{"id":18655,"date":"2018-08-26T21:28:21","date_gmt":"2018-08-26T21:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/food.hoggardwagner.org\/?p=18655"},"modified":"2018-08-26T21:28:21","modified_gmt":"2018-08-26T21:28:21","slug":"grilled-eggplant-hammerhead-shark-tiny-corn-wild-tomato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/food.hoggardwagner.org\/?p=18655","title":{"rendered":"grilled eggplant; hammerhead shark; tiny corn; wild tomato"},"content":{"rendered":"

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it’s a bucket of hammerhead shark steaks (I’d already picked out mine)<\/em><\/p>\n

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I’ve never seen a hammerhead shark steak in the Greenmarket.<\/p>\n

In Friday I saw a hammerhead shark steak in the Greenmarket.<\/p>\n

That night I cooked the hammerhead shark steak I saw in the Greenmarket.<\/p>\n

It was a special occasion, since we were entertaining a friend visiting from Berlin, and I’m pretty sure there are no hammerhead shark steaks in Berlin. I was really intrigued, they looked beautiful, and I couldn’t resist buying some. It didn’t occur to me that I was taking a chance, especially sharing it with company, since I had never cooked hammerhead before, and neither of us had ever even tasted it.<\/p>\n

Once home, I couldn’t find anything on line that seemed useful as a cooking suggestion, but something told me I could do worse than just treating it like swordfish, since I had done exactly that 2 years ago<\/a> with a very different member of the shark family.<\/p>\n

Fortunately I hadn’t really looked deeply into what was<\/em>\u00a0there on the internet until the next day, when I went back on line to learn more about what we had eaten the night before. It seemed that almost no one had anything good to say about the taste of hammerhead shark, and in fact much of the conversation was pretty frightening, especially when it got into the uric acid thing. One of the more positive comments read, “They are edible if you are starving.”<\/p>\n

Well, we weren’t starving, and they were far more than merely edible. Maybe ours was a young one, and maybe the fisherman knew what he was doing. I would say that if there were any shortcomings, it was in its texture, or its dryness, both of which may have been my doing, although hammerhead flesh is described everywhere as meaty and firm. Still, I may have used too high a flame, and\/or kept it on the heat a bit too long.<\/p>\n

I’m willing to prepare it again, if I ever come across another, but\u00a0most sharks of any kind appear in markets as a byproduct in a search for other fish, so it may be a while before I get a chance.<\/p>\n

The vegetables were stars throughout the meal, and almost as exotic as the hammerhead.<\/p>\n

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Before we got started that night there was an aperitif.<\/p>\n