It’s a question every landlocked seafood lover has: How, exactly, does seafood get here? And: So many thousands of miles from the ocean, how can the fish possibly be fresh?
“Airplanes are good for that,” explains chef/owner Amy Vitale of Tables restaurant in Park Hill. “Sure, there’s nothing like being up in Maine and getting a fresh lobster. Maybe it’s just in your mind, but there is something to that. But fish comes by Fed Ex now. We get it hours after it’s been caught.”
Vitale purchases her fish from a local fish distributor, Northeast Seafood, which, like other area distributors, makes daily deliveries.
But just because the truck rolls in from the airport with new fish every day, does that mean it’s fresh?
A visit to another local seafood supplier, Seattle Fish Co., helps connect the dots from hook to table.
Where dinner says “aloha”
Seattle Fish Co., a nearly century-old Denver outfit that supplies dozens of area retailers and restaurants from the Brown Palace to the Cheesecake Factory to Marczyk Fine Foods, brings in much of its fish, including wild tuna and farmed kam pachi, by air from Hawaii.
Boats in the Pacific use long lines to catch tuna, which are immediately placed in a slurry of crushed ice and salt water to keep the fish at a constant temperature: just at, but not below, the freezing point. Boats are typically at sea for several days before they arrive at the hectic, early-morning fish auction in Hawaii, where sharp-eyed buyers and brokers contracted by the Seattle Fish gather to inspect the catch for purchase.
“I know these guys well,” Harry Mahleres, the company’s director of purchasing, says of his buyers. “I have to trust them to get the best. It’s a good-old-boy, manual system.”
As the fish are brought into the chilly warehouse for display, a sample of flesh is “notched” from the tail of each fish for buyers to evaluate. Fish are then tagged to denote freshness and quality, and the bidding begins. Fatter fish and the most recent catches fetch the highest prices.
Off with their heads!
After the fish are purchased, they lose their heads and gills (much of this offal goes to fish feed for farmed stocks, or to pet-food products). Then they’re flown immediately to Denver, often arriving at DIA in the wee hours of the morning.
It’s a 2 4/7 operation. “You have to move fast,” says Mahleres. “Freshness is everything in this business.”
Gel packs and insulated boxes keep the fish at a constant temperature in the air; if the flight is delayed or the insulation is breached, it’s the shipper who eats the cost of lost product.
Welcome to Denver
At DIA, the fish are quickly loaded into refrigerated trucks and brought to Seattle Fish’s temperature-controlled (read: near-freezing) processing plant in north Denver. There, the product is re-evaluated for quality and temperature (if the flesh has reached 40 degrees, the fish is discarded), screened again for bacteria and other imperfections, then processed and portioned for distribution to stores and restaurants.
Seattle Fish maintains an active, spotless, and frequently inspected facility, which is no small task in the face of the dramatic butchery that happens on-site. Watching an authoritative knifesman disassemble a 150-pound tuna is not for the faint of heart. But dangerously sharp blades and expert skill quickly transform a human-sized swimmer into so many blood-red steaks.
For some larger fish not sold whole (tuna, swordfish, halibut), the flesh is quickly treated with ozone (a naturally occurring oxygen compound) to retard bacterial development. The fish is then shrink- wrapped in breathable plastic and labeled for delivery by refrigerated truck — just hours before it hits the table.
Tender freezing care
In the best case, this high-tech journey gets Pacific fish from hook to kitchen within 48 hours, but most wild-caught fish, particularly those delivered to restaurants in the mountains, are older than that, having spent a few days in controlled temperatures along the way.
Derek Figueroa, chief operating officer for Seattle Fish Co., insists that as long as the fish is correctly handled along its journey, that extra time doesn’t compromise quality or freshness.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think that the best fish was the one you’ve just caught yourself and thrown on the grill,” says Figueroa. “But that can’t happen every day.”
Figueroa says that Denver’s access to fresh seafood isn’t so different from coastal cities. If you serve Pacific fish on the East Coast, it spends even more time in transit.
“In many ways, Denver is ideally situated to have fresh seafood from both coasts.”
This unlikely accessibility to high-quality seafood is not lost on Denver eaters. “The Denver consumer is sophisticated,” says Figueroa. “And fish is so transparent. You can’t fake freshness.”
No disguises at the table
Dave Kauder, Whole Foods’ seafood coordinator for the Rocky Mountain region, agrees. “It’s really not too hard to know if a fish is bad or not. If it’s slimy or smelly, it’s bad — and you’ll know it.”
Kauder, like Figueroa, lauds the state’s seafood sophisticates. “We sell more fish on average in the Rocky Mountain region than the other regions,” he says. “Coloradans traditionally eat a lot of seafood.”
“Salmon is still the number one fish no matter what the variety,” Kauder says. “Then cod, tuna, sea bass, halibut, the basics. But we now stock 20 species at some of our stores.”
Tables’ Chef Vitale, and her customers, have also seen a diversification in available species of seafood.
“My customers know more about fish and seafood all the time. If you put monkfish on the menu five years ago, it would have been a hard sell. But now, customers say, ‘Oh, the poor man’s lobster!’ ”
Tips for buying fish
By John Broening, Special to the Denver Post
1. Buy from vendors who sell most of their stock on a daily basis.
2. Buy fish on the bone whenever possible (it’ll stay fresher longer).
3. If you buy a piece of a fillet, ask for your fishmonger to cut it from the section near the head. The tail is usually leaner and less flavorful, as well as being more fibrous and having a greater proportion of the strong-tasting bloodline. This is especially true for tuna.
4. If you’re buying whole fish, look for clear eyes, reddish gills and shiny skin. If you have a chance to smell the fish, do so. It should smell clean and briny.
5. If you’re buying fillets that still have the small pinbones still in them, the pin bones should cling tightly to the flesh of the fish.
John Broening cooks at Duo restaurant, .
Fish is healthy for us, sure, but what about the oceans?
According to Alison Barratt
of the Monterey Bay Aquarium
in Monterey, Calif., nearly
70 percent of the world’s fisheries
are “either fished to capacity
or overfished.” What’s
more, a quarter of the global
catch is discarded as “bycatch”-
including unwanted
fish, sea turtles, sharks and
at-risk bird species.
The global impact of fishing
and fish farming (aquaculture)
on the ocean is severe,
said Barratt, and getting
worse.
“It’s not surprising that people
are less aware about the issues
with seafood. When we
look at the ocean, it looks fine.
It’s not like looking at the Amazon,
where you can see the
forest shrinking day by day.
So making that connection is
harder for people.”
Seafood Watch, a nonprofit
program the aquarium started
in 1997, maintains an up-to-date
guide to help consumers
and vendors make informed
fish purchases.
The Seafood Watch guide
lists dozens of fish, tagging
each with a green (best
choice), yellow (good alternative)
or red (avoid) code,
based on strict criteria including
the size of the stocks, the
vulnerability of the species to
overfishing, the extent of the
“bycatch,” environmental impact
and the management
practices of the operation.
“People always look at the
red list first,” Barratt says.
“They’re disappointed, and
surprised, to see things like
farmed salmon. With farmed
salmon, they think they’re giving
the ocean a break. But it
takes 3 pounds of caught fish
(processed into feed) to produce
1 pound of salmon.
You’re actually draining the
ocean of protein that you
could use ‘as is,’ and you’re
left with untreated sewage.”
But Barratt doesn’t discount
aquaculture entirely. “We’re
finding ways to farm in a more
sustainable manner because
the demand for seafood is increasing-
but what we can
take out of the ocean wild is decreasing. Agriculture on land
has been around for thousands
of years. Aquaculture is very
new. It’s only been around for
30 to 50 years. There are new
innovations on the horizon.”
Dave Kauder, Whole Foods’
seafood coordinator for the
Rocky Mountain region, sells
both wild and farmed salmon — with a caveat.
“Yes, there are some scary
farming practices out there.
But if we’re farming seafood
correctly and safely, then
we’re not depleting our
oceans. We know exactly
where our farmed seafood
comes from. We use a farm in
Norway for our farmed salmon.
It is the only farm in the
world that meets our standards. It’s environmentally
friendly and we know what the
stocks have been fed. A lot of
farmed fish are fed things like
chicken byproducts. We don’t
want to give our salmon anything
they wouldn’t naturally
eat, and salmon don’t naturally
eat chicken.”
Derek Figueroa, chief operating
officer of the Seattle
Fish Co. in Denver, which
sells both wild and farmed
salmon, is also optimistic
about farming.
“We know that wild stocks
are insufficient to service the
demand for salmon. We
know we can only effect
change by working together. It
feels like a partnership now.”
Much of the innovation is
happening in the U.S. “If it’s
farmed or caught in the United
States, it’s often a better choice
than imported,” Barratt says,
citing relatively stringent laws
in the United States, including
trap doors to release sea turtles
from shrimp trawlers and
mechanisms to shoo away the
albatross that might get caught
in an Alaskan net.
“It’s not to say that things
are not being done well in other
places, but it’s hard to monitor
across borders, to create
the chain of custody. Stuff
gets shipped all over the
world. What’s caught in one
country is processed in another.”
And that, Barratt says, can
obscure the issue.
Ultimately, she sees change
coming from consumers.
“Consuming seafood is a
personal choice,” she says. “If
we ask for better choices, ultimately
the fish-supply chain
will change.”
Visit seafoodwatch.org for
more on the Seafood Watch
program. The Marine Stewardship
Council (msc.org) also offers
consumer news and tips.
Tucker Shaw
