Fishing (and Diving) For Art and Dinner
An interview with Eli Woolery of Carmel
Hello, All! After a few lovely weeks in New York, I’m thrilled to be back home in California with my almost-ripe Santa Rosa plums and my Meyer lemon tree. This week also marks the return of our interview series. Apologies for the lack of interviews in recent months—I kind of dropped the ball on them when I was finishing up my next cookbook (more on that in a few weeks!), but hopefully you’ve all enjoyed the additional recipes I posted instead.
This week I get to share a conversation I had with Eli Woolery, the co-host of the Design Better podcast, which explores the intersection of creativity and technology (also hosted here on Substack), and a lecturer at Stanford. He told me about his California childhood, his previous life as a food photographer, how he got into fishing (and underwater photography), and what he likes to do with his catch—hint: he doesn’t just eat it! He also shared a recipe for smoked rockfish croquettes (and his smoking technique), which I’ll share with all of you separately in a few days. Here’s what he told me, condensed and edited a bit:
[Note: If you like this post, hit the heart button! It helps others find the California Table.]
Eli Woolery
I don't know that I really was conscious of this when I was a kid, but I grew up in a very food-oriented place, in Napa, California. My folks were not in the food industry—they're both physicians—but they really enjoy food and wine. So, I got a lot of exposure to that from an early age. Both my parents are quite good cooks. My mom did the bulk of the cooking when we were younger, my grandparents, especially my paternal grandmother, were good cooks as well. She went back to culinary school kind of late in life, and, just as sort of a passion project, became a chef.
My mom grew up in Los Angeles. Her parents had been in New York and moved post World War II to Southern California. She grew up in Redondo Beach. My father grew up mostly in Ohio.
It was an interesting blend of foods, because my mom's side is Jewish from Eastern Europe and my dad's side has kind of a Scottish and Irish background. And they have very different food traditions. So, I was exposed to different things growing up. I wouldn't say that I was really a big participant in the cooking; I kind of maybe observed and helped out until I left and went out on my own. And even then, in college, I didn't really cook much. I’d say I really became more passionate about it in the last 10 years or so. My wife and I sort of share cooking duties, but I really enjoy it. I do it as much for pleasure as for sustenance, and for me it's another kind of creative outlet that I enjoy.
I was at Stanford for my undergrad, and then I spent sort of a random year in Bermuda at a biological research station, which is where I got into diving. I wasn't really using my training in product design, so I came back here—actually moved to Monterey—in 1999 and was working at a company making underwater photography equipment, doing a lot of diving and testing. I got into photography, and I started an underwater photography magazine and ran that for about three years.
At that point, we had moved up to the Bay Area, to Sausalito. I ended up kind of getting into the startup world, so I moved down to Silicon Valley for a few years. And that's around the time I started teaching at Stanford. But I always had the goal of moving back here. And when we started having kids, and we were both remote employees, it made sense to come back down. So, we moved back down here, right before my son was born, in 2015.
What got me even more into cooking was that for part of my time as a photographer, I was doing food photography. Most of my work was with this chef named Jeremy Fox who started a restaurant in Napa called Ubuntu, which became the first Michelin starred vegetarian restaurant in the US. I think working with him gave me an appreciation for the rabbit hole of complexity, I guess, that you could dive into with food—as well as the just making simple food really good. Through the course that, I got to work with a few other well-known chefs briefly, like Dominique Cren, and I just had a lot of admiration for their skill and creativity and talents.
And then, when I moved back down to the Monterey Peninsula/Carmel area, I got into spearfishing. A friend of mine who happens to work for fish and game taught me all the guidelines and the most sustainable fish to go for, and things like that. And, so, I began to cook a lot of my own fish and seafood dishes.
I love the ocean—being a surfer, diver, just being near the ocean. In all the other places I lived, the ocean was accessible, but down here, it's just somehow different. It's magical. And the diving is much better. I’d argue there's better surf—though there's probably better places to be if that's your core focus. And then just the kind of natural beauty, even up here in Carmel, but especially in Point Lobos or Big Sur; it’s hard to match anywhere else on the California coast.
Fishing in our area, the most common species you'll find is rock fish. The ones that tend to be closer to shore are either blue or black rock fish, or kelp rock fish. They tend to be a smallish to medium-sized fish. Some of the rock fish are very long-lived species, but those tend to be the deeper water ones. The ones closer to shore tend to mature faster. And they're sustainable. Sometimes we get lingcod, which are a bit larger; minimum size for those is 22 inches. And then cabazon, which are these very kind of ugly fish with very large heads—hence the name. Just this past month, I got my first white sea bass, which aren't as common up here, at least close to shore, and they can get quite large. They're a bit more common in Southern California, where you're fishing a little bit further offshore than you would spear fishing.
What's nice is that fishing is an that activity complements surfing, because if the surf is good, that means the diving is usually not great, because there's a fair bit of swell. So, if it's flatter, and I'll go diving—and that's more this time of year through early fall. And then later fall, winter, and early spring is more surfing, because you just can't really find a protected spot to dive. But when I can dive, I’ll often go once or twice a week.
My family members are not as big of fish eaters as I am. So, I had to be creative about how I make it. My wife likes it, but not just a filet with a veggie on the side—she likes something a little bit more elaborate. She likes fish tacos a lot and the more interesting, creative things that we discover. There's this British chef who’s show we watched, and he was traveling through France, and he made a seafood gratin, which sounds kind of weird, but it was sort of this layered seafood dish. We made that, and it was quite nice. Some other ones on the “favorite list” are Thai fish cakes; we do those really frequently. Sometimes I'll smoke fish in a smoker here. Smoked rockfish is good. Over time I've kind of built up a library of recipes that work with the fish that we get here that I can go to.
I do like simple preparations. So even something just like butter and tarragon is really nice—and it works well with scallops, too. Or, you know, sometimes I'll do a whole fish. That's kind of the best way to use the whole animal. If I'm filleting the fish, what I try to do is set the rest aside and make stock from it. Something my wife really likes a lot is a bouillabaisse, so I'll do that fairly frequently with my own stock and fish and then get some other shellfish.
My son is getting more into it. My daughter isn’t, unless it's sushi. Oddly, she'll eat sushi. But she doesn't like fish cooked, for the most part. And theoretically you can make sushi from rockfish, but you want to be food safe about it, so you have to freeze it below zero degrees for a few days to make it safe to eat. So, I haven't really have experimented with the sushi side of things. I've done ceviches before.
But one of the other things that I do with fish is Gyotaku prints. It’s a Japanese technique where you ink the fish, and then you make a print of the fish. And then you kind of ink in the details around it. I've loved Japanese culture for a long time, since I was a kid. I don't know exactly when I found out about this technique, but I decided to try it around the same time I moved back here. And I use an edible ink—it's a soy-based ink that is used for pastries and stuff—and that way I can safely eat the fish after making the print. And then a friend of mine, who's a Japanese designer who helps out with the class I teach at Stanford sometimes, she helped me design some of the hanko stamps that you sign these prints with. It’s pretty simple: ink the fish, and then you end up having to kind of paint in some of the details, like the eye.
I haven't lived long term in other places. But I've done a lot of traveling over the years. I spent a summer in Morocco, where I have family, and I love the food there. I spent a lot of years traveling, when I was with the magazine, to various more tropical places. I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico; our family spent six weeks in France, and over the years, we've spent a lot of time in London. And I think maybe what sets California apart a little bit is just the access to ingredients. Just next to me is the Salinas Valley, which grows something like 80 or 90 percent of the of the country's salad, essentially. It’s kind of crazy to think about. And we have a lot of friends in the ag industry, in various roles. And then the oceans are here. And wine is obviously a big thing in our area and all throughout California. We also have a kind of amazing melting pot of people everywhere, especially in big cities like San Francisco, who bring their own cultural perspective and ingredients. And I think that makes for a really interesting mix of things.
Other California Stories to Check Out
This headline, “One of California’s best burritos costs just $5,” from Cesar Hernandez at the SF Chronicle totally grabbed me—and now I need to stop and try them on my next drive down the coast. (It’s also a great little profile of the business.) If you haven’t been reading Luke Tsai’s “The Midnight Diners” series for KQED, make sure to check out the latest installment, “Brazen Head Is San Francisco’s Most Delightful Late-Night Secret;” it made me want to stay out late for the first time in a while! The Santa Barbara Independent (my hometown paper) alerted me to a collaboration between California sweet companies McConnell’s Ice Cream and See’s Candy. And the Santa Cruz Sentinel has an in-depth look at why it’s been so hard for the Gilroy Garlic Festival to come back (trigger warning: it starts with memories of the tragic shooting five years ago, with some photos.)
Photos and Prints: Eli Woolery
excellent writing! you really draw the reader in. (as a bonus, I found out I need to stop in Salinas for a burrito the next time I'm passing through there.)