Eat, drink and catch crab
Cooking school participants set traps and learn how to cook their catch of the day
VICTORIA, B. C. — When visiting the B.C. capital, here’s an unexpected addition to your “must do” list: learning how to catch, kill and cook fresh Dungeness crab.
Dan and Micayla Hayes, the charming husband and wife team behind The London Chef cooking school and catering company, are angling to not only get you up close and personal with spectacular West Coast seafood, but also teach you how to prepare it.
“It’s half cooking class, half floating fishing adventure,” says Micayla of their new “West Coast Best Coast” class. “It’s for people who are interested in the food of our area — they’ll get exposed in one moment to local seafood, local veg, local cheese and meat products, and local ciders and wines.”
The experience includes three hours on a luxury motor yacht with chef Dan Hayes, setting crab traps, sipping mimosas and learning about local sea life, and then three hours back at The London Chef’s professional demonstration kitchen to cook up the daily catch and enjoy a communal meal — complete with wines from Vancouver Island’s Blue Grouse Estate Winery — around the school’s 16-foot, farmhouse-style, Douglas-fir dining table.
“It’s going to connect people, I hope, to the animal, connect them to the fact that actually, yeah, you do have to kill something,” says Dan, who is also an English expat and sustainable-seafood advocate. “It was alive, it was fresh and it was swimming around, and now we’re eating it. And that connection people find daunting and a bit scary but also fascinating.”
A classically trained chef who’s worked at the prestigious Poissonnerie de l in London and with famed U.K. seafood chef Rick Stein, Dan lives in Victoria with Micayla, a bornand-raised Islander. The pair moved to Victoria from London in 2008, and Dan quickly fell in love with the abundant seafood, top-notch wines and high-quality produce this corner of the country is producing.
“I’ve been lucky enough to eat seafood all over the world and I think these Dungeness crab are absolutely exquisite,” says Dan, who also co-hosts a new APTN cooking show, Moosemeat & Marmalade. “People go to a supermarket or a fish monger and spend $50 on one crab ... one of these crab traps costs $50 and you have it for life.”
The class starts on the back of a spacious yacht, motoring away from Victoria’s waterfront, to drop the fish-head-stuffed crab pots just past the Inner Harbour breakwater. Once they’re down, it’s off for a coastline tour heading west toward Esquimalt Harbour, with mimosas in hand and a hearty boxed brunch to munch on.
The Olympic Mountains hog the horizon, white-towered lighthouses whiz by and chef Hayes pulls out a tray teeming with tasty ingredients — garlic, lemons, cilantro and an entire spring salmon — and the teaching begins.
“Today, we’re going to be doing two raw preparations, a ceviche and sashimi, so we’re going to go to Japan and South America,” says Dan, as he fights to stay upright, knife in hand, amid the waves and wakes. “Please excuse my stance ... I don’t always cook with my legs spread like this.”
He gets going on the dressings: “I’m going to start with the zest ... the sexiest part of the citrus fruits is the zest, always.” He moves onto breaking down the salmon, expertly slicing the meat from the bone: “Look at that colour, oh my goodness ... bright pink.”
A seasoned fisher and hunter, Dan passionately believes not a single part of a wild animal should go to waste. He packs up the salmon bones and skin, to be used to make a stock back at the cooking school, and places the freshly dressed salmon flesh onto a white serving plate.
The flavours are full and fresh, made all the better with a spectacular sea view and a full flute of Prosecco. Then it’s back to Victoria Harbour to haul in the crab traps and pull out the usable crabs — by law, they must be male and more than six inches long — and straight to The London Chef’s sparkling school kitchen to get going on the dish of the day: braised Provençal shellfish.
Ingredients are laid out waiting to be mixed with the just-caught crabs’ legs, but nothing is measured exactly nor are Dan’s instructions hard and fast rules — he knows cooking is about combining base knowledge with a heaping dose of fun.
“I prefer you to take away how to kill a crab, how to put it in the pan, the fact we use some booze and then finished it with tomatoes and cream,” says Dan.
The “ohs” and “ahs” during the relaxed post-class meal prove he knows exactly what he’s talking about.