Can you carbonate raw fish?

if so, should you?

Hello, to the finest clowns on Planet Earth!

You. That’s you. Congratulations on being here witnessing the greatest culinary feats known to man at Food is Stupid. As a reward, I will give you a kitten photo, since you’ve all been asking for them. Davida took this one, and it’s wonderful.

Isn’t Scorpion handsome?

Well. Okay. As the parents of kittens it’s our job to love our baby cats unconditionally, even if they look terrifying when they’re half-asleep. At least you can see his tiny teeth, which are comically small. Cat teeth are the baby corns of teeth.

A thing I learned about our kittens is that they frequently smell like ass. One, they’re still learning to groom themselves, and two, they think the litterbox isn’t just a toilet, it’s also a source of entertainment. I watched Sub-Zero swat at Scorpion’s head today while he was preparing to pop a squat. He did not like that. Imagine someone reaching over into a toilet stall to smack you on the head right as you’re about to sit down. You’d probably bite them too.

As all of you know, I, Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history, tend to switch shit up every week so you guys don’t get bored.

However, I felt like I did not do my SodaStream enough justice by simply making weird hard seltzers with it. Fine, a drink is one thing, but a SodaStream is built to make drinks. I can do better than that.

When my former coworker Renee found out I’d purchased one for the newsletter, she excitedly text messaged me to inform me that you can also carbonate fruit and vegetables with it. Pretty much anything that has moisture content in it is fair game. Since the SodaStream basically just forces carbon dioxide into water using heavy pressure, it seems reasonable that it would be able to do this with small tomatoes and the like. Fizzy grapes sound cute.

Then I thought, wait. Can you carbonate meat? The neck of a SodaStream isn’t big enough to accommodate, say, a whole bone-in pork chop, but little chunks of something could easily fit in there. But even if I could carbonate a whole pork chop, I would probably not be eating it raw, sashimi-style. I’d have to cook it and maybe all the bubbles would go away when I did that.

Wait. Did I just say sashimi-style?

Why couldn’t I just try carbonating sashimi?

Dannis Ree, you’re a genius. You’ve done it again. It’s okay, you can all sit down, I’ve already given myself a standing ovation.

I got a little package of cubed sashimi from the Korean grocery store, Joong Boo Market.

I am there at least twice a month now, usually looking for cool ingredients to shove up my ass. I find something new every time I go, and it’s basically a wonderland.

Now, these cubes were already small enough to pick up easily with a pair of chopsticks and could fit into the SodaStream bottle as-is.

But what I really wanted to do was maximize surface area on the fish by cutting it into even smaller pieces, which would also maximize how much carbonation could potentially get into the fish. So I’d have to cut the fish even smaller.

This is what some people call science. Other people call it magic. Some call it stupid.

I call it genius.

Just like cat teeth are the baby corns of teeth, I turned these sashimi cubes into the baby corns of raw fish.

I excitedly jammed the fish into the bottle and took this photo of the warning saying to “ONLY carbonate water.”

Ha. I’ll show you, SodaStream. I take instructions like this as a challenge, not a warning. This is why I crap my pants every time I see a sign that says “No Dumping” on it.

I can just imagine my phone call with SodaStream’s customer support line, telling them I ruined their product with raw fish.

“Excuse me, you did what now? You’re the third person this week, and it’s only Tuesday! I quit.”

I pushed on the Sodastream button and watched in amusement as some of the fish cubes violently flew around the bottle.

It’s always good times in our household.

Seriously, doing this just to watch raw fish fly around in a tornado tube was 100% worth it, no matter how the experiment was destined to end up.

I pushed the mechanical carbonation button probably a little too many times, because the device started hissing at me angrily.

I’m assuming the sound was a safety pressure mechanism that activates only when the bottle is at max safe pressure. Honestly, that’s the best way to do a scientific experiment. By making assumptions about your own personal safety.

I let the fish sit in the machine for a few minutes, shook it to move the cubes of fish around, and pressurized it again multiple times.

I finally released the bottle, and broke out our finest La Choy soy sauce to kick off my maiden voyage with hopefully carbonated sashimi. Would this work?

I popped a raw fish cube into my mouth and waited.

Holy shit. It actually worked. I carbonated raw fish. I couldn’t believe it. The fish had a tiny effervescence to it, the same kind you experience with Pop Rocks, just with a soft, meaty texture. I could feel tiny bubbles coming out when I pressed the fish with my tongue inside my mouth. It was awesome. The carbon dioxide did make the fish a little bitter, the same kind of bitter you experience when you drink club soda, though. For me it wasn’t a deal breaker, but some kind of citrus would have helped. Maybe red onion juice.

Davida tried some and made a face. Come to think of it, it looked kind of like this:

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I did it. I made bubbly sashimi. If you see this on the menu at a fine dining restaurant in the future, please raise a glass to me. Because of this, I will have officially won every James Beard Award, especially in the category of carbonated fish. And you know what you do for James Beard Award winners-to-be? You share their newsletter on social media:

The other thing you do for self-proclaimed James Beard Award winners is that you sign up for paid subscriptions to their newsletters. It gets you even more editions, some of which are for subscribers only. Plus you get access to the entire backlog of what I’ve done so far, at foodisstupid.substack.com.

Plus it pays for SodaStreams.

I’m still mulling over what to do for Friday’s edition for paid subscribers, but I’m sure it’ll be awesome.

See some of you in your inboxes on Friday, and I love all of you.