Phony Abalone with Avocado Salsa

Chef John Guinivere prepares Phony Abalone with Avocado Salsa

You put it between this and you can pound it out that way. You don’t get the chicken meat everywhere. Of course this is—yes, absolutely. This is two things, it grinds the meat it makes it nice and flat so it’s going to cook for a real quick, and as far as the soaking time in the clam juice, you can go a couple of hours you can even go two days. It’s actually going to get a little bit better if it’s longer it marinates. So really, you just pounded it out and put it in that, throw it in the fridge, cover it and make sure you put it in a glass bowl chicken has a way of getting through plastics, it’s really funny and then, you’re set, and all you have to do then is pour and spread it. A little bit of water in this and now, it’s called egg wash. It goes in there. Use a little bit of oil. You can use either oil or butter. These are bread crumbs and they’re Japanese bread crumbs in there. They’re lighter, they’re crispier and I just prefer them over—whether regular or Italian—they’re great with seafood and seafood flavors. So, you go egg wash and use the bread cramps. If you want to make it really thick thing, you go back into the egg wash and then back in. I like to keep it really light as far as that goes, and then back in there. This is a spice that’s actually one of our chefs makes, a gentleman by the name of John Howie. He’s up and Seattle over by the Microsoft Offices, so one of the chefs in the NFL and he makes really good rubs and really likes this one. That’s also going to add a nice color to it. This really doesn’t take long to cook and often—I’ll just if I get a lot of people coming, I’ll go ahead and do batch after batch and put it on the oven, put it in there for like 275, they’ll stay on a nice and crisp and their still very moist actually. So you really don’t have to worry about them drying out. Turn that down, and next we’re going to do a—I call this avocado salsa. When you’re at the store, if you push down at the bar, it sort of pushes in and it doesn’t—it’s soft enough to push, it’s usually about as ripe of an avocado. If you can’t push in, then it’s not going to be very good for anything like salsa it would just be too hard, and actually aren’t there either. Turn that off, it’s quite well. This is where—if it was ripe enough, I want to use this technique. Shred the onions. Often when I’m making a batch guacamole, I want to do it really fast. I use that Surachi Hot sauce and of all things ranch dressing. It works really good to mix with guacamole. Everybody is like, ‘How did you make this?” And there’s always the cheater version I guess you could call it. Then the garlic, turn that over so if it’s—perfect, and if you’re doing garlic in something that’s raw, you want it pretty finely minced because otherwise someone’s going to get a big chink of garlic in their mouth and it’s just too much so, this is really you want, take a little bit of extra time and do a fine dice. And add some lemon and use your fingers as you’re strainer and we use some cilantro here. A little bit of extra virgin oil, you can use regular oil. This is the time to use a good oil, because you are going to pick up the flavors of it. Add black pepper and mix it with the hot sauce, and you should have some salt here, I put it up here. You really don’t want to mash—you have a course that’s really going to look nicer if they’re left in chunks. It’s really different flavors and you can certainly make it into like a guacamole but I personally prefer to be cubed. Add nice lemon wedge, since it’s Phony Abalone, we want to pretend it is still seafood. And if you press it out, this is about 22 box pound cheaper to do that regular abalone and I'm telling you, you can server this in the restaurant as abalone and people who love abalone could not tell the total difference. So there we go! Then at the edge there a little bit—that’s our Phony Abalone with Avocado Salsa.