I try to visit a new “splurge” restaurant about once a season. It’s a great way to connect with the changes in local ingredients and celebrate the year in food and drink. But now, having been to Gravitas, a modern American restaurant in Ivy City, I think I might have to change my routine and go only here. Helmed by Matt Baker, Gravitas’s exceptional team consistently creates new, inspiring, and refined menus that have me eagerly awaiting my next meal.

The cuisine at Gravitas focuses on ingredients from the Chesapeake watershed. This means a lot of seafood, like tuna and oysters, but also locally raised meat and vegetables. Recently, I’ve been wowed by their oxtail porridge with black truffles and parsnips, perfect for early fall. The oxtail is served with its braising liquid, and it’s incredibly juicy and pulls apart easily. The oat porridge is arranged around the oxtail centerpiece and the parsnips are on top and have a touch of earthy sweetness.

I always love going to Little Serow on a night off. It serves up Northern Thai specialties, and I think it’s consistently one of the best places to eat in the city, hands down. It’s just great, straightforward cooking. The dining room is small, no frills, but cozy and inviting. It’s generally always busy. It’s pretty dark in there but every time I’ve been, I’ve seen another chef or another industry person. There really isn’t anything else like it in DC.

The dining experience itself is also very unique: you never know what you’re going to get, because they only serve a pre-set, rotating menu; the food is super spicy; and they don’t make any special accommodations. I am a huge fan of the Golden Mermaid Menu, which is a fish- and shellfish-based menu that they do several times a year. It’s different every time they do it, but last time I had this crazy fried fish; it was a whole fish with Southeast Asian-style flavors—fish sauce, chilies, that kind of thing. Before heading over, do note that the restaurant is closed on Sundays and Mondays.

The parasites that infect most marine fish are nematodes, or roundworms, from the genus Anisakis. It’s preferable to avoid eating them, of course, but conventional wisdom says that the stray live anisakid in your gut will, at worst, provoke some discomfort—nausea and possible stomach pain, similar in kind to a bout of food poisoning.

That impulse to find a more hospitable environment, Sakanari says, is what makes anisakids particularly worrisome for humans. The human body is sufficiently different from that of whales and elephant seals—typical anisakid end hosts—that it forces the worms to wander around inside of it. As they do so, they probe along the intestinal wall, trying to penetrate it and sometimes getting stuck in the process, which can necessitate resection. (Interestingly, because humans are a natural end host for tapeworms, Sakanari says that tapeworm infection, as disgusting as it might sound, would be preferable to larval anisakid infection. The pathologies associated with the adult fish tapeworm infection are by and large less severe, and can be treated with a simple anthelmintic.)

But there are caveats: Freshwater fish and some anadromous fish—fish, like salmon, that divide their life cycles between fresh and salt water—are susceptible to broad fish tapeworms, which are widely considered more harmful than other parasitic worms. Few experts recommend eating fish in the cod family—particularly Atlantic cod, but also Pacific cod, haddock, and pollack—since they’re highly susceptible to infection by a range of parasites. (According to Haraguchi, there’s another reason fish in the cod family are not eaten raw: “There’s so much moisture [in the flesh], it doesn’t taste good.”) The results speak for themselves. Not only does Osakana offer a range of fish for sashimi that’s rarely found at other fish markets—I found porgy, sea trout, tilefish, and Spanish mackerel on a recent visit—but the fish flesh is both visibly and texturally altered: a little darker, a little firmer, drier in the mouth, with a flavor that’s a tad more pronounced. To test this, I ordered from Osakana a whole Spanish mackerel, which the shop gutted, de-headed, and cleaned but otherwise left untouched. (This is a service Osakana provides to any customer, given advance notice.) I filleted the fish myself and sliced it up into sashimi. While it was undoubtedly quite fresh, it paled in comparison to the Spanish mackerel sashimi you can buy, either in blocks or presliced, from the store’s display case.

Dr. Judy Sakanari, a parasitologist in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, believes that this view downplays the risks of ingesting anisakids. “Infection by these parasites can be very serious and can lead to resection [surgical removal of part of an organ] of the intestine,” she warns. Sakanari stresses that understanding the life cycle of the parasite is necessary to a full appreciation of the risks involved.

All parasites seek to reach their end-host organisms. For tapeworms, these are bears and other fish-eating mammals; for anisakids, they’re marine mammals, such as whales, seals, and dolphins. If all goes as the parasite gods intend, fish carrying infectious worm larvae will be consumed by an end-host organism. But if those fish are snatched up in a trawler or caught on a line, the ideal parasitic life cycle is interrupted. As soon as the fish’s body temperature begins to rise to that of the end-host mammal, the parasite larvae in its gut will attempt to find a way out, leading them to burrow into the fish’s flesh. This is one reason why it’s always best to keep ungutted fish cold: Any parasite larvae in the fish gut will remain immobile as long as the temperature is sufficiently low.

Sakanari notes that preparations like ceviche, in which fish are submerged in an acidic bath, do nothing to kill off anisakids, since they thrive in highly acidic environments. Candling—in which a strong light is shined through thin fish fillets placed on a glass, in order to spot parasites to be removed—is also not foolproof: Sakanari describes an experiment in which she and her colleagues examined a piece of rockfish using this method and determined that it was free of parasites. After cooking, they then flaked the fish fillet and examined it, and found that they had in fact missed several worms. Even experts can fail to completely deworm a fillet.

The upshot of all this: The only real way to be sure that you’ve eliminated any parasites in the flesh is by using temperature. “It’s best to properly freeze or cook the fish. That’s the bottom line,” Sakanari says. Is it worth the risk to eat raw fish that hasn’t been properly frozen? “It depends on how much you love the dish,” she says. “There are always risks to eating anything raw and improperly prepared or washed, so it is incumbent upon consumers to be aware of the risks and how to prevent the infections.”

Both Haraguchi and Herron point out that, in certain cultures, fish has long been served raw despite never having been frozen at all, and neither was bothered by the idea of eating fish under those circumstances (though they stress that the fish they sell for raw consumption has been frozen according to FDA guidelines). Of parasites, Haraguchi says, “It’s natural. Parasites are as natural as seeing a ladybug in farmers market vegetables.” When I tell Herron that I myself have purchased fluke at The Lobster Place, butchered it, and eaten it raw at home, he says, “I’ve done the same thing. I’m fine, you’re fine. And everybody was doing that before these regulations came out, and everyone was okay.”

Temperature Abuse and Bacterial Contamination: The Real Danger
Haraguchi and Herron agree that parasites in raw fish are less of a concern than bacterial contamination. “At the end of the day, we can freeze this product—so we’ve gotten rid of the worms—but you could temp-abuse it at home, we could temp-abuse it here, there’s a million different things that can impact the bacterial count on that fish,” Herron says.

This FDA table details the species-specific risks of live parasites in fish. But the information here is a little misleading, and meant to serve more as an agency warning about the perils of mislabeling fish than as a practical guide to which fish must be frozen prior to raw consumption. Exempted from the FDA’s freezing requirements are, as Herron mentions, large species of tuna—deemed safe based on the frequency with which they are eaten in raw form and the infrequency of related, documented parasitic infection—as well as aquacultured fish, like salmon, given verification that the feed it’s raised on is parasite-free. To meet FDA guidelines, every other type of fish must be frozen to those temperatures, even if the table does not indicate that it carries a parasite risk, because it “may have a parasite hazard that has not been identified if these fish are not customarily consumed raw or undercooked.”

It’s a paradox: The FDA will not deem a fish free from parasite hazards, and thus safe to eat raw without freezing, unless that fish is eaten raw, without being frozen, frequently enough to present sufficient evidence of its safety. To Luke Davin, the general manager of Osakana, this standard means that “deviating from [the FDA’s] ‘freeze it all’ approach puts the burden of testing and proof on the processor.” He says that most, if not all, fish markets lack the resources to exhaustively test the fish they receive for parasite hazards. The easiest solution, then, is simply to freeze everything.

What the FDA Guidelines Mean (and Why Tuna and Farmed Salmon Are So Common)
Regulations regarding fish sold for raw consumption vary from state to state, although every state points to FDA guidelines as the gold standard; the key difference between the states is whether those guidelines are enforced. Haraguchi and Herron note that both the New York City Department of Health (which regulates restaurants in NYC) and the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets (which regulates fish markets throughout the state) have adopted the FDA guidelines as law. While those recommendations are primarily focused on limiting pathogenic bacterial growth (more on that below), they do include rigorous specifications for killing parasites.

Herron describes those specifications this way: “Any wild fish except tuna species—bigeye, yellowfin, bluefin, bonito/skipjack—those wild fish need to be frozen for specific periods of time at specific temperatures to get rid of parasites.” The exact temperatures and times can be found on the FDA website, but suffice it to say that those temperatures, reaching as low as -31°F, are well below what a home freezer can reliably produce and maintain, which is why it isn’t advisable to try this at home. Sushi restaurants and fish markets use what’s called a “super freezer,” which is exactly what it sounds like: a freezer that maintains super-cold temperatures. (Osakana’s super freezer, for example, maintains a temperature of -60°F.)

The appropriation of sushi and sashimi for this purpose makes sense, since many Americans eat raw fish primarily in Japanese restaurants. It’s the “grade” portion that is entirely misleading. There is no national governing body that grades fish in the same way that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) grades beef. Although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issues advisory guidelines that sketch out processes for handling a variety of fish meant for raw consumption, those guidelines are not intended to determine the quality of the fish in the way marbling determines the quality of beef—only its relative safety for eating raw. So when you see a piece of fish labeled sushi- or sashimi-grade, that means that the seller has judged it safe to eat raw. The claim is only as trustworthy as the fish market that makes it. Because some infections are asymptomatic, and many are thought to go unreported, the risk of infection may be greater than statistics suggest. On a less scientific level, worms—particularly parasitic worms—inhabit dark recesses of our collective imagination.

How Dangerous Are Parasites? Depends Who You Ask
Despite the FDA’s blanket recommendations for the elimination of parasites, which is the main goal of its freezing guidelines, very few infections from eating raw fish have been documented in American medical literature. In the US, eating raw fish that hasn’t been frozen is rare enough that the agency’s “Bad Bug Book” uses Japan as a reference point, since the practice is far more prevalent there. But even in Japan, where freezing of fish meant for sashimi is not required, reported infection rates are vanishingly small compared to the total population. (For instance, the Bad Bug Book reports “more than 1,000 cases” of infection by anisakis worms, the most common parasite in marine fish, reported annually in Japan, but keep in mind that’s out of a total population of ~127 million in 2015.) The idea that eating a piece of seemingly pristine, delicious fish carries a risk of infestation by alien-like organisms is enough to give anyone—including health authorities equipped with all the relevant, fear-assuaging data—the heebie jeebies.

Officially, the terms “sashimi-grade” and “sushi-grade” mean precisely nothing. Yuji Haraguchi, owner of the Brooklyn-based Osakana, a fish shop specializing in sashimi, recalls using them for marketing purposes when he worked as a sales representative for wholesale fish distributor True World Foods. Back in 2004, the company was trying to expand its customer base beyond Japanese restaurants, and Haraguchi’s mission was to convince other restaurants to serve their customers raw fish besides tuna. “The term ‘sushi-grade fish’ was very effective in terms of making sales, but at the same time, I had to provide the right product and the right information,” he says. Davis Herron, director of the retail and restaurant division at The Lobster Place fish market in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, agrees: “It’s a marketing term that has little significance [with respect] to actually being able to consume raw fish.”

The appropriation of sushi and sashimi for this purpose makes sense, since many Americans eat raw fish primarily in Japanese restaurants. It’s the “grade” portion that is entirely misleading.trustworthy as the fish market that makes it.

At Osakana, Haraguchi’s idea of what it means for a specific fish to be sashimi-grade depends not just on the safety of the fish, but also on its quality. First, Haraguchi does not source any farmed fish. (Farmed fish, he says, tastes more like fat and less like the fish itself, due to the feed it’s raised on, so he avoids it.) Instead, he sources wild, local fish, and his suppliers know that he intends to sell that fish as sashimi. This gives Osakana the benefit of securing some very fresh fish that has been handled in such a way as to minimize bruising of the flesh. The trade-off is that Haraguchi and his staff—and their customers—have to be flexible, depending on what’s available.

The fish Osakana receives is never allowed to stay whole overnight. Instead, it is scaled, gutted, and de-headed; carefully washed in running water; and filleted. Some fish undergo further treatments in order to make the skin edible—for example, the skin on Spanish mackerel is torched, and boiling water is used to blanch porgy skin in a process known as yubiki—while others are skinned. The fillets are then allowed to air-dry in a refrigerator designed to maintain a controlled temperature and humidity level to reduce the moisture content in the flesh, a process sometimes referred to as “aging.” “Taking the moisture out is sanitary, and it makes the fish more flavorful,” Haraguchi says, noting that “a lot of people make the mistake of packing fish right after it’s filleted, and there’s a lot of moisture still left, whether it’s from the fish or from the water used to clean the fish.” After the fish has sufficiently dried, it’s frozen in a super freezer to kill parasites. “Of course, freshness is important,” Haraguchi says, “but the most important thing is how it’s handled the closer it gets to the table or the customer.”

Finally, additional confusion has been borne out of some widespread and misleading terminology. Some fish markets will have a section of their display cordoned off, containing a few pristine-looking pieces of tuna and salmon labeled “sushi-” or “sashimi-grade.” A great fish market may advertise sushi- or sashimi-grade hamachi and fluke as well. But, as anyone who has eaten much sushi knows, there are plenty of other fish in the sea. In indicating that these fish are safe to eat raw, the labels also imply—erroneously—that others are not.

I spoke to several experts to help demystify what “sushi-” and “sashimi-grade” mean, and to outline best practices for preparing fish at home for raw consumption.* If you’d like to just skip ahead to the tips, click here. For a more involved description of the risks inherent in eating raw fish, including the possibility of parasite infection and bacterial contamination, read on.

Few foods can rival a sliver of raw fish, impeccably fresh and minimally adorned, whether it’s perched atop a mound of sushi rice or swimming in a spicy citrus bath. And yet, despite the popularity of incredibly simple dishes like sushi, sashimi, crudo, poke, and tartares on restaurant menus, for many cooks, preparing raw fish at home remains a daunting task.

In part, this stems from uncertainty about the risks of eating raw fish. Many people will gladly place their faith in an anonymous sushi chef at a random restaurant, but nevertheless shy away from the potential dangers of homemade ceviche. Cooks comfortable with chopping up may think twice about doing the same for striped bass.

And then there’s the issue of availability. Many Americans struggle to find fresh seafood, and even those with access to good fish markets are rarely sure of their ability to gauge the freshness of fish, both whole and filleted. That can drastically reduce their confidence in eating fish at all, let alone raw.

The information in this guide applies to finfish and flatfish only. Raw shellfish, including crustaceans (like shrimp and lobster) and mollusks (oysters and clams), are subject to their own set of considerations, which unfortunately lie beyond the scope of this article.

The Short Version
If you know what to look for in fresh, whole marine fish (freshwater fish are susceptible to tapeworms and probably best avoided), as well as how to fillet them, then your decision to eat raw fish other than tuna and farmed salmon at home comes down to your individual comfort level with risk. To be 100% sure of avoiding parasites, you’ll have to stick to tuna and farmed salmon. But if you are willing to accept a small risk of infection—a risk that’s also present in any fish that hasn’t been grievously overcooked—then all you have to do is keep your fish cold and your preparation area and tools clean, and you’re good to go.

How to Season and Clean a Wok
Just like with a good cast iron pan, a carbon steel wok’s performance will improve the more you use it. Most come with a protective film of oil to prevent them from rusting or tarnishing in the store, but it’s important to remove this layer before using it the first time. Scrub the wok out with hot, soapy water and dry it carefully; then place it over a burner on the highest heat possible until it starts to smoke. Carefully rotate the pan, so that every area of it is exposed to this super-high heat. Rub it down with oil using a paper towel held in a pair of tongs, and you’re ready to go.

After use, avoid scrubbing the wok unless absolutely necessary. Usually, a rinse and a rubdown with a soft sponge are all that’s needed. Purists may tell you not to use soap; I do, and my wok is still well seasoned and completely nonstick. Once it’s rinsed, dry the wok with a kitchen towel or paper towels, and rub some vegetable oil into the surface to give it a vapor-proof coating that will prevent it from rusting.

Traditional woks have a deep bowl shape designed to fit into a circular opening directly over the hearth. Unless you have a custom wok insert in your range (if you do, you probably aren’t reading this article anyway), you want to avoid round-bottomed woks. They won’t work, period, on an electric range, and are tough to use on a gas range—even with one of those wok rings. On the other hand, woks with bottoms that are too flat defeat the purpose of a wok, making it tough to flip properly and to move food in and out of the high-heat zone.

Your best bet is a wok with a four- to five-inch flattened area at the bottom, with gently sloping sides that flare out to between 12 and 14 inches. This will give you plenty of high-heat space for searing meats and vegetables at the bottom, while still providing ample volume and room to maneuver when flipping.

As for handles, you have two choices. Cantonese-style woks have a small handle on either side, while Northern-style woks have a single long handle, and usually a smaller helper handle on the opposite side. The latter is the type of wok you want. The large handle facilitates flipping and stir-frying, while the short helper handle makes it easy to lift.

There are a number of woks that match these criteria, but our favorite is the Joyce Chen Pro Chef Flat-Bottomed Wok, which sells for just $34 on Amazon at the time of writing.

Joyce Chen Flat-Bottom Wok
It features heavy-gauge carbon steel and a riveted, heat-resistant phenolic-plastic, Northern-style handle, plus a helper handle, and it’s extremely inexpensive. That said, be sure to check that you’re purchasing the 2mm-thick version; on occasion, Amazon sells out of our preferred wok and redirects customers to the Helen Chen 1.5mm-thick wok instead. Unfortunately, that wok does not meet our standards. With repetitive use, the oil you heat in your wok breaks down into polymers that fill the microscopic pores in the metal’s surface, rendering the material completely nonstick. As you break in your wok, the material will gradually change from silver to brownish and finally to a deep black. This is what you are looking for.

Cast iron is a better choice, though it still takes a relatively long time to heat up and cool down. It offers a better nonstick surface. The main problem with cast iron is that when it’s too thin, it is extremely fragile—I’ve seen cast iron woks crack in half when set down too hard. But when made thick enough to be durable, they are extremely cumbersome to lift, which is essential for proper flipping during a stir-fry.
Carbon steel is your best bet. It heats quickly and evenly; it’s highly responsive to burner input; it’s durable and inexpensive; and, when properly cared for, it will end up with a practically nonstick surface. (Read more about why carbon steel is a great cookware material here.) Look for carbon steel woks that are at least 14-gauge—about two millimeters thick—which won’t bend when you press on the sides.
Avoid nonstick woks at all costs. Most nonstick coatings cannot handle the high heat necessary for a proper stir-fry. They start vaporizing, releasing noxious fumes long before they reach the requisite temperature.

Woks come in an array of sizes, shapes, metals, and handle arrangements. Here’s how to pick the right one.
Agood wok is one of the most versatile pans in the kitchen. Beyond being the best choice for a stir-fry, it’s also the ideal vessel for deep-frying, steaming, and indoor smoking. It is the most commonly used pan in my kitchen.

But, as with most things, not all woks are created equal. They come in a dizzying array of sizes, shapes, metals, and handle arrangements. Here’s what you need to know.

Wok Materials
Stainless steel woks are a waste of money. Not only are they extremely heavy and difficult to maneuver, they also take a long time to heat up and cool down—a fatal flaw for something that requires rapid, on-the-fly heat adjustments, like a stir-fry. Food, particularly protein, has a tendency to stick to steel.They make browning difficult, and it’s impossible to get food to stick in place against the wok when you want to clear a surface to cook in the middle.

Woks are made in three ways. Traditional hand-hammered woks (like the ones they used to sell in those ’80s infomercials) are an excellent choice. The slight indentations left by the hammering pattern allow you to push cooked food to the sides of the pan, while adding ingredients to the center without them slipping. The only problem is that it can be difficult (dare I say impossible?) to find a hand-hammered wok with a flat bottom and a handle (more on those elements later).

Stamped woks are made by cutting out a circular piece of thin carbon steel and machine-pressing it into a mold. They are extremely cheap but completely smooth, which makes it difficult to stir-fry in them properly. They are, without fail, made from low-gauge steel and prone to developing hot and cold spots as well as feeling flimsy.

Spun woks are produced on a lathe, giving them a distinct pattern of concentric circles. This pattern offers the same advantages as a hand-hammered wok, allowing you to easily keep your food in place against the side of the pan. Spun woks can be found in heavy gauges, with flat bottoms and with flip-friendly handles. Fortunately, both spun woks and hand-hammered woks are inexpensive.

Swap out regular lemons for preserved ones in your go-to recipes for roast chicken and fish or grilled meats. For an easy weeknight meal, toss pasta with some good olive oil, a little garlic, and chopped preserved lemon peel. Impress your friends at brunch by mixing a little of the zesty preserving liquid into Bloody Marys and swirling chopped peel into yogurt with a little honey. And impress them again at dinner by adding a twist on the peel in your Martini. Use preserved lemons to liven up potato or grain salads, or to enhance your salad dressing, hummus, or even, Admony suggests, guacamole. Solomonov even likes to freeze his, then grate the peel for granita. (He also adds a pro tip: Don’t toss the leftover preserving liquid. Instead, “sprinkle it on vegetables or fish before baking. It ups the ante and brings out all of its surrounding flavors.”) Or follow North African tradition and simply put a bowlful out on the dinner table—it might just become your newest favorite condiment.

From there, the options are manifold. In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee suggests that a solution of 5 to 10% salt is needed to achieve a good North African–style preserved lemon. (As a reference, olives call for the same percentage.) A proper Indian pickled lemon calls for double that amount, as well as turmeric, fenugreek seeds, and chili powder. Or take a tip from Sortun, who encourages you to make a batch with fragrant, sweet Meyer lemons when they’re in season. You can also add cloves, mustard seed, or mace—just a few of the spices popularized by the British in the 19th century. Meanwhile, Admony uses a 70% salt to 30% sugar mix and adds chili and paprika, for a smoky, spicy twist, and turmeric, for color. She also lets her lemons ferment for a full three months. But if you’re in a hurry, Paula Wolfert has a five-day pickled method. Admony notes that she’s “even seen some chefs make a sous vide version in 12 hours,” which, she laughs, isn’t as good as the real thing, but certainly works in a pinch.