On Fish

Here are my rules on buying seafood: 1) Don't buy farmed salmon. Never mind that farmers frequently dye the flesh pink and most practices are bad for the environment. Farmed salmon tastes like crap. It’s mushy and bland and good for nothing. Wild salmon, while not perfect for the environment, is a world apart from the farmed crap. Just look at Copper River salmon next to a fillet of pale and floppy farm stuff and you wouldn’t think they were from the same planet, let alone species. Don’t even get me started on the taste difference. Coho, Sockeye, Copper River, King – I’ll eat them all. 2) Never buy farmed shrimp. That’s just because of the environment. 3) Steaming your own live crab is far superior than buying the precooked stuff. It’s not even worth it to buy the precooked stuff. I’ll either buy the refrigerated canned crab from Southeast Asia or I’ll steam my own Dungeness crab. It’s a pain in the ass to shell it and it’s no fun dumping those poor little crustaceans into the Pot of Death but it’s one of my top ten foods. The sound of crab claws banging against the pot can be haunting. “Tell me, Clarice. Have the crabs stopped clanking?” 4) Buy fresh local stuff whenever possible (tough luck, Kansas) or, if not, buy flash frozen stuff. A lot of seafood is sold defrosted. You just don’t know when they did it. Could’ve been that morning, could’ve been last Tuesday. Luckily, recent USDA laws make it mandatory for sellers to specify the fish’s country of origin and whether it’s fresh or frozen. 5) Not all farmed seafood is bad. Farmed oysters are benign. Vegetarian fed fish like catfish and tilapia aren’t terrible, though they’re often fed corn. Is industrial corn worse than overfishing? Vegetarianism is sounding better and better. 6) Above all, avoid escolar. Why? I’m glad you asked. Now, I love the succulent fish. The kind whose flesh is on the fatty side; it can be like the Kobe beef of the sea. It tastes decadent and it’s easy to cook; it’s almost impossible to overcook. But since Chilean sea bass hit the top of the unsafe list and sablefish, or what my people call “black cod,” is kinda pricey, what’s there to eat? So when the dude at Fish King said that escolar was like Chilean sea bass and it was under ten bucks a pound, I pounced on it. I had John and Ole over for dinner where I served fillets with a watercress pesto. During dinner, we all were freaking out on how amazing the texture of the fish was and how odd it was that we’d never even heard of escolar before.

Watercress Pesto 2 big handfuls of watercress 2 garlic cloves 1 squeeze of lemon 1 small handful of pine nuts Extra virgin olive oil Stuff everything but the olive oil with some salt and pepper into a jar. Slowly add olive oil while zapping it with a hand blender. Keep adding and mixing until it comes together.

So after dinner, I looked it up on the Internet and I read this article out loud about how some chefs call it the evil fish or something like that. Apparently one of the fats that makes escolar flesh so luscious is indigestible by humans which can lead to “intestinal discomfort.” An oceanic Olestra. We all laughed nervously. The article recommended that you grill it so the fat can drip away in portions no larger than three ounces. I baked 14 ounce fillets – extra juicy. Oops. Oh well. How bad could it be? CUT TO: MORNING. I woke up with a rumbling in my stomach. Hm. Gurgle. Uh. Oh no. Then something terrible happened. Something unspeakably horrific. And then I made it to the bathroom. This continued on and off for a couple hours until I gathered the strength to call Ole and John. Ole had no problems. John was fine. So I thought it was me. And then I got calls from both of them not two hours later. I was not alone. For three days, we suffered in ways that – well if you need a description, just read the side of a nonfat Pringles can from the ‘90s.