Is there any food that is more fleetingly seasonal than shad and shad roe? Ramps I guess, another spring fling. But generally speaking, so much is available at your local grocery all year round now, you don’t have to wait until April for your asparagus or August for your watermelon. You can have crab (or “crab”) any time you want; you can eat corn on the cob for Christmas Dinner if you so desire. There seem to be just a few culinary harvests remaining that make only the briefest of appearances and then disappear until the next season, and the American White Shad is one of them.
Like most everything else this Spring, the shad run is late, and we were lucky to procure a few nice Roe Fish from our friends at Captain’s Ketch in Easton for the class last night at the K-B Kitchen School. We hosted Crisfield native and local artist Ben Dize, who came in to share his knowledge of shad and the tricky art of boning it. Shad are known not only for their tasty flesh and roe but for their crazy bone structure, which makes it a particularly difficult fish to filet. And they have a lot of bones!
We had a great time, as Ben and Kevin teamed up to present this very seasonal meal.
Ben shared his waterman’s knowledge of the life of a Shad and demonstrated his skill with the knife, including the retrieval of the roe. It is too bad that I failed to get a photo of the fully boned filet… (I don’t know why I also didn’t get any pictures of the finished and plated dishes…) Afterwards, everyone sat down and enjoyed Kevin’s preparation of the roe, followed by the very boneless fish – no one got any bones! It was a delicious and edifying evening in the K-B Kitchen.
Be on the lookout for more of these “Guest Instructor” sessions at the K-B Kitchen.
K-B Market and Kitchen 