Herring, Beet, and Potato Salad

Last summer, in what feels like an eternity ago, I visited a friend in London. We spent the days roaming the city, eating goat cheese and lox on baguette, and browsing through second-hand bookstores. In one of these bookstores, I spotted Luisa Weiss’s My Berlin Kitchen. Although my next flight was on EasyJet (which has notoriously terrible limits on carry-on luggage), I knew I had to buy the memoir – and somehow fit it into my already overly-full backpack.  

This summer I pulled out the memoir to reread it, and one recipe stuck out: a potato salad with herring and beets. I don’t know what drew me to this, since I was never a huge herring fan. But the recipe kept calling to the Eastern European Jew in me, so one day I grabbed some beets and decided to make it. And I’m so glad I did. This salad is perfect for a hot summer day: filling, yet summery, sweet and a little salty, with just the right amout of crunch. Every time it has been above 90 degrees this summer, I find myself craving this potato salad. For the herring skeptics out there, it’s really good without the herring. But if you eat fish, please try it with the herring. I don’t think that you’ll regret it.

This blog has covered enough depressing supply chains for the moment. (Though if that’s what you’re craving, take a look at these posts on shrimp, Italian tomatoes, avocados, and poultry.) Today it’s time to discuss an ingredient that you may still want to eat after learning about its supply chain (Yes, I do realize that sharing grim information about an ingredient and then suggesting a recipe that includes that ingredient is an inherent contradiction of this blog – welcome to the world of supply chains.)

For this week’s post I want to focus on herring. While we often discuss how sustainable fish is, we rarely focus on the small fish at the bottom of the food chain. This is a mistake, since the small fish – herring, sardines, anchovies – often have strong stocks. This is helped in some places by the fact that their predators, like haddock, cod, and tuna, have been overfished. As one top scientist said, “You remove the predator, you get more prey fish.” 

That’s not to say that herring stocks haven’t had their crashes. Many of the North Atlantic stocks have struggled over the past 60 years, going through cycles of collapse and recovery. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Northeast Atlantic stocks collapsed from overfishing, although they have recovered to varying degrees. The Atlanto-Scandian herring and Icelandic summer spawning herring still have “more vulnerable populations.” Stocks near Alaska and Canada in the Pacific have also crashed at times. And the Japanese stocks collapsed from overfishing 50 years ago and never recovered.

Despite these crashes, herring is relatively sustainable – that is, if you eat the herring, instead of using it as feed for other fish. Unfortunately, most of the herring caught in the US is turned into feed for farmed fish – say, for farmed salmon or tuna. But, if you do the math, you quickly realize how wasteful this is. It takes four pounds of herring to feed one pound of farmed salmon. To be more sustainable, you could simply eat one pound of herring. Moreover, herring is healthy and does not have as much mercury as larger fish, like tuna, often do.

The wastefulness of this system is exemplified by the herring sent to Japan, a country that imports a huge amount of herring. (As a reminder, Japan’s herring stocks crashed and have never recovered, so it has to import all its herring.) Japan imports herring mainly for its roe. But because only the roe is prized, the rest of the fish (and all the males) are turned into feed. This means that only a small amount of the actual herring – by one estimate about 12 percent – is eaten by people.

While using herring as feed is wasteful, eating herring remains a sustainable option. The stocks, at least in the Atlantic off the US and in Alaska in Sitka Sound are currently strong, and some of the North Atlantic stocks seem to have recovered. Plus, it’s much more sustainable to eat herring than to feed the herring to salmon and then buy farmed salmon. So, here’s my suggestion: instead of eating salmon, eat like a salmon, and consider giving herring a try!

Herring, Beet, and Potato Salad

Course: Dinner, Salad, Side

Servings

6

servings

Total time

2

hours 

Adapted, very slightly, from Luisa Weiss’s Pickled Herring Salad with Potatoes and Beets in My Berlin Kitchen.

This salad can take a while to make if you roast the beets. But (1) it’s worth it, and (2) most of that time the beets are either in the oven or cooling. The prep time for the rest of the ingredients is around 30 minutes, which includes boiling the potatoes.

Ingredients

• Roasted Beets

• 3 roasted beets, scrubbed clean

• 2 tablespoons of olive oil

• Herring, Beet, and Potato Salad

• 3 roasted beets, cooled to room temperature (from above)

• 6-8 small red potatoes or about 2 cups mini potatoes, boiled and cooled to room temperature

• 1 cup drained pickled herring pieces (from herring in wine sauce, including the onions from the wine sauce)

• 1 large pickle, sliced

• ½ cup of parsley, chopped

• 1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard

• 1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar

• 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil

Directions

• Roasted Beets
• To roast the beets, preheat the oven to 450˚ F (210˚ C ). Add two tablespoons of olive oil to a Dutch oven, casserole dish, or baking dish.
• Clean the beets well, scrubbing them if necessary, and chop off most of the stem, leaving about 2 inches. Place them in the Dutch oven or other baking dish and coat them in the olive oil.
• Cover the Dutch oven or baking dish. (If using a baking dish, you can cover it with aluminum foil.) Bake for 45 minutes, although it could take longer for the beets to cook through, depending on their size. The beets are done when you can skewer them easily. If, after 45 minutes, they are not done, keep cooking them, checking every 10-15 minutes.
• When cooked, let the beets cool and then peel them. This can get messy, so be careful. Cut into 1-inch pieces and set aside.
• Herring, Beet, and Potato Salad
• Boil the potatoes in salted water until soft. Let them cool to room temperature. If using red potatoes, into quarters (about 1-inch pieces).
• Add the chopped potatoes, herring, chopped pickle, and chopped parsley to a large serving bowl and mix together.
• In a separate small bowl, add the mustard. Add salt and pepper to taste. Pour the vinegar into the mustard and mix until it has formed a single mixture. Then drizzle in the olive oil and mix until it has emulsified.
• Drizzle the sauce over the potatoes, herring, pickle, and parsley.
• Add the beets to the potato mixture and mix. The deep purple from the beets will bleed into the rest of the salad. Eat and enjoy!

Notes

• If you like boiled beets, you can also cook them that way. I haven’t tried it, but you could probably also use canned or jarred beets, although it won’t taste as fresh.