mallet, and a bag of abalone. First I shuck them, and then pin the very tough muscle to the board with the knife (otherwise a lot of work goes flying into the bushes), and the splat begins. Beat it tender. Only... the steak hammer tends to take off little fragments that go splat-airbourne and liberally coat the surrounding 40 km exclusion zone, bushes, grass, passing birds, and principally the little hairy feller in the budgie smugglers with the mallet, with teeny sticky gooey bits of abalone. The mallet handle become slimy and life and limb are in danger of tenderised (that's why I use the knife, these days. Tenderised my hand.) The abalone are then transported to the kitchen window and the long task of de-splatting begins with a nice cold wash down of the hairy little bloke and his utensils with the garden hose. Then we proceed (shivering artisically, to let the universe know how I have suffered) to the shower and scrub the gooey gobbets off. I'm hairy. It sticks.
I mean SCRUB.
All for a mere $300 a Kg morsel.
Cheap at twice the price I tell you ;-)

9 comments:

  1. Farm raised, pre-tenderized are about $75.00 a pound. You can't get wild caught for sale. I used to go to California a lot in the late 80's and there were pizza places that made abolone pizza with garlic sauce. Every place had a sign "Farm Raised Abalone Only!"

    So I imagine I've never eaten a wild caught one.

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  2. I thought the Abalone area was north of you around South Australia? It is also a dangerous trade, and that is nothing to do with the sharks!

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  3. There's abalone around Victoria too, my uncle used to dive for it for a living. Sounds like southern Australia, rather than South Australia, perhaps?

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  4. Christine - I would guess wild required liscences to vend - so I wouldn't bet on that. But farmed tend to small. I did Abalone pizza last night :-)

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  5. Voradams - I think it is whole of southern Australia, from Vic to WA. It's dangerous - bends, sharks, drowning. The trade in South Africa is very criminal too. Big money.

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  6. Kesalemma, yeah - BTW do ask your programme people to please drop me an e-mail (save me digging through thousands) as I now have time to think about the programme.

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  7. Rats, that was me...I for got Chris has a google account now as well.

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  8. FWIW -- I asked Mitsuko, and she was horrified that you would tenderize the abalone. She says you should try it as sashimi (raw) or slice it and cook it with salt, paper, and butter. She's convinced that it should be edible right out of the shell. If it's sandy, wash it in salt water. Then slice it thin, and saute in butter (she wants to eat it!)

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  9. Mike - If you guys ever get to Australia, I will somehow get some fresh to you (It would of course be best if you visited the island. Plenty of room in the inn. And Mitsuko would love all the other fresh seafood too). It may depend on species? I used to catch Haliotis midae back in South Africa, and to be honest it is FAR tougher, but also much tastier than Haliotis laevigata -local greenlip I suspect that ALL abalone is tenderised by some form of impact, but doesn't have to be for slow cooking or eating raw. (Mollusc protein has a bi-phase reaction to heat - tender briefly, tough, then much later, tender.) It is probably sliced paper thin at the prices over there - I see they eat the guts too in Japan. To eat Japanese Tottsuru I would need a lot of Sake!

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