The Making of a Seafood Charcuterie Program at Ocean Cut

“Going back to my days the Ritz Carlton, the hardest thing for me to learn to make was pâtés and terrines,” muses Dirk Flanigan, executive chef of Ocean Cut. “Then throughout my career I’ve been doing that stuff; always little things here and there.” Charcuterie eventually became a fixture in Flanigan’s esteemed career, from making sausages at The Gage to curing whole muscles for Henri. “Then I got here.” 

 

Ocean Cut

At Ocean Cut, Flanigan finds himself in the unique position of doing something unseen in regards to charcuterie, taking his skills to the next stage and getting seriously crafty with seafood. When the chef came aboard, he had a specific vision for how he wanted the menu to look, without getting too overblown. “I thought about how I used to make lobster sausage, salmon sausage and all these things, so I thought about doing an ocean charcuterie program.” And just like that, he was taking the long established charcuterie tradition, one rooted in things like pork, foie gras and beef, in a fresh new direction. Piece by piece, the board came together, from “ham style” sablefish to eel and foie gras terrine. 

For the sablefish, Flanigan cures the fish for 24 hours with shaved apples draped overtop before employing the kitchen smoker to cook it at 242-degrees for 40 minutes. The end result is a fish with a distinct ham-like profile, served with mustard. 

Naturally, Flanigan also thought about doing some sort of seafood sausage, which he makes by folding lobster and scallop into a dense shrimp mousse. “While all these things sound very progressive, you want them to sound approachable too,” says Flanigan. “So that’s why there’s fennel and shallots and Pernot in there and the idea was to kind make it taste like an Italian sausage.” 

 

Ocean Cut

Then there’s the BBQ eel and foie gras terrine, an elegant take on surf & turf that Flanigan first tried when he served as chef at now-defunct Henri. “People totally dug it,” he recalls. “The terrine shows just how versatile both of those ingredients can be.” In a similar vein, Flanigan is also working on a duck and lobster galantine. 

Of course, an ocean charcuterie board wouldn’t be complete without some brandade. “It’s really cool to take that cured fish and fortify your sauces with it, but there’s lots of stuff you can do with it.” Although Flanigan sees it as sort of the wild card of the bunch—“it’s not technically charcuterie,” he points out—it fits in nicely with all its salty, cured qualities. 

Changing the charcuterie paradigm isn’t something that can just happen overnight, so Flanigan sees the dish as a steady evolution with lots of possibilities. “I want to get to a point where it just says ‘Ocean Charcuterie’ on the menu and we don’t have to list anything,” says the chef. “I really want to continue building on it.” Future ideas for the board include a tuna sausage and a pork belly-octopus combo that he’s envisioning as a capicola but with octopus. 

From the sea beans garnish with steaks to this nautical charcuterie board, it’s all about doing new things with seafood for Flanigan. Summarizes the chef, “I want to continue to bring the ocean to all the plates.”

- Matt Kirouac

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