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06 March 2007
I hate seafood. Even the smell makes me queasy. Yes, that includes crab, lobster, shrimp, and clams.
Mmm pan fried oysters... beer-boiled shrimp with horseradishy cocktail sauce... spider rolls... mussels steamed in a white wine butter sauce with bread for dipping...
My mom grew up on an island where she developed an intense hatred of seafood. Consequently, we never got to eat any while growing up. (Occasionally, my dad would take us to Captain D's, but that doesn't really count.)
To this day, I am conflicted about it: I like the idea of seafood, but I can't say that I really enjoy eating it all that much. I've probably just never had any of the really good stuff.
I would gladly eat seafood every meal of every day for the rest of my life. Especially crab. It is the food of the gods.
When I was a kid, our neighbor down the shore was this awesome little Hungarian man who truly believed that everything was edible. As a result, we ended up eating all kinds of odd things like smoked eel and raw conch. The only majorly awful thing he made us try was the fried shark's liver. That was a bad idea.
Seafood is probably the single most important reason why I am not a vegetarian at this point. It is a massive quality of life boost, and I wouldn't want to live without it.
I can eat over ten pounds of crawfish at a sitting. At Acme Oyster House, I had three and a half dozen oysters and still ate a poboy. When I lived in Austin, the local "cajun" restaurant had to end their ten cent boiled shrimp special because of me.
Me: I don't eat seafood. But I'm sure they'll have chicken or something at the restaurant.
Them: What about salmon?
Me: That's a fish.
Them: Not even lobster or crab?
Me: I wouldn't eat a steak if it came from a swimming cow. OK. I don't eat seafood.
I also hate nuts of any variety. Except corn nuts. Even walnuts? Yes, even walnuts.
God, I lurrrrve me some seafood (exception: anything with tentacles) and eat it almost daily -- it's one of the great benefits of living on the coast. When I was a kid, I remember wanting to be rich in part so that I could afford to eat lobster every day.
I'll eat prawns (what USians call 'shrimp') if they're peeled and served with lots of other nicer ingredients (i.e. in a stir-fry or something), but unpeeled they look too much like the sea bugs they really are.
As for crab, lobster, etc., no thank you. Giant bugs.
I've never eaten an oyster, and don't intend to. I've had bronchitis. I imagine swallowing an oyster to be very similar in terms of texture and flavour.
Fishies: Not fond of 'em, although I do have a nifty recipe for sole in white wine that ain't bad. Also, salmon sushi is good, but cooked salmon, no matter how it's done, is just not for me.
Oysters: Not in this lifetime. And yes, I've tried them.
Clams: In chowder and with pasta.
Shrimps: A-OK
Squids: Ditto
My current problem: I've been diagnosed as being deficint in vtamin B12. There are supplements I can take, of course, but I prefer to get what I need from real food. Sadly, the best sources seem to be either beef liver (NO), beef in general (given the mad cow thing here in the Northwest a little while back, moocows are off the menu), salmon or trout.
I love trout almondine. I've made Rachel Ray's recipe with fresh green beans a few times. I am sure the birthday trout is far better, but Rachel's isn't bad for a quick dinner.
I hated, hated seafood of all kinds until adulthood. There were two incidents that broke me into loving it (which I do now).
1. When I was 25, I was dating a guy who lived in Burlington, VT. He took me to the Five Spice Cafe, and ordered an appetizer to share of smoked shrimp. Inside I was all "eeeewwwwwww shrimp!" - but of course, I could not admit a food phobia in the presence of a person I so wished to impress. When the smoked shrimp came, they were gorgeously pink, each shrimp sliced precisely down the center and resting in a caramel-colored shell. I gingerly took a small first bite, and a wonderful sweet smoky meatiness took over my mouth. From them on, I was like "Shrimp are A-OK."
2. In 2002-03 I took a part-time waitressing gig at a restaurant in coastal Connecticut. It was a quirky, funky, owner-operated, everything scratch-made sort of place. The seafood was their specialty - they bought most stuff off the docks, changed the menu daily according to availability, and got a new fish order all 7 days of the week (almost unheard of). All employees got to eat anything off the menu for dinner each night. I was encouraged to try the seafoods; I wrinkled my nose at the thought, but I realized that in order to talk to diners about the food, I had to know what it was like. So the first thing I tried was a flounder dish. Oh, my, god. Incredible. It was sweet - fresh and sweet, tender, moist -- not at all fishy, not at all tough. I had never tasted anything like it (and I'd had plenty of flounder at restaurants before). The chef watched me eat it and said "You just tasted the difference between fresh and three-day-old."
That process of discovery continued with everything I ate there - scallops, red shrimp, monkfish, black seabass, rockfish, blackfish, sword, tuna, cod, lobster, oysters, clams, mussels -- everything was an order of magnitude more delicious than any seafood I had ever before tasted, even at very fine restaurants. The degree of freshness and quality was just unmatched, and that was only because of the 20+-year relationship of the restaurant owner with the boats, and because he was monomaniacal about quality and willing to pay more.
So now I know some awful truths. The first is that seafood is profoundly delicious -- if it's fresh. The second is that we almost never get to eat it fresh. Even in coastal cities, the majority of fish on restaurant plates is days old and has probably undergone freezing. Due to the weirdnesses of the food industry, fish goes from boat to auction to wholesaler to long stays on a refrigerated truck to the door of the restaurant, and maybe then into a box freezer. That's the money trail, and it works because most restaurants are more interested in a consistent supply of the same items each night than in re-writing their menus based on what's actually fresh and available direct.
So the moral of the story is: Don't knock anyform seafood until you've eaten it when it's less than 24 hours out of the water. You won't recognize it as the same creature.
Whoops -- I should add that the cruel irony is that now that I really know what good seafood tastes like, I pretty much can't eat all the rest of the seafood, which is most of what's available in markets and restaurants, which ends up meaning that though I now love it, I don't eat it anyway except under those exceptional conditions.
"... Even in coastal cities, the majority of fish on restaurant plates is days old and has probably undergone freezing. ..."
About 98% of commercially caught U.S. seafood are quick frozen on the boat, with the exception of very small day trip operators, like Maine lobster men, and long lines guys doing high dollar catch like albacore tuna, into live wells, for the Japanese market, who are willing to buy large whole live fish at $$$ (sometimes as much as $50-60 / pound).
I live 10 minutes down the road from a working local port, and I go a couple times a month for shrimp off the boats. The shrimp are "frozen" in the sense of being iced down in the boat holds when the nets are emptied and sorted. If I meet the boats as they dock, I hold up a $20 over my empty cooler, and one of the deck hands will grab it, and toss a couple of scoops of ice/shrimp slush in my cooler, and away I go, lugging it up to my truck, and home. Usually, 4-6 lbs of unsorted shrimp, for $20. That's as fresh as it gets, and by the time they are home, 1/2 the smallest of the unsorted little buggers are frozen solid.
I get culls from the long lines guys, too. Basically, yellow fin, bonefish, dolphin, grunts, and grouper that got a bite taken out of 'em by a shark, while being drug on the long lines. These are fish that would have been dead in the live well, anyway, so they're tossed on ice, for take home by the fisherman, or sale to locals like me. They're commercially not valuable, so I get 'em for a $1/pound, and the "scale" if one is used at all, is generally 25-50% in my favor. Mostly the guys and I argue a bit about what they've got, and if they pulled a lot of small dolphin that night, they'll shrug, pull the cover off the ice box, and start tossing me fish, counting out loud as they do, their idea of the total worth of what they've tossed me. "2" and here comes a $2 bonefish, "5" and I've got a 3 pound dolphin airborne towards me, too. "9" and they flipped me a 4 pound black grouper, without his tail. "11, 15, 17" and I've got a 2 pound, a 4 pound and then a 2 pound dolphin airborne, aimed at my head. Around "20" or "25", I've got all the fish I need for a week or two, and I yell "Thanks!" and hold up the money, and don't ask for change. Only one long line guy generally wants to use a scale on what he sells me, and I don't buy so much from him, but he's the best guy for jack and yellowfin, so I do, sometimes.
I head and gut 'em on the dock, buy a $2 bag of ice for the cooler at the dock head, and toss the cooler on my truck, and head home.
There are a few seine net trawlers that work out of the local port, and more up in Fernadina Beach, 40 miles north. These guys sell bulk to the local icehouses, and 100% of what they bring in from their week to 10 day deep sea trips is flash frozen on the boat. I buy from them, if I can, when they're in, but frankly, they're all about selling to the icehouses, and selling to dockside guys like me is more trouble than its worth to them. These are big boats, and it's not a simple matter of holding up some cash to a guy on deck with a grain scoop. I get no choice of what they sell me, and I have to buy a honkin' lot of fish, if they do sell me, as they're manually off loading, not using the pump system of the icehouse.
There's nothing wrong, at all, with fish iced and frozen on the boat, in my opinion, and if you're under the impression that only unfrozen fish are any good, you're passing up a lot of good eating. Which is great for me, and guys who like fish, 'cause it keeps the prices down.
When I go bridge fishin' around here, for flouder, shad, and grouper, we toss the catch into coolers we fill with seawater in the spring, late fall and winter. In the summer and most of the fall, if we're keepin', or on a especially on a boat, we always ice, as it's hard to keep a live well goin' in the heat, even on a boat with a pumped live well.
About 98% of commercially caught U.S. seafood are quick frozen on the boat
This is true, but I'm not talking about that type of fishery. That average includes the massive bottom-scraping fisheries of the Northwestern fish-factory boats and is not at all prevalent in this region. Those boats catch for volume and do indeed flash-freeze; they also sometimes have the capability to process and package the fish products right there on the boat.
We didn't buy any of the hard-frozen stuff. Iced-down and frozen are two very, very different things. Hard freezing destroys the resilient cell structure and ruins the texture and shape of the fish; it's also quite dehydrating.
At that restauarant, we bought only top-haul, day-boat scallops, flounder, monk, blackseabass, rockfish, and blackfish. The cod, sword, and tuna were not from dayboats (impossible) but were iced, not flash-frozen. The owner was buying from small draggers, trappers and longliners in a 30-boat fleet. We also got small quantities, often, and had the ability to use the bycatch of a more financially rewarding haul. When you're only serving 35 dinners a night, you can do that, and buy paying the extra, the fish buyer got the pick of the catch most days. Meanwhile, the bulk of the pressed-down, juiced-out monk or whatever it was that day, from the bottom of the fish hold, was sent to the wholesaler.
The oysters came from an oyster culturer within view of the restaurant's front door.
The red shrimp were also iced but not frozen; they are not worth much on the export market, so they are sold mostly locally in coastal New England.
What I'm saying is that really, really fresh fish is something most people almost never see, unless, like paulsc, you go to the docks yourself, or you have a great relationship with a fishmonger who does, and who is honest.
Also, the fisheries picture in the Gulf and the Southern Atlantic range in the U.S. is quite a bit different from the in New England. Apart from lobster, cod, and the whitefish ('fishstick' fish like hake and pollock that end up in processing plants and show up at Long John Silver's as Fish'n'Chips) most of the fisheries are not of an industrial/export scale. Lobstermen are normally sole operators and often do lobstering as a part-time occupation. The offshore fisheries are small-boat operators as well, usually independently owned, although that picture is changing as sharply rising insurance, licensing, and fuel costs drive the littler guys out of the business. In larger ports such as Gloucester and Boston, we're now seeing sizeable investment companies buying up licenses and operating larger boats with hired-on captains. Big companies can spread their risk and absorb the vagaries of weather, changing regulations, and the inherent chance quotient in fishing far better than a single-boat operator can. One federally-mandated change of 1/8" in mesh size for a scallop dragger can put a single-boat runner out of business. The margins are too small. Whereas HighLiner Foods can set up a tenant-boat system and amortize costs like that across the board.
I am extremely pro seafood, but then I'm from Charleston. And I'm going back there this weekend and I'm going to go to Bowen's Island and sit in the oyster room while guys toss snowshovels of oysters on top of a metal sheet over a wood fire with a seawater wet burlap sack over them and then, about 10 minutes later, put that same snowshovel of now hot oysters on the newspapers in front of me. I'll drink ice cold Bud from a can and eat oysters with tabasco like there's no tomorrow. Yum all seafood. Yum to the coolers full of shrimp being sold by old black men from pickups by the side of the road. Yum to the huge sleeping crabs you can catch up in Mclellanville this time of year. Yum to Chesapeake crabs in the summer with old bay all over them; yum to mussels swimming in a garlicky sauce; yum to salmon and trout out of a mountain stream, yum to flounder and grouper and, well everything. Yum yum yum yum. Except catfish. Never have liked catfish.
snowshovels of oysters on top of a metal sheet over a wood fire with a seawater wet burlap sack over them and then, about 10 minutes later, put that same snowshovel of now hot oysters on the newspapers in front of me
Oh my God. Will you meet me there someday so we can do that?
The TX girl in me still adores catfish. Yeah, I know it's garbage fish. But it fries up beautifully and takes spicy sauces like a champ.
Lake perch is nice too, caught in the morning and fried in the evening.
"... Iced-down and frozen are two very, very different things. ..." Not after about 6 hours on the ice. A fish frozen brick hard doesn't usually remember how it got that way. :-)
"... Hard freezing destroys the resilient cell structure and ruins the texture and shape of the fish; it's also quite dehydrating. ..." Flash freezing at sea is done within a couple hours of catch, after cleaning on the boat. These days, it's typically done with a process that freezes the fish so fast (blast freezing), that destructive intracellular ice crystals don't even form. Even the older, slower ammonia process flash freezing is effective at preventing quality loss, due to icing, compared to whole fish freezing when simply iced. And if the fish is properly packaged and handled after flash or blast freezing, it doesn't dry out, because the packaging prevents that. But freezing is effective in destroying some pathogens, which is why the FDA regulations stipulate that fish to be served raw in the US, first be frozen. Freezer burned fish flesh is incredibly easy to spot, as it's not translucent when thawed. I eat a lot of "fresh" fish, because I have easy, cheap access to it. It usually costs me less, if I take culls, but culls are iced, often frozen through, off the long lines boats, because they'd die in the live well. I can take the same fish whole from the live well, and have, but really, there's zero difference in taste or quality. But the price of the live well fish will be higher, because of their better appearance in the case, (when, again, they're generally, iced, even to freezing, ironic as that is).
But if I want salmon, or albacore, I use flash frozen, because we don't get those species around here fresh, and there's just no big difference, Miko. Chilean fish, like sea bass and salmon, are available here either frozen or "fresh", the fresh being flown in for restaurant trade mostly, but readily available from the specialty fish markets, and even, occasionally, the supermarkets here. There's not a consistently discernible difference on the plate, really. But the tourist restaurants down at Jacksonville Landing are plopping that "fresh, flown in" stuff on plates, by the water, at $40 a head. It's very scenic, and my out of town friends who never eat fish otherwise love it :-)
Live Maine lobsters in the Publix store tank, or at the fish market here are expensive, whereas Florida rock lobsters can be somewhat cheaper, but you get tails only on the Florida species. If I'm just doing bisque, flash frozen South African rock lobster tails are fine. I buy live Maine lobsters on the 4th of July, for the fun of seeing guests deal with them, not because there is a big difference in taste or texture, compared to the flash frozen.
Miko, if your point is that only people living by the ocean should eat fish, and everybody else is missing out, good luck with spreading that opinion. As I say, it keeps the prices down for the rest of us, and Al Gore says the oceans are runnin' out of fish, anyway.
I'm not crazy about shellfish, but I'll make a vigorous exception for Low Country (South Carolina) -style shrimp and grits, preferably with some bacon crumbled over it. Beaufort stew (shrimp, potatoes, sausage and corn on the cob, boiled together with just the right spices) ain't half bad neither.
My actual experience tells me otherwise, paulsc. However, I'm willing to chalk up much of that difference to elapsed time rather than storage temperature. Still, our fish was not hard-frozen when it came off the boat. Stiff indeed, but not the rocklike effect you get in a subzero restaurant freezer, which is far colder than a fish hold.
I have also been in three fish processing plants and watched even weeks-old sword and tuna come off the boat for butchering and portioning. It's not rocklike. Frozen processed fish tasted side by side with more recently caught fish leaves absolutely no room for questions of quality, plain and simple. If that weren't the case, no chefs would care to pay the difference.
only people living by the ocean should eat fish
I wouldn't go to the mat for this, but yeah, kinda. Of course, I'm biased on the issue of eating locally, seasonally, and sustainably. I speak as co-leader of a Slow Food convivium -- and someone with a professional background in the field of American maritime history. Ocean fish stocks are on the edge of collapse, or perhaps even already in the first stages, and you don't need Al Gore to tell you that. A study team here at UNH has been working on using historical landing data to create estimates of fish populations and trace the effects of environmental change, regulation, and harvesting technique, and the picture is bad. Consumer demand for fish, gradually rising since the days of Clarence Birdseye and given a boost by the fishstick boom of the 50s, has pushed the ocean's depletion to a point that's already well beyond sustainable. People want seafood even inland, and the Red Lobsters and supermarkets of the world want to have the same kinds of fish available in the same quantities every day of the year. This creates a demand that is just not aligned with the needs of a sustainable fishery. Add to that the energy costs of freezing and refrigerated transportation and the fossil fuel costs of getting farm-raised catfish and salmon or even line-caught fish to another region, and fish becomes a real environmental disaster for those who don't live near the source.
But even in coastal restaurants, the nature of the restuarant supply industry means that Maine lobster eaten in New York might have flown to Tennessee and been trucked back before it got to your plate.
And wait a sec. That 98% figure - where'd you get it? Citation please. I can only substantiate that for the shrimping industry, not for fishing as a whole. Though FAS has come to grab most of the market due to the consistent retail demand, I would be surprised if FAS numbers overall are that high.
Ice is still king in the ports of New England. Air-blast freezing is an expensive proposition for the smaller boats. Besides which, reading information on freezing systems aimed at commercial fishermen shows that one of the primary cons to consider in choosing air-blast is the dehydration it causes.
IT's true that 'fresh' means something different in the fishing and food industries than it does to the rest of us. Fish that have spent plenty of time on a boat at or below 32 degrees can still be sold as fresh. I understand that fish that's been on ice, at or near 32 degrees, is frozen. But not all freezing, as you say, is created equal. Each freezing or cooling process has different effects on the product. Determining how your fish has been treated is difficult, unless you can see for yourself how it was caught and held.
My point remains: That the best quality experience you can have in eating fish is to eat it at the soonest possible moment after it comes out the water. Flash-frozen fish coming to you from Alaska may have been preserved in its flavor deterioration at a very early point, allowing you to taste something almost as good as a freshly caught fish. But I repeat - it's only almost as good. If you have the opportunity to eat the same fish fresh at the same elapsed time, I'm saying you'll find it better.
Any discussion of fisheries becomes quickly muddy and full of exceptions and confusing information. This is because fisheries are complex. Business models are different. Fishing methods and technology differs regionally and from boat to boat. Scheduling and licensing and regulation vary from state to state. Information about fish migration and populations is not well understood - and that's a vast understatment. The same fish can be a sustainable, responsible choice at one time of year and an enviornmentally damaging one at another time; the same fish can be responsible when bought from one boat and terrible when bought from another. The same fish can taste brilliant when a minimum of time has elapsed between its catch and your eating it, or miserable when too much time has passed, or if it's improperly handled. It's a tricky, complex industry. Anyway, this document will thoughtfully make specific most generalizations about fish freezing at sea.
Fish rock. I love pretty much all kinds in all forms.
Freshwater? Bring it on. I've caught my own trout, perch, catfish, perch and so on. Mmmmm...trout. Made trout etouffe once - that was something great.
Crayfish? Can't get enough. There just simply aren't enough in the world.
Saltwater? Raw, poached, fried, broiled, grilled, smoked, it's never been bad.
Shellfish? Oh man. I used to work at Adobe in their fat salad days and I just want to say that the open oyster bar at the holiday party cost them so much money, primarily because of me. Clams? Fabu. Mussels? Steam 'em in wine. Crabs? Gimme, gimme, gimme. Lobster? Yes, please.
On the "how can you possibly eat that?" front, I love pickled herring in sour cream. Mmmmm...
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