A good solution:
Mmmmm almost lunch time…
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Is the same reason you never refreeze meat. Multiple freeze and that cycles degrade the texture too much, and leaves too much space for bacteria to get involved.
Home freezers suck, but it’s not all that hard to freeze genuinely fresh fish (like stuff you catch yourself) without impacting quality. Best practices are the same as many other things. Lay them out flat on a metal tray till frozen, transfer to tight wrapping. Vacuum sealing works best.
ETA: oh and fishing boats typically have ice machines or live wells. Outside of specialized fisheries, only the big, corporate owned, deep water boats tend to have on board processing and freezing. We call them factory ships for a reason. And they are the devil.
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Ok. From that perspective I don’t disagree.
To the above posts. I’ve had some slightly freezer burned cod before. Makes perfectly fine fish cakes afterwards. This is also me knowing what I bought and how long it was in the freezer and such.
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Yeah… don’t eat that.
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Dang. Usual solution. Prescribed
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[Keith Floyd] gleefully recalled serving a serially ungrateful diner a carefully cooked beer mat disguised as a breaded escalope of veal. The man ate it without comment but criticised the topping on his crème brûlée.
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Oh yeahhhhhh. That stuff. I’d forgotten about it completely until just now. Bought it once, for the life of me could not figure out how to resuscitate it.
I soaked it until it was no longer spongy, but it was still insanely salty.
You change the water multiple times, once too much salt gets in the water it can’t leach out any more.
And it’s not like you soak it and fry it up like a fresh fillet. You’re meant to make chowders, fishcakes, and other shit from it. Latin America and the Caribbean it gets shredded, dressed with veg, citrus, and chilis as a salad. So generally the salt is diluted in the overall dish, or deliberately played off.
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Most the sushi people eat is frozen at some point. Large amount of Poke sold in Hawaii is frozen at one point. On plus side it might kill some of those parasitic worms (or at least stun them) so they don’t wriggle around while you’re eating and ruin your meal.
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Swordfish and cod here on the east coast. It’s notorious for having worms. I buy at a trusted local fish monger. They purschase properly processed IQF product. And I cook it properly. Never a worry or issue.
Fresh water fish is another matter. Give me fresh caught brook or rainbow trout any day of the week!!
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It shouldn’t be so obviously waterlogged. This is very damaged (but tough) fish.
As people have said, the protein is still there. Probably not a whole lot has changed - it’s not like it was a fish with high amounts of, say, omega-3 to begin with.
Even after water changes, salt cod is still fairly salty (and strong). That’s part of the charm of it, and recipes that use it rely on that. (My favorite being a Chez Panisse recipe where, after soaking, it’s mashed with large quantities of garlic and some cream to use as a ravioli filling. The ravioli are served in a delicate fish stock-based broth, which somewhat offsets the strong flavors of the filling.) If improperly treated, it can be inedible - I once had a salt cod stew in Sicily that was improperly soaked and I’m pretty sure the salt would have been enough to literally kill me had I been able to consume it all.
Yeah, it’s not just de-wormed by being frozen but actually ends up being fresher that way - it’s immediately frozen on the boat at very low temperatures (which does kill parasites that could be dangerous to humans) and stays that way until shortly before being sold. Whereas “fresh” fish sits around, unfrozen, for a fairly long time before being sold.
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Degraded protein is still protein. Several cultures eat fermented foods with animals/plants that are in various stages of breakdown. Volatile fish oils would likely not have the same benefit. There was a study where they took a pot pie, injected Vitamin C in it, and found that thawing and refreezing it made the Vit. C go away, but it may well be on a case by case basis for different nutrients.
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IQF fish is often treated with sodium tripolyphosphate, causes it to bloat up with water and firms up the texture.
But it also causes it to dump a shit ton of liquid when cooked, which makes it impossible to brown. And often leaves a rubbery, indestructible texture.
So I’m gonna guess that’s part of the issue here.
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Eh, those New Zealand green muscles are frozen when we get them. they are quite good.
Although I expect that they lose some flavor.
Alright, I get your point on this, not everywhere is the PNW, US.
I don’t (almost don’t) buy fish that has been frozen.
There’s a guy Bruce Gore who pioneered salmon freezing, his product often costs more than fresh.
Is it as good, no, it’s not
Well… yeah. Why would I cook that?
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The ice machine is just refrigeration, that’s not for freezing. The freezing happens when they bring the catch to the factory ship as you mentioned.
Or to the dock. The factory ships work as a vertically integrated unit. Catch the fish, clean the fish, freeze the fish. Sometimes it’s a separate processing boat supporting a fleet of fishing vessels, but it’s still a vertically integrated operation.
These boats are owned by large corporate Packers, and operate in international waters. They don’t represent the bulk of fishing vessels, and there are very few places in the US where they can operate out of. They’re typically skirting (or out right ignoring) quota systems and regulations. Typically operate out of Asia (especially Japan, Indonesia and China), Russia, and Norway.
When you hear about the horrors of bycatch, over fishing, and international treaty disputes these are the culprits.
Most fishing boats are independently owned, much smaller, and operate mush closer to shore. They keep the fish alive or cold. Deliver it to the dock, where it will be frozen, or sold to a packer/cannery where it will be frozen.
Most of your individually quick frozen wild caught seafoods in the US come from Asian factory boats. As does a lot of imported fish overall. But the bulk of seafood caught in the US or sold as fresh as a product of the US, Canada, and some other places comes from those independent boats. And in many fisheries or countries they represent the majority of fish being caught.
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Halibut freezes very well if you treat it properly. Treating it properly means vacuum-packing it and flash-freezing it to low temperature, not just throwing it in a ziploc bag and into a kitchen fridge freezer section.
We have connections with a family in Alaska who do commercial fishing. Every once in a while, they will sell fish and shellfish to friends when they have extra. When they have Grade AA halibut, we buy as much as we can. It’s better than anything you can buy at a grocery store or fish market outside of Alaska or coastal BC. It comes deep frozen in vacuum packs and is of such high quality that it is almost impossible to mess up. It’s simply amazing.
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Can confirm! Alaskan butt is in fact the best butt.
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Still better food than lutefisk. But so is vinyl siding.
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Having grown up in Kansas, I think I realize why I was never a fish fan unless we were visiting relatives in coastal Florida.
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