Farmed Fish: Often It's the Only Choice at Restaurants and Markets-but Can It Taste More Than White?
by Corby Kummer
FOOD LOVERS have greeted the advent of farmed fish with alarm. Fish with real flavor, they fear, will soon be the province of sport fishermen and epicures willing to pay high prices for a wild food that may become as rare as game. Genetic engineering and mass production, they say, can lead only to anonymous fish, and soon fish will end up like much commercially raised chicken—as white protein with no discernible flavor.
To test these claims, I recently arranged a tasting of farmed against wild fish at Legal Sea Foods. In the process of learning about the differences, I learned much about how to buy fish in its best condition. Legal, as the group of restaurants is known, is Boston’s most popular purveyor of fish. Visitors and Bostonians alike line up at its eight locations (you can’t make reservations) for what will reliably be a wide variety of perfectly fresh fish. Roger Berkowitz, the head of the family-owned restaurants, was hard pressed to find wild fish and shellfish to test against the commonly farmed varieties—already a sign of the takeover of farmed fish.
You won’t ever find a wild-caught trout, for instance, at a fish market—it’s illegal to sell one. Atlantic salmon has been so overfished, and so much of its habitat was destroyed by dams and pollution, that now it is virtually unavailable commercially, and the only wild salmon regularly sold comes from the Pacific Northwest. If the menu or the sign in the fish case doesn’t specify a northwestern variety, such as sockeye, king, or coho or silver (these two are the same), the salmon you order or buy will be farm-raised Atlantic salmon, probably from Norway, Canada, or Scotland. Any catfish or crayfish is likely to be farmed too, although there are still significant catches of wild crayfish on the West Coast and in Louisiana, where it is called crawfish, as in crawfish étouffée. Farmed fish currently accounts for only about 10 percent of the fish consumed in this country, but that figure is misleading. The most intensively farmed fish are the kinds people want to buy and order, rather than varieties that are put into fish sticks or ground and extruded to make surimi, commonly sold as mock crab or shrimp.
Like many restaurants across the country, Legal uses farmed fish regularly, including salmon, trout, catfish, and scallops, because of its guaranteed consistency—that paramount concern of the restaurateur. This seeming paradox, a fish house in an active center of commercial fishing relying on farmed fish, is not unique to America. Ninety percent of the salmon eaten in Western Europe is farmed. On a recent trip to Apulia, a region of Italy on the Adriatic coast, I was served farmed salmon and bass in Trani, a pretty port town in an area that has traditionally relied on commercial fishing.
The suppliers to Legal Sea Foods did their best to obtain as many kinds of wild-caught fish as they could, because they knew that the guest of honor at the tasting would be Julia Child. (Child turns eighty on August 15, and the occasion will be much celebrated. She is likely to take the fêtes in stride and go on maintaining her punishing schedule, ever supplied with robust good humor and frank opinions.) A few years ago Child researched fish for her masterly, useful The Way to Cook; she was eager to try farmed versus wild fish, something she’d never had the chance to do.
AQUACULTURE is the world’s fastest-growing food-producing industry, according to the Institute of Food Technologists. Its defenders say that it is an economical way of making easily available a highly nutritious food, without incurring the great environmental and occupational hazards of commercial fishing—or the health hazards of chemical residues and viruses, which eating wild fish (chiefly fish caught near the shore, versus in the open sea) can present in the absence of any comprehensive and mandatory U.S. inspection program. They say, too, that farms choose varieties for their taste, and that they kill and store fish far more carefully than most commercial fisheries, resulting in better-tasting fish.
Detractors say that aquaculture poses its own threats to the environment, including, in ocean pens, pollution from fish feces and from the insecticides and herbicides that are sometimes used; also, uneaten fish food collects on the ocean floor and robs water of oxygen. Antibiotics are frequently given to farmed fish, as they are to farmed livestock and poultry, to prevent disease outbreaks that result when so many animals live so closely packed; although the doses are very small, they arc so far unregulated. Any disease that attacks a pen spreads rapidly, and can infect wild stocks nearby. Domesticated fish can escape from pens and crossbreed with wild stocks, weakening them.
These issues are more pertinent to marine than to freshwater fish farms, where the pens are usually in specially dug ponds. And, with the exception of a case of toxic algal bloom traced to farmed shellfish, health and environmental problems have as yet been few in the United States (although a number have occurred in Norway and Ireland). The most pressing problem that fish farms have presented here so far, aside from spoiling the views on expensive shorefront property, is putting commercial fishermen, mostly in Alaska, out of business. The drops in price that sudden gluts can cause have even put some fish farms out of business.
Cooks say that penned fish are flaccid for lack of exercise, and often flavorless because they eat packaged feed. Like poultry, fish tastes of what it eats, which explains the variability that in wild fish—especially a scavenger like wild catfish—is often annoying to restaurant chefs but is welcome to people who like strong-flavored fish. Most people, of course, don’t like strong-flavored fish, which accounts for the phenomenal popularity of some kinds of farmed fish—especially channel catfish, once a strong-flavored fish that was much loved in Arkansas and the Mississippi Delta but almost unknown elsewhere. (“Ocean catfish” is a very different species, usually called wolffish.) Now bred to a perfect blandness, it has become the fifth most popular fish in America. The Catfish Institute, which markets farmed catfish, ominously describes its product as “chickens that don’t cluck.” Richard Schweid, in Catfish and the Delta, an absorbing investigation of the conditions in Mississippi catfish plants and a portrait of life on the Delta, quotes a scornful catfishlover:
“You touch a farm-raised fish and your hands don’t even smell. A fish should stink. River fish stink. They stink like fish ‘cause they’re down there eating other fish.”
Fortunately for catfish farmers, this attitude is rare. . . . [Farm-raised catfish] do not have a muddy flavor, nor a fishy flavor. In fact, their white, firm meat is just about as close to no flavor at all as a fish can get, and the farmers are proud of that.
THE FISH-TASTING at Legal was conducted blind: farmed and wild versions of each kind of fish were presented side by side, without identification, by Jean-Jacques Paimblanc, the French-born chef who is the head of research and development for Legal. Most of the wild fish had a stronger flavor, and in nearly every case I preferred it—not a result I expected, since if anything I went in thinking that farmed fish has not been given a fair chance by gourmets. I was often at odds with Child and Berkowitz, however, who in several instances were fooled by which was which and frequently liked the farmed better.
None of our opinions can be called definitive, because the flavor of wildcaught fish depends on when in its development cycle the fish was caught and on what it ate—and also on whether it was handled and shipped properly, which too much fish isn’t. And to be fair, a test should compare a farmed variety with a wild one that is nearly identical in species, which is often impossible. Nonetheless, in most cases we were able to make valid comparisons, and I report here on the four most telling and widely applicable of the six we made. My fellow tasters’ preferences (and assumptions about what makes fish desirable) taught me much about why farmed fish will only increase in popularity.
An instructive example of the pros and cons of farmed fish is mussels, a big aquaculture success. Maine and Prince Edward Island are producing excellent farmed mussels, which often differ from wild mussels only in being meatier and cleaner. At the country’s largest seafood show, in Boston, I had recently tasted farmed P.E.I. mussels as good as any mussels I’d ever had. The farmed ones at the tasting, also from P.E.I., were surprisingly soft and “vanilla,” as Berkowitz called them, showing that farmed fish, too, can vary in flavor depending on when it’s taken.
Farmed mussels have thinner, darker shells than wild, and are usually free of the annoying steel-wool-like black “beard” you have to pull off wild mussels. The cooks at Legal hadn’t bothered to remove the beards, giving the wild away immediately, and the wild mussels were gritty; the texture was chewy, the flavor stronger than that of the farmed. The real surprise was the steaming broth. It was sandy, yes, but briny and dark beside the broth from the farmed mussels, which was almost as clear as water and with as little flavor.
Even if wild mussels can have better flavor, I would buy farmed, because they provide so much more meat and are so easy to clean—you just rinse them, and you don’t have to “degorge” them by soaking them in water to purge grit. Mussels cook in a few minutes, either in a pot with some wine and onion and tomato, if you like, or in the microwave oven.
Shrimp, America’s most popular shellfish, is badly in need of flavor help for its farmed versions. Already a quarter of the shrimp sold worldwide is farmed, and shrimp is the fastest-growing aquaculture. Sulfites and phosphates are regularly added to nearly all shrimp as whiteners and barriers to spoilage, and to help the shrimp retain moisture; phosphates can impart a soapy flavor. Shrimp also often tastes of ammonia—“like Mr. Clean,” Child said dismissively—a sign that it has gone bad. The flavor of farmed shrimp isn’t keeping pace with the growth of the industry. At the seafood show I tasted many examples of farmed shrimp from Asia, the principal location of shrimp farms, and could hardly believe how mealy and boring they were.
Legal’s farmed shrimp, from Ecuador, were better, but they didn’t sell me. Unfortunately, the wild shrimp we tried, from the Gulf Coast, weren’t good either. They had that ammonia aftertaste. I decided to give up on shrimp cocktail and “scampi” dishes (true scampi is a relative of the lobster, and is virtually unobtainable even in Italy) and to stick from now on to the kind of small wild shrimp I had tasted at the seafood show, which had been caught in colder waters (cold water usually results in better flavor). Unimpressive as the tiny samples looked, they tasted like shrimp and offered some spring to the bite.
THE SALMON-FARMING industry is the most competitive of any aquaculture, so it’s logical that salmon was the best of the farmed fish we tasted. Paimblanc brought out two kinds of farmed Atlantic salmon, one the kind Legal buys, from Canada, and the other Norwegian, handpicked by an importer who wanted to impress Legal and Child. Both farmed salmons had a deep color and rich texture, and more flavor than is typical: I’ve often been dismayed by fatty, soft, bland Norwegian salmon. Beside them was a much paler piece of Alaskan salmon, most likely chum, although it had been labeled sockeye.
Berkowitz was fooled. He thought that the Norwegian was wild Pacific king salmon. Child criticized the wild salmon for being dry and short on flavor. Probably it had not been caught at the right time—just before spawning, when salmon is fattest. Nonetheless, I preferred it, because although less lush it had the gaminess I associate with the best salmon, and I would always risk dryness for the flavor of wild salmon.
Almost all legally caught wild Pacific salmon this year will come from waters off Alaska. This year catches off California, Oregon, and Washington have been greatly restricted, and press reports of the restriction mistakenly imply that wild salmon will be in short supply.
Too, we were confounding species, something hard to avoid since farmed Pacific salmon is much less common than Atlantic. Atlantic salmon is actually more closely related to trout than to Pacific salmon. Arctic char, from Iceland, a fish just now being intensively farmed, has excited cooks. It tastes like a cross between salmon and trout and is a pale salmon color. Jasper White, of Jasper’s, in Boston, who is as careful and discerning a cook of seafood as any in the country, plans to make arcticchar an exception to his general rule of serving only wild-caught fish.
The last comparison showed clearly what farming will never be able to do. We tasted striped bass, the fishing of which during much of the eighties was banned up and down the Atlantic coast because of dangerously low stocks; only recently have restrictions been occasionally relaxed. A bass-farming industry grew to meet the demand. Farmed striped bass are hybrids, bred with freshwater white bass, and they only echo wild striped bass, which to my mind is the king of Atlantic fish. Paimblanc brought out an undernourished-looking, insipid creature from a farm in western Massachusetts, which tasted like some forgettable kind of sole. Beside it was a beautiful, thick piece of striped bass from Virginia, soft but not mushy, powerfully oily, fishy in the best way. It set us all to thinking how we’d cook it. “I’d love it broiled with lots of butter, maybe a caper or two on the side,” Child said. Paimblanc remembered cooking bass at Le Pavilion, the legendary New York City restaurant: “We’d roast the whole fish with shallots and white wine, and mix the juices with butter.”
Child did not dismiss the farmed bass, however, and dreamed up buttery ways to dress it, too: butter and cream make Child unapologetically happy. Berkowitz told us that the oils in the wild bass, resulting perhaps from herring or other oily fish the bass had eaten, would scare some people off: “It’s too much flavor,” he said. Here was further evidence that people will gladly forgo the taste of wild fish in favor of something that meekly suits their favorite fish dish. This is why Berkowitz was confident that he could sell the farmed bass at his restaurants—maybe even more of it than the wild—and why farmed catfish has vaulted to popularity.
THE FINE points of whether farmed or wild-caught fish tastes better won’t make much difference when you’re at the fish counter, because you rarely have a choice between them. In fact, you’ll be lucky to find out which kind the fish is. Learning where the fish is from and whether it has been frozen is a matter of chance, since if you ask a sales clerk, you’re likely to receive the wrong answer. To get good fish, you’re forced to rely on the people who do the ordering and storing.
A basic rule in buying fish is that neither the area where fish is sold nor any of the fish should have any odor at all. A fishy smell means that high numbers of bacteria are at work. The very freshest fish does have a strong, pleasant, seaweedlike odor, but you can usually smell that only on a fishing boat. “Look for an antiseptic environment, says Jon Rowley, an authority on fish and the owner of Fish Works, in Seattle, which advises fishermen and fish buyers. “The glass on the fish eases should be spotless, the stainless steel gleaming, and the workers should wear clean clothes.”
A whole fish, something that is becoming harder to find (Child, lamenting diners’ reluctance to cope with bones, said, “People are getting to be such damned sissies”), gives you more information to help you judge freshness. The clarity of the eye of a fish, something most people remember as crucial, isn’t as important or as reliable as odor. Skin should be bright and shiny and adhere tightly to the flesh. The more scales that remain on a scaly fish, like salmon, the better it was handled.
Most fish, though, is sold in fillets, and the best test is again smell. Ask if you can pierce plastic wrap to take a whiff; you may be unpopular with the service person, but rewrapping the fish actually requires just a few seconds. Fillets should be free of any bits of skin and bone, and should not curl at the edges or show signs of yellowing. The Makes should still be tightly connected rather than “gaping”—often a sign of age, although certain fish, such as bluefish and cod, have big flakes that are more loosely attached than the flakes of other kinds, such as sole and perch.
Raw and cooked fish in a display case should never be kept on the same ice, since any contamination on the raw can easily spread to the cooked. The best way for a merchant to store whole fish is covered with ice, which keeps it at an ideal temperature and, with proper drainage, continually washes off bacteria. A pool of liquid under fish indicates that the cell structure is breaking down, and the stagnant liquid can be high in bacteria.
Put unfrozen fish you buy in the coldest part of the refrigerator, preferably on ice, and cook it as soon as possible after getting it home. If you buy frozen fish, defrost it in the refrigerator, not at room temperature or under warm water. My favorite way to cook fish is in the microwave oven, but under a broiler, and of course on a grill, are excellent ways too. For general cooking information I often turn to Shirley King’s Fish: The Basics. Unfortunately there is no single invaluable reference, but an elegant and helpful book is Alan Davidson’s Seafood, with beautiful illustrations by Charlotte Knox. The vital first step is finding a source of consistently fresh fish.
“Fresh” does not mean fish that has never been frozen; it is better used for the opposite of “stale.” To anyone knowledgeable about fish, “frozen” is not a dirty word. The fact is that 90 percent of fish sold in this country has at some point been frozen. And fish that is carefully frozen at sea as soon as it is caught and cleaned, and defrosted slowly in a refrigerator, is likely to taste fresher than “fresh” fish that is kept chilled for days before it reaches port. Fish chilled as it travels can partly freeze during the several legs of its journey to market or restaurant, causing damage to the flesh, and when it defrosts, it will lose much liquid. Also, the variety of temperatures at which unfrozen fish is often kept during the long time from catch to sale increases the likelihood that it could prove a health hazard from acquired bacteria.
Properly handled just-caught fish is refrigerated or, preferably, frozen before it enters rigor mortis. Though it may seem indecorous to discuss rigor mortis regarding something you’re going to eat, the subject is of central concern to anyone interested in fish. If fish is left at ambient temperature for even a few hours—the time it takes to enter rigor mortis—the texture will irremediably suffer. If it is frozen immediately, the thawed fish can be superior. Bruce Gore, a Seattle-based fisherman whose frozen Pacific salmon, mostly king and coho, costs more than almost any kind of unfrozen, has had the pleasure of seeing his pristine fish beat samples of top-quality unfrozen salmon of the same species in blind taste tests.
Your fishmonger, like most restaurateurs, might well have already decided to take the easy route with commonly farmed varieties of fish. Farmed fish does offer commendable consistency and occasionally, as in the cases of salmon and mussels, a taste strongly reminiscent of the real thing. But it is a standardization of something that is elusive and at its best inimitable. As fears about safety and overfishing rise, we’ll probably be obliged to rely on farmed fish in very popular varieties. To cultivate a taste for wild-caught fish, you’re best off trying odd kinds. Socalled trash fish like cusk, skate, wolffish, and porgies, which are available year-round, can be some of the most enjoyable fish you’ll ever cook. Keep an eye out for fish that appears only at certain times of the year, like mackerel, soft-shell crabs, shad, and cotuit oysters. They allow you to savor something with a short, uncertain season and unique flavor. That incomparable flavor is the reward for waiting until any food is at its peak rather than trying to have it any time. Take a chance when company isn’t coming.
