Fire It Up - Andrew Schloss [116]
Ocean management has come a long way to help ensure the long-term abundance of wild fish and the vitality of our oceans. Seafood watch groups like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Environmental Defense Fund, and Blue Ocean Institute have helped save species like swordfish and Chilean sea bass from the endangered species list. Other species, like wild Atlantic salmon, have not been so fortunate.
To help meet market demands without endangering wild stocks, the fishing industry has turned to farming popular and adaptable varieties like salmon, sea bass, trout, and tilapia in enclosed ocean pens or freshwater ponds and tanks. Aquaculture is now used to supply more than 40 percent of the world’s fish and shellfish, and fishing industry analysts predict that by 2020, fish farms will surpass capture fisheries in supplying the majority of the world’s seafood.
Like domesticated land animals, bred and farmed fish are not the same as their wild counterparts. But the quality of aquacultured fish is far from standardized. It varies widely from farm to farm and country to country. To ward off disease, aquacultured fish are routinely given antibiotics in their feed. For fish farms with open water pens, excess waste, disease, and harmful organisms can migrate from the pens to wild fish and impact the health of the wild stocks. Farmed carnivorous fish like salmon also tend to be higher in contaminants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) because they are fed fishmeal made from fish refuse, which is higher in such contaminants. You can minimize contaminants in farmed fish by removing the skin and trimming any visible fat.
Determining Quality
Animals that live in water need to be buoyant. To that end they tend to have delicate skeletons, slightly oily flesh (oil is lighter than water), and air bladders that keep them afloat. Because water supports their weight, their muscles don’t need to be as dense as those of land animals. So even though fish move constantly, their muscles tend to be soft, and their meat very tender. This means that all fish are tender enough to be grilled, but their soft flesh is also vulnerable to damage, which is why fish is the most perishable of animal proteins. It is easier to determine how fresh a fish is while it is whole. Once it is filleted or cut into steaks, most of the areas where deterioration shows up have been cut away.
Here’s what to look for:
• Healthy-looking skin. Fish skin should be dry. If the skin is broken or bruised, it is a sign that the fish was roughly handled, and probably damaged beneath the skin as well.
• Firm flesh. When you poke the side of a fish (or the skin of a fish fillet or steak) the imprint of your finger should spring back.
• Clear, bulging eyes. Flat, sunken, or cloudy eyes indicate a fish that has been out of the water for a few days.
• Bright gills. The spongy, crescent-shaped gills lying under the gill-flaps on either side of the back of the head should be bright red, without hints of brown or gray.
• Shiny, tight scales. Most ocean fish have scales. If they are still on the fish when you buy it, they should be shiny and firmly attached.
• Little or no odor. Fresh fish has no odor, except possibly the faint aroma of seawater. A fishy odor is an indication of decay.
Grilling Fish: The Fat and the Lean
Unlike the muscle fibers of land animals, which are arranged in bundles, fish muscle fibers are structured in thin layers. The layers are separated from one another by connective tissue, which runs from the center skeleton out to the skin. When a fish cooks, the muscle fibers contract