Stuart's Fresh Seafood Market

The Little Fish That Could
by Erica Marcus

Blowfish may be odd creatures, but at this time of year they're inexpensive to buy, easy to cook and fine to eat. AT FIRST GLANCE, the blowfish appears to be an unassuming little fish. Rarely weighing more than a pound, it has a mottled brown hide, albeit with spiffy orange detailing, bright teal eyes and a cute little beak.

But when threatened-say, by a human who intends to serve it for dinner-the blowfish's white belly puffs up, skin taut as a balloon's, until the fish is pretty much spherical. At that point, the human might find it almost impossible not to pick up the blowfish up and use it as the centerpiece of a game of catch.

Scratch a Long Islander of a certain age who spent summers at the beach and you'll invariably uncover a blowfish-tossing memory.

"We had a summer house out here," recalled Charlotte Klein-Sasso as she looked out across Fort Pond Bay, just a few miles northwest of her present Montauk home. "My brothers and I would cast right from the shore to catch blowfish. Then we'd toss them around, tormenting them as small children do."

After a little reflection, she added, "I think we enjoyed catching blowfish so much more than other fish because, let's face it, after you bring a fluke up, the show's over. With puffers the fun goes on and on-like making Jiffy Pop."

That was back in the '60s. Most younger Long Islanders have been denied this sports tradition because it's been decades since northern blowfish, which live in waters from New York to the Carolinas, were so plentiful that you could practically kick them up on the shore.

That's not to say that blowfish were appreciated in their heyday. Fishermen considered them trash fish, the unavoidable by-product of fishing for prizes such as bluefish, weakfish and squid. Local baymen still evince this deep-seated disdain by the name they use-toadfish.

Actually, the blowfish has a long list of aliases. Besides toadfish (or, more familiarly, "toad"), there's puffer, bottlefish, swellbelly, chicken-of-the-sea. The last one, no doubt, alludes to the fish's culinary appeal. As with monkfish, a blowfish has only a sturdy backbone running through its body, with no little bones sticking out from it. The cleaned blowfish "tail" is a skinless cone of white flesh that looks more like a headless jumbo shrimp than a fish. Thus it can be be picked up by the tail fin and eaten like a chicken drumstick.

Charlotte Klein-Sasso remembers her mother's way with the blowfish that she and her brothers would bring home from the beach: Mrs. Klein would dip the tails first into flour, then egg, then bread crumbs before frying them to a golden brown. Now that Klein-Sasso is, with her husband Bruce Sasso, the co-proprietor of

Stuart's Seafood Market in Amagansett, her blowfish past is writ large. Stuart's is one of the East End's biggest retailers of blowfish, buying up all it can of the daily haul, and Klein-Sasso passes on variations of her mother's recipe to novice customers along with the assurance that the Long Island blowfish is absolutely safe to eat; it is only distantly related to the infamous Japanese blowfish, or "fugu," which must be handled by a licensed sushi chef lest the toxins in the internal organs seep into the flesh.

One of Stuart's most reliable blowfish sources is Jens Lester, a second- generation bayman, who this year started finding blowfish in his trap right on schedule, around May 20. Lester said he expects them to last well into June, perhaps even into July, after which the blowfish head back out into deeper water, returning for a few weeks in October.

On a gray morning about a week into blowfish season, Lester set out in his 20-foot boat from the beach at Fort Pond Bay. He only had to motor 50 yards or so to reach his pound trap, a net-walled box 20 by 30 feet wide, 18 feet deep, the corners of which are attached to poles stuck deep into the sand.

Lester maneuvered his boat around the trap, gradually hoisting up the bottom so that all the fish in the trap were lifted to the water's surface.

Most of the trapped fish were sea robins, chunky brown fish with big orange wings that are considered trash fish. In among the robins were skates, porgies, a daylight fish (so named because it is translucent enough that you can see the daylight through it), beautiful tawny squid and our quarry, blowfish.

Leaning over the side of the boat, Lester used a long-handled net to scoop the fish out of the trap, then tossed each species of fish into a separate bucket. The motions were second nature; Lester's been doing this since he was a boy. "My father would take me with him when he went out for blowfish," he said as he worked. "My job was to pop them. My dad told me if I didn't pop them, they'd blow up and blow a hole in the side of the boat."

There is, Lester explained, a perfectly sensible rationale for this: You can fit many more in a bucket when they're popped. Regarding a bucket of blowfish, fully inflated and making peculiar wheezing noises, the 56-year- old fisherman took out his knife and punctured the lot of them, as if popping so many balloons.

After 90 minutes, Lester had caught 16 pounds of blowfish, 15 pounds of squid, 11 pounds of skate, 8 pounds of porgy and one 1.7-pound sea bass, all of which he delivered to Stuart's. "Not a great day," he pronounced. Sixteen pounds of blowfish was a far cry from the hauls of Lester's childhood.

The reasons for the decline in blowfish in recent years are not fully understood, but Bob Valenti probably knows as much about Sphaeroides maculatus as anyone. Valenti, who holds a doctorate in fish genetics, also is the director of Multi Aquaculture Systems Inc. in Amagansett, a company that, among other pursuits, farms fish and sells them wholesale.

"It's due to a series of factors," allowed Valenti, and among them, doubtlessly, are the impressive comebacks made by some of the blowfish's main predators. "Now that bass and fluke are spawning inshore," he said, "blowfish are going to get gobbled up. Today most baby blowfish don't end up in the market, they end up in a striped bass' belly."

That the blowfish hold gustatory appeal for bass is ironic, since the whole point of their puffing up is to discourage would-be diners. "When something bigger approaches them, or when they're handled," explained Valenti, "they puff up. In the water, they puff up with water; out of water they puff up with air.

They have very rough skin, like sandpaper. Between that and the swell, they're not a very appetizing meal."

This putative bass opinion is not shared by Fred Terry, proprietor of the Montauk seafood institution Lobster Roll/Lunch, as well as the recently opened Lobster Roll West in Baiting Hollow on the North Fork. A lifelong advocate of local seafood, Terry claimed that his "are the only restaurants willing to pay the price to tie up the whole blowfish catch on the East Coast."

Terry started serving blowfish occasionally 10 years ago, but in 1996 he began featuring them on the menu. "Now we sell all the blowfish we can get, 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of fillet each summer." Terry has a historic attachment to blowfish that few can match. The Terrys were one of the first European families to settle on the North Fork. "My family," he said, "has been eating swellbellies since 1640. We have diaries recording how the family would go out and catch them."

You could, in fact, call Fred Terry Long Island's own Mr. Blowfish. Or, more precisely, Mr. Swellbelly. Terry trademarked the name "swellbelly" five years ago as well as "Mr. and Mrs. Swellbelly" and "plate of puffers." He also registered the domain name "swellbellies.com."

All this legal wrangling is a preamble to what Terry expects to be a bona fide blowfish boom in the next few years. "We're not too far away from farming them," he revealed. "They don't raise well in farms because they don't tolerate cold water, and the gas mixture in the water has to be just right. But we're getting close."

If they're so difficult to farm, why bother? Terry could barely contain himself as he reeled off the reasons. "They're pure white meat, with only a center bone. They're extremely easy to clean. They're low in fat and high in protein. They get to market weight within 11 months. They're the best fish in the world."

"Look," continued Terry. "I started my career on the docks of Montauk 40 years ago. They would bring tuna in as trophies and back then, you couldn't give tuna away."

The fish fates are fickle. Not long after those scorned tuna-now seared and sesame-encrusted-became ubiquitous on fancy menus, things were looking bleak for a firm-fleshed fillet called Patagonian tooth fish. Bleak, that is, until it was renamed Chilean sea bass.

Could blowfish, in its swellbelly guise, be the Chilean sea bass of the new millennium?