That sounds awesome. I’ve always enjoyed food remixes, and sometimes do them myself (like making jambalaya with Italian sausage and serving it on tortillas).
Can someone definitively tell me if it’s the salt water or the freezing that makes salt water caught fish safe to eat raw?
This is about as definitive as you’re going to get:
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Growing up, I never understood why I preferred my grandmother’s mayonnaise to other people’s mayonnaise until I learned that my obaasan was feeding me Kewpie mayo and any other mayo was simply not Kewpie.
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Same in Europe, @Hellokitty. I’ve never been to Japan, but unagi nigiri are, AFAIR, even referenced in Murakami’s Umibe no Kafuka, so I assumed they are available (and well-liked) in at least parts of Japan.
I had a conversation about European sushi with a Japanese traveller two weeks ago, but she did not yet try it. Her experience in the US was that the rice wasn’t proper, and always to sweet. She also was quite opposed to the idea of California rolls.
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I wonder how sashimi compares to Nordic gravlax? Thanks to IKEA, I’m familiar with (and love) the latter.
Actually unagi live in both rivers and the sea - they travel down to the Philippines to spawn. Anago is conger eel. The industry farming eels is so big that eels are now an endangered species.
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We also get a lot from Mexico, which supplies roughly 45% of the world’s avocados, I believe.
Side note: No matter where we move in So Cal, we seem to have neighbors who have avocado trees, too, and they always share. Yum!
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Thank you, Internet Stranger!
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Welcome!
I’ll add some talking points here along with the recommendation to not eat freshwater fish raw (which I don’t and am leery of).
I’m an avid fisherman, and get into debates periodically with other local anglers about what waters are safe to eat fish from (and just we’re talking cooked).
So I regularly read up on what the DNR has to say, and sometimes I call them to chat since they survey pathogens in the local watershed.
A while back, I was arguing with a guy about the stretch of the Chicago river where my apartment was. Because it was a low-flow section which was fed by the loch from Lake Michigan, the water was clear and blue and smelled great basically all the time. However, the city of Chicago still has an archaic sewage system they are overhauling which after heavy rains will dump raw sewage (i.e. human waste, among other stuff) into the river. This gentleman had been fishing that stretch and saw plenty of people eat fish out of that stretch. I called up the DNR, and they checked their spreadsheets, and the fecal coliform bacteria count from about 10 days after the last rainfall even was still far in excess of the recommended level even if you are cooking the fish.
As for the amount of fecal coliform bacteria which could make you sick even in fish frozen for 10 days, personally I’m going to keep that number as close to 0 as I can. Now that’s the city of Chicago, which the water is tested very frequently–imagine now that most rivers run for hundreds of miles, past many towns with unknown dumping. Similarly, farm runoff can end up in lakes nearby, bacteria can breed in the backwaters or shallow lakes, etc.
We haven’t even gotten to the part where I kept wild Chicago river fish in a fish tank, and watched a few of them get eaten to death by anchor worms. (Granted anchor worms I gather you could eat live, and we’d just digest them… but it’s still creepy)
More wild, virgin, undeveloped country probably would have fewer issues with the fish from bodies of fresh water (especially rivers fed from mountain streams instead of the prairies), but honestly I don’t know how you could make sure of that. Unless the DNR is really well funded in that state because of being a destination fishing spot?
That chef I posted has ample reason to make his recommendation about freshwater sushi.
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Thanks for the article and your insight. Looks like my dream of introducing the world to Canadian fresh-water sushi is dead. 
I’m more of a casual fisherman, hoping to graduate to deep water Great Lakes fishing soon. I’ve gradually moved to a “release all but the smallest fish” attitude due to the accumulation of mercury in the bigger ones. Two added benefits: smaller fish are tastier, and returning the big ones helps make more little ones. 
Took me a long time to get over the need to keep the big ones. Turns out you can show off the big ones by taking photos…
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Yep. Some of the best tasting fish I’ve had recently have been Chub. Either hot-smoked, or pressure cooked. Unexpectedly fantastic.
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By excising the rest of what I wrote, you show that you missed my point.
I repeat that I don’t call everything served in a burger joint a hamburger, nor do I call everything served in a “Sushi restaurant” Sushi.
Sashimi = Sashimi, California Maki = California Maki, Futomaki = Futomaki, etc. If there’s a word for it that describes it well, use that word and don’t lazily lump them in to a category that isn’t applicable like calling what they were serving in the video “Sushi”.
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