The clerk cringed. He eyed the fillets of orange roughy he was wrapping. “No, ah - not really. Not frozen solid. Just chilled.”
Almost certainly, he was lying. Less than 10 percent of the fish sold in this country has never been frozen; and according to distributors, virtually all our orange roughy arrives frozen from New Zealand. A mild, firm fish popular for its almost complete lack of flavor, orange roughy stands up very well to freezing and proper thawing; home cooks have no reason to shy away from it. Yet a fish clerk at one of Manhattan’s most expensive supermarkets felt he couldn’t tell the truth; nobody would have bought the fish.
“Our whole concept of ‘fresh’ is warped,” says Peggy Parker, program director at the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, a trade organization. “We keep trying to tell people that fresh isn’t the opposite of frozen, it’s the opposite of spoiled.”
Frozen fish, traditionally the lowliest seafood in the store, is getting an overhaul. With supermarkets largely unable to keep fresh fish in prime condition, and technology at hand for sophisticated, on-board freezing, more fish will show up in the freezer case - some of it looking very glamorous indeed. “Frozen got a bad rap at retail,” says Steve Chartier, national sales manager for Seattle’s Peter Pan Seafood. “Now fish are kept on board in refrigerated sea water, at temperatures below freezing, and delivered to processing plants within 24 hours. The difference in quality is night and day.”
The undisputed royalty of frozen fish is the Alaskan salmon from Triad Fisheries on Bainbridge Island, Wash., a product so extraordinary it’s known among fish lovers as “Bruce’s salmon,” after Triad’s owner Bruce Gore. Susan Herrmann Loomis, author of “The Great American Seafood Cookbook,” says it’s among the best fish she ever had; and chef Wayne Ludvigsen of Ray’s Boathouse in Seattle serves it six months a year. “Because of Bruce’s freezing technique, and all the handling that goes into the fish, you’re assured of an incredibly fresh product - within my definition of fresh,” says Ludvigsen.
Triad’s fishermen handle each salmon individually. “We race the clock,” says Gore. “We want to get the fish stabilized prior to rigor mortis. That happens very early on, and it can be controlled by temperature. We bleed the fish and freeze it pre-rigor - the boats are capable of about 35 degrees below zero. That very rapid freeze minimizes tissue damage, so when the fish is thawed you don’t get any liquid draining out of ruptured cells. The fish stays moist, and it slides across your tongue like a fresh fish.”
Freezing alone doesn’t make these fish great, of course: Triad’s boats use hook and line rather than nets, and they target Alaskan salmon just when they’re fattening themselves up to spawn. All this attention makes for an expensive product, as Gore readily admits. “You could pay $10 a pound for my king salmon, then go across the street and buy farmed salmon for $3.49,” he says. “But it’s the difference between buying a Pinto and a Porsche.”
