A few years ago, one of Charleston’s finest fishing boat captains approached chef Mike Lata with a problem: If business didn’t improve, he would have to hang it up, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Federal quotas limited how much
lucrative grouper and snapper he could catch, and while there were plenty of
other fish for the taking, what he brought in barely sold for enough to cover
gas. So the chef made him a proposition:
Read more HERE.
“I told him on his next trip to bring us
everything he caught, and we’d pay.”
Mr Lata and his cooks set to work on the
catch—a grab bag of amberjack, banded rudderfish, mackerel, eel, lionfish and
sea robin—and discovered that many of these fish were remarkably delicious.
“This was great product, treated with care and attention, only the species
names weren’t marketable. So, we decided to take care of the marketing side.”
Mr Lata is one of a growing number of chefs
making a case for eating abundant domestic species that have up until now been
largely ignored. These are widely referred to as ‘trash fish,’ a name
originally bestowed by fisherman unable to sell them, now co-opted by some of
their staunchest advocates.
The sea is home to thousands of fish
species, but only a few of them regularly appear on American tables. Shrimp,
tuna, salmon and tilapia together account for nearly 70 percent of seafood
consumed in the US; in the case of fine dining, cod, halibut and sea bass have
also been in heavy rotation for the past 30 years. These once-plentiful species
have retained pride of place on menus and behind fish counters long after it
stopped making ecological sense, as chefs and seafood purveyors have catered to
a dining public skeptical of trading salmon and swordfish for fish with names
like ‘scup’ and ‘smelt.’
Every fishery has a unique set of
under-loved species. Waters in the Northeast are teeming with pollock, hake and
dogfish, which match the flaky, mild profile of dwindling cod. Acadian redfish,
once used for lobster bait off the coast of Maine, makes a superior alternative
to tilapia, much of which is raised in antibiotic-spiked pools in China. The
Chesapeake Bay is lousy with blue catfish, similar to the basa being imported
by the ton from Vietnam. Firm, buttery and plentiful Pacific lingcod is a good
understudy for pricey halibut.
“There are incredibly delicious, vibrant,
abundant fish out there and people don’t know about them,” said Michael Dimin,
the co-founder of Sea to Table, a supplier to top seafood restaurants like New
York’s Marea and RM Seafood in Las Vegas.
Confronted by the copious overlooked
species swimming off Massachusetts, chef Michael Leviton is working on a trash
fish cookbook. At Lumière in Newton, Massachusetts, he regularly serves such
underappreciated species as Acadian redfish and porgy.
The Aquaculturists
This blog is maintained by The Aquaculturists staff and is supported by the
magazine International Aquafeed which is published by Perendale Publishers Ltd
For additional daily news from aquaculture around the world: aquaculture-news
No comments:
Post a Comment