Seafood Lovers.. Are You Getting What You Pay For?

reply to post by SLAYER69

I can honestly say it's getting more expensive and the portions are getting smaller. I used to love this particular Chinese food place in China town in L.A. from my younger years. Recently I went back 17 years later and ordered my old favorite shrimp dish, they served the same meal but this time it was twice as expensive and the Shrimp were no longer jumbos but tiny popcorn sized .

Sounds like inflation...

I remember 15 years ago a bag of skittles was 45 cents now its $1 dollar... and in smaller bags...

Originally posted by userid1
A favorite trick *some* restaurants use, is to substitute stamped pieces of skate wings for scallops. Many people can't really tell the difference in taste. If you are having any questions about your order of scallops - look to see how "perfectly" circular they are are - especially the edges. This really doesn't happen with true scallops - but happens each and every time with stamped (cut) pieces of a substitute.

Actually I am fairly certain that the above is false and somewhat of a myth. Granted I haven't done the research as far as formaly looking on google/Wikipedia, what I have done is try something similar to this but for a different reason. In fact I have always heard this myth and believed it to be true until I attempted to use skate/sting ray as a menu item. You see, my family owns a seafood business and now restaurant and both my father and grandfather were small time commercial fishermen. They never went on the big haul boats but instead fished the local river for flounder (similar to halibut), mullet, striped bass, crab, catfish, white perch, Spanish mackerel, blues, shad, croakers, etc. To supply our market, and then bought from a wholesaler anything else they needed to retail. Anyway, in more recent years my father renovated our store and added a restaurant. He hated the fact that stingrays were a devasting by-catch to his nets as they would roll themselves in the net and literally make a 10x10 ft section unusable. So he named his restaurant after that burdensome animal (he figured they cost him so much money in damaged nets, that he was going to make them benefit him somehow and that's how we named it). Anyway back on point, last year he caught several skates and stingrays and wanted to add them to the menu since it was part of our name and we always heard the myth. So we take the wings and remove them from the body so as there are 2 seperate wings and discard the body. Well the wings have a piece of cartelidge that runs thru it, so you can't just 'punch' thru it. So we fileted the top half of the wing off of that cartelidge and proceeded to skin the meat off now that it was workable. At this point we had already realized that you couldn't mistake this meat for any scallop. First off the meat is extremely bloody, and is almost a grayish red not white like a scallop. Second the meat is striated all wrong and has to be sliced similar to a beef brisket with respect to how the grain of the meat runs, this ensures the proper tenderness just like in brisket, otherwise it feels like chewing on boot leather. I'd be more than happy to picture document this for you when our next ray comes thru to properly debunk this. I would think you would have more success trying to imitate shark for scallop instead of rays. The method that's always been told to me as to how they 'stamp' these wings is with a lead pipe and just pressed thru the meat with that until they pop out the top end, probably 3/4 to 1 inch diameter.


I have another old wives tale to debunk as well. I'll go on a limb here and say that people familiar with seafood have probably heard to only eat oysters in months that have an 'R' in them. This is solely because that back 70 years ago and previous, they did not make use or probably have many refrigerated trucks for hauling the loads of oysters up and down the coast. Now it's accepted to eat oysters all year round because of the fact that they are tightly controlled by the FDA and regulated to be transported in properly temped trucks and stored in appropriate facilities.

When I was young I wondered why all seafood had an underlying flavor.
Then I spent several years underwater and realized why.

What I realized is that the Earth's oceans are 4 BILLION year old
toilets that have never been flushed.

Every sea creatures swims, eats, and breathes in the same place it
defecates.

Add in mercury and a gang of other pollutants.

I haven't touched seafood in two decades.

reply to post by Version100


That's kinda flawed logic, why dont you continue up the ladder and add in all the other waste and toxins like human poop, run-off water, industry waste, oil, and gas, etc. It all ends up in the water, which in turns enters our atmosphere (precipitation anybody?) falls back to earth in our 'clean' supply pools, or waters our vegetation we consume, etc. Point is those same toxins can be applied to literally everything because everything is contained in this earth and it's atmosphere. It's a part of us, and if you don't eat seafood, you should give up living altogether cause guaranteed far enough up the chain youre still consuming what your reasoning says you choose not to eat.

Another side note, seafood is one of the last remaining bastions of relatively safe and real food. I don't see many steroid pumped, GMO fish coming thru the door with the exception being farmed products instead of wild caught. Just saying seafood is more organic than most anything produced and sold that doesn't come from the sea


Sorry, I didnt literally mean give up living because you don't eat seafood. Believe me I know it's an acquired taste and we know only a small portion of people regularly enjoy seafood. Most people tend to eat it only on occasion.

I have sport fished all my life. My father taught me and my husband and I sportfish to this day. We do what they call selective harvest. We do keep some fish for eating. I can tell you, I know the difference between Crappie and Bluegill. I know the difference between perch and walleye.
But I have to say, these are species that I catch and eat. I eat what I catch. I have never really trusted anything I get in a restaurant. I have worked in the industry for over 40 years on and off, and I can tell you, when it comes to buying product, small businesses will always take the cheaper product as long as they can create what they want to with that product. Hence: sauces, glases, or plank cooked, Your not tasting the fish, your tasting the contents of what their cooking it in or on, or with.
And not to mention the fact that most small businesses have distributors, and they have distributors. etc.........

Originally posted by phishfriar47
reply to post by Version100

 

That's kinda flawed logic, why dont you continue up the ladder and add in all the other waste and toxins like human poop, run-off water, industry waste, oil, and gas, etc. It all ends up in the water, which in turns enters our atmosphere (precipitation anybody?) falls back to earth in our 'clean' supply pools, or waters our vegetation we consume, etc. Point is those same toxins can be applied to literally everything because everything is contained in this earth and it's atmosphere. It's a part of us, and if you don't eat seafood, you should give up living altogether cause guaranteed far enough up the chain youre still consuming what your reasoning says you choose not to eat.

Speaking of flawed logic, fresh water evaporates out of the oceans
none of the pollutants evaporate they remain in place...

Atmospheric pollutants contaminating rain water is unavoidable, eating
out of a 4 billion year old toilet is.

reply to post by phishfriar47


Where's the cartilage here?


en.wikipedia.org...:Uncooked_Skate_Wing.jpg

reply to post by userid1


Link didn't work, using an iPhone so please embed photo or give me a better link. I'll check it out and I did say I was using real life experience over searching the interwebs, just saying, i said that in my original post

Originally posted by Version100

Originally posted by phishfriar47
reply to post by Version100

 

That's kinda flawed logic, why dont you continue up the ladder and add in all the other waste and toxins like human poop, run-off water, industry waste, oil, and gas, etc. It all ends up in the water, which in turns enters our atmosphere (precipitation anybody?) falls back to earth in our 'clean' supply pools, or waters our vegetation we consume, etc. Point is those same toxins can be applied to literally everything because everything is contained in this earth and it's atmosphere. It's a part of us, and if you don't eat seafood, you should give up living altogether cause guaranteed far enough up the chain youre still consuming what your reasoning says you choose not to eat.

So following the food chain doesn't count either? You do realize water makes up the larger portion of this planet right? Alot of things as simple as plankton and algae to small fish and the like are consumed by 'land' creatures that you may consume. Just saying your making an exception because it holds the same contents for extended periods of time. Does our air escape our atmosphere (seriously i don't know) i just feel like we live in a bubble of sorts and everything that's here will always be here so i feel like you're arguing something somewhat trivial. Just my opinion as it were.

Speaking of flawed logic, fresh water evaporates out of the oceans
none of the pollutants evaporate they remain in place...

Atmospheric pollutants contaminating rain water is unavoidable, eating
out of a 4 billion year old toilet is.

Originally posted by phishfriar47
reply to post by userid1

 

Link didn't work, using an iPhone so please embed photo or give me a better link. I'll check it out and I did say I was using real life experience over searching the interwebs, just saying, i said that in my original post

Copy and paste the entire link and I think you'll get my point. Btw - the information I posted came from employees (5 different employees of 5 different restaurants in the tidewater, VA area) en.wikipedia.org...:Uncooked_Skate_Wing.jpg

Oh Yes they are,with lots of Cesium added free as a side ingredient. Ha,Ha
And maybe a dose of the other radiations.

reply to post by userid1


Ahh yes that is exactly what those wings look like when we cut them. Notice how you can easily see the grain in the meat. Totally different than that of scallop. Scallop has a tighter, more stringy grain, that runs from top to bottom. This is a horizontal grain, that is tough. Also, how could you get a uniform scallop when the rays wings taper off? Just saying only someone completely ignorant of seafood could mistake the 2. And the cartelidge has already been removed from that piece just like I described in my original post. If you think of how a ray swims by flapping it's 'wings' to propel itself, it needs some structure to it's wings to be able to make that curling motion. And like i said you have to cut that ray wing in slices in order for it not to be tough when eating it. When it's sliced like that, it curls up when cooked and pulls apart easily.

I will be more than happy to give a demonstration as soon as my next ray comes in. Oh and I'm not saying that your method doesn't happen, it's just not as common as you think, especially coastal areas that are used to scallops, it's easily identifiable as whether or not it skate or scallop, only someone with little seafood experience could confuse the 2.

I've tried the method, I've eaten both animals, and I've been born and raised in the seafood industry, I'm pretty sure my first hand knowledge is sufficient in this matter, especially after seeing that picture. I'll be sure to show you real life pictures of this instead of a staged wiki photo. You know so you can see in real life, by a real person in the field how it's performed practically. That picture reminds me of the cheeseburgers you see on TV ads, looks perfect in the picture, real life is a whole different animal.