Fish for people who don't eat fish - Page 5

well, a couple of things. first: like any other animal, fish need to go through rigor mortis to taste their best. the whole live tank thing can be treacherous for the beginning cook. just-killed fish need to be cooked very gently (steaming, poaching), or they toughen and are flavorless.
also, often the freshest-tasting fish you can find is frozen. fish that has been carefully handled, quickly and carefully frozen, and then defrosted carefully is as good as fresh-caught any day.

I wanted to put a pic up of a fish covered in crude oil, but alas, this is the only thing I could find on google images when I searched "fish oil" so use your imaginations.

You can get tons of seafood in my parts that get caught and dumped alive in tanks in front of restaurants to swim or dance around all day, and then get chopped up and cooked and served... it's fairly fresh, but still stinks like hell. Depends on the seafood and inner oil/other stuff content, me thinks. Little mackerels and cod can pretty fresh, but still smell like ass when cooked. I'm not really sure on the seafood/fish reaction, I probably don't have one, as I grew up about 30 paces from the pacific ocean and ate that stuff happily when I was a kid, but what I am questioning is why people do in fact order seafood/fish and as above, squeeze lemon all over it to mask the fish smell? I'd do it because I hate fish/seafood, but why would one order it if they felt the same way? What is this shit I am missing? I always get the choice to avoid seafood/fish, except for Japanese restaurants... and Japanese people do like their seafood/fish.... and my lady is Japanese. The seafood thing is not serious at our house but I am 'the baby'...

Fresh sushi is fucking phenomenal, btw. One of the best meals I've ever had in my life was tuna at the fish market in Tokyo at something like 5:00am.

You wouldn't think there'd be much of a taste difference between fresh and slightly old sushi, but there's a world of difference. It was a real eye opener for me.

Halibut has a very subtle taste and nice texture for those people who are not too fond of fish. Marlin's texture is very similar to chicken if properly cooked.

What do you know about the ike jime method? Have you read/written anything about it? Supposedly what happens in fish is that the ATP in their muscles (what makes muscles contract and relax) runs out, and the muscle has no more ability to relax itself. So what happens is that each time the fish contracts, the muscle is then set in place, since the compound allowing it to relax is no longer there. So the faster and harder that the rigor sets in, the lower the quality of the final product. Ike Jime is a slaughtering method where they make a small cut behind the brain and a small cut along the tail, and then slip a needle into the spinal cord to push all the spinal fluid out. The fish is then chilled in ice water and allowed to bleed out. By destroying the spinal cord, you affect how much ATP is lost, which means rigor sets in less hard and less fast, and it results in a higher quality filet.

Personally, I don't know about all the science behind it obviously, I'm a cook, not a scientist. But I have seen fish killed ike jime style before, and I've eaten fish that were killed at the same time ike jime method and regular method, and the difference is vast and really goddamn impressive. It is almost insane how much it effects the quality of the fish. IIRC, some blog did a big post about it. I remember reading it somewhere, but don't remember where. But then at my last place of work the fish supplier did an ike jime demonstration and it blew my mind.

that was a new one one me, but it sounds really fascinating. must investigate. many years ago i did something somewhat similar with jon rowley, a real seafood wiz. but it was just investigating the effect of rigor ... we picked up a live-tank catfish, a catfish that had been killed that morning and a catfish that had been killed the day before. the day-before catfish had the best flavor and texture. the live-tank catfish was almost inedible ... tough and cottony with very little flavor at all (we sauteed).

Swordfish is #1 and Tuna is #2 in Mercury content.

Stick with genetically modified tasteless American vegetables and one day you will make a relatively healthy and fit corpse.

[sigh] just for the record, there are no genetically modified vegetables for sale in america. there are tasteless vegetables, but that's for other, more complicated reasons.

Really depends how you define "genetically modified." Technically speaking, breeding is a form of genetic modification. Gene splicing to reduce pest or disease resistance is genetic modification. Etc. People hear the term "genetically modified" and think we're talking about broccoli with fish genes in it to produce omega-3 acids or something. Those types of foods, while technically possible, are not currently sold in the US. They won't be for quite some time, given the uncertain effects of long-term human consumption (recent studies, while controversial, have linked cross-species genetically modified vegetables to fertility problems in mice). What scientists are starting to learn, and what's separating genetic engineering from science fiction, is that the genome as a whole is extremely complex. You can't just insert a random gene here, or remove a random gene there, and expect the outcome to be contained/limited to that single gene's expression. Rather, tinkering with one part of the "machine" seems to affect other parts in occasionally unpredictable ways. This is the lesson Jurassic Park was trying to teach us, which sounds LOL-worthy, but is actually more prescient than Crichton probably realized at the time.

OK then just eat lobster.

Mahi
Wahoo
Pompano
Any sort of snapper typically
Cobia
Flounder
Speckled Trout






Stay away from Chilean Sea Bass...it's over fished.

This whole process is fascinating, Kyle. I so wish I knew about this process before my trip to Japan two months ago. I can understand the logic behind severing the head's neurological connection to the rest of the fish, but I'm not sure about the spinal cord's need for destruction. What I need to figure out is if the cord is destroyed, does the heart still beat, thus allowing appropriate bleeding? For the skeletal muscle, I suppose the pithing/needling of the spinal cord takes away the reflexes of the fish, thus stopping the circuitry that creates muscle contractions? I need to investigate this more. Here is the page I found to be most informative so far, but fails go get down to the nitty gritty: japanese-fish-killing-ike-jime-smackdown-part-1/ Edit: Here are all of the chapters of these chef's investigation into ike jime: http://en.wordpress.com/tag/ike-jime/

^^ Just read that link (read part two for the science bit), very interesting. Edit:Free link to research papers http://www.journalarchive.jst.go.jp/...al=fishsci1994

Blackened snapper, the best.