#139 – Swimming Upstream: Ethical Salmon in an Era of Farmed Fish with Sam Pflaum of Ketchikan Sam’s

What does ethical and sustainable seafood look like, and how in the world do we even begin to find such a thing? In this episode Andrea sat down with Sam Pflaum, owner and operator of Ketchikan Sam’s up in Ketchikan, Alaska, USA. Sam’s family has been living and fishing in Ketchikan, Alaska for several generations, and he understands the nature of the fish and the nature of the fishing industry. We asked him about farmed vs wild-caught salmon, different varieties of salmon, salmon hatcheries, ethics of salmon and eating fish when you live away from the ocean. We talked about alternatives to salmon and other types of fish that are good to eat, and we discussed seasonality and storing of fresh fish. This was a fascinating and eye-opening episode – seafood is a topic we are often asked about but we are not deeply educated on ourselves, and it was a relief to have someone to ask these questions who really understands the industry from all angles.

After we finished recording the main feed episode, Sam took us on a walking tour of his fish plant, which you can see on our Ancestral Kitchen Podcast YouTube channel; supporters of the podcast can also listen in to the audio of this on the private podcast feed. Nothing beats seeing the visuals and walking outside to see the salmon running down the creek right outside the fish plant!

Sam is educating us on how to find ethical suppliers wherever we may be, and the quality of fish to look for; we have also shared links to his online store for frozen fish shipping everywhere in the USA, in the show notes. There are plenty of other great resources in the show notes today too, so check them out for additional video content from Ketchikan Sam’s!

What We Talked About:

• What was the last thing you ate today?
• Let’s do a deep dive on salmon – current sustainability issues, fishing ethics, regulations, as well as farmed vs wild-caught
• Should someone who lives away from the sea be eating ocean seafood?
• What are some reasonable alternatives to salmon?
• The rising cost of seafood – prices double as tariffs block global imports of cheap, net-caught seafood
• Fish seasonality – when to look for certain fish? How long can we store them in the freezer?
• Jakob wanted to know: What sea animals can you smoke?

Visit Ancestral Kitchen Podcast on YouTube to see a walking tour of the fish plant and smokehouse, as well as hear Sam’s favorite ways to cook and serve fish!

The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

Sam’s online freezer shop and use code ANCESTRAL26 for $10 off your order!

Alaska Vibes interview and tour with Sam

Ketchikan Sam’s on Instagram

Ketchikan Sam’s on Facebook

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Welcome to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. Today, I am not sitting across from my lovely co-host, Allison.

Andrea:
I’m across from the rough fisherman. I don’t think we would use the word lovely for you, Sam. um sam flom is the husband of leah who y’all have heard on the podcast i think three times now she’s been on air with us, and they live in ketchikan alaska and sam is the owner and operator of ketchikan sam’s which you guys have heard me mention multiple times as they are friends of ours and they have opened this business now you’re going into your second year, and the, The amazing thing about you guys, Sam, is how much you know about sustainability of fish and, the wildlife and the environment and then interactions of all the different wildlife since you and your family have been in Ketchikan for many generations now. I think we have said since before Alaska was a state. Yeah, 1955 is when we moved up. That’s awesome. And Alaska became a state in 58, right?

Sam:
It was 59.

Andrea:
59. Okay. Maybe Hawaii was 58. Pretty close. But it is super awesome to have you here, Sam. Every time I talk to you, I learn something new about fish. Every time I talk to Leah, I learn something new about fish. So I asked her, do you think Sam would just come on and do a full episode? Allison and I get a lot of questions about seafood. And for neither of us, we have, neither of us have felt comfortable answering them because it isn’t our forte. We know enough to know that there’s a lot of bad practices out there. We know enough to know that it’s hard to find good seafood that’s considered ethical and sustainable, especially now. But we don’t, we don’t, um.

Andrea:
Don’t necessarily know the ins and outs of it all um sam after i made you put your phone on do not disturb my phone just rang so let me put my phone on do not disturb, that is a first usually people don’t call me up 4 30 in the morning when i’m recording so i kind of forgot that, so anyways sam you were actually recording from your fish plant in catch a can and, you and i have already been on the phone for a minute and you walked around and gave me a bit of a mini tour we tested your wi-fi and if it works out we will go on another tour and you’ll record it for everybody listening just so they can see what, a small size i mean it doesn’t seem small but in the face of like it’s pretty small in this industry in the face of yeah these mega corporations like trawling the asian oceans and sure you know it’s different you know you don’t have slaves and stuff like that, which i know that affects the price when you actually pay people to work um.

Sam:
It definitely does.

Andrea:
So hopefully if you are listening to this on the podcast you can check out the ancestral kitchen podcast channel on youtube and then you’ll be able to see sam actually in his blue sweater sitting in the fish plant, and then you’ll also hopefully be able to see a tour even if we have to record it separately if it goes up as a separate piece one way or the other we’ll get it up so So anyways, Sam, that’s a mighty long welcome, but welcome. I’m super happy to have you here.

Sam:
Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Andrea:
It’s very exciting. I have a question for you, which every guest on this podcast has been asked. And that question is, what is the last thing you ate besides the cup of coffee in your hands?

Sam:
Besides a cup of coffee? Well, this morning I had some eggs and I had some venison breakfast sausage. So that was good.

Andrea:
Awesome. uh that’s your venison that you.

Sam:
Hunt yes or yeah you and the people around.

Andrea:
You are hunting.

Sam:
We use most of it up already and uh the season season’s open now but uh we usually get most of our year in october so use it up for then and go get some new stuff soon so.

Andrea:
Is that sausage the breakfast sausage.

Sam:
That you guys.

Andrea:
Yeah because that’s one of the last things i ate too actually because leah brought some of that down.

Sam:
You might have the summer sausage down there but yeah that’s what Yeah, the summer sausage. That’s kind of the shelf-stable stuff. My uncle’s put together a breakfast sausage, the one that he cooks together. Wow.

Andrea:
Well, I love the summer sausage. It’s really good. So thank you for treating us. We had it on millet bread with homemade raw butter, and it was perfect.

Andrea:
All right. I’m going to take a quick break, Sam, and then we’ll jump back in with the first question, which is, probably the hottest one right now, which is take us on a deep dive about salmon and we’ll talk about wild-caught versus farmed.

Sam:
Thank you.

Andrea:
All right. Deep dive on salmon. Let’s go there.

Sam:
Sure. Sure. Well, there’s a lot of information out there. And the first thing I want to say is I’m not a biologist. I don’t have a degree in fish science, but I have been around fish my whole life. As with my family, I’ve been around a lot of fish scientists. I work with a lot with the hatcheries, like the Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association. They do a lot of the hatcheries around here, which I’ll talk about that a little bit about salmon enhancement and some of the aspects of the sustainability and how we manage our stocks in Alaska.

Sam:
So I guess if we want to start talking about salmon, it’s, I guess, just the basic idea of how they operate, the basic timeline that they operate on. There’s five species of them. five species of the Pacific salmon. There’s the king salmon. There’s the coho salmon. Those are the two most popular, as well as the sockeye. And then there’s also the chum or the keda salmon and the pink or the humpy salmon. And they’re all good in their own way, but those are the five distinct species that we have up here. They all have different idiosyncrasies and things that they do to, you know, their life cycle is all different. Some of them have to have a lake. Some of them spawn in brackish water where the saltwater mixes, and they’re all unique in their own way. But typically, a salmon is, well, all of them are born in the freshwater. They’re anadromous, so they start in the freshwater and they go to the saltwater. And so they spend up to a year to two years in the freshwater, depending on the species. They go out and live a time frame of two to seven or eight years depending on the species in the saltwater. Wow. Live on the ocean.

Andrea:
So they leave home and they’re gone for like two to seven years, depending on the species. Wow.

Sam:
Yeah, like the pink salmon, they have a two-year cycle. They reach maturity, the reproduction age in two years on the ocean. and they call them, so a salmon that spends time on the ocean is, so if it spends two years on the ocean, it’s a two ocean fish when it comes back. It might be three or four years old, but it’s a two ocean fish. That’s how it’s referred to in the, the biology side of it because that’s how many years they’ve spent on the ocean. And like a pink salmon has two years. A king salmon, they are mature at three, but sometimes they can get the ones that are 70, 80 pounds. Those might be eight years. It depends on the, depends on the species. um, And, you know, these salmon, they come out of the stream and sometimes the stuff in Alaska goes far as Japan. They go as far as China. Sometimes they go all the way up into the Bering Sea and then they come back.

Sam:
Most of the salmon, except for king salmon, spend their life at about under six inches. They’re very small for most of their life. And then they raise their weight as they come back in. King salmon are a little bit different. They go get a bit deeper. They’re just a different critter. so there’s just there’s a lot of story to tell about them, but that’s the basic premise is they go live their life in the ocean and they come back to the stream that they were born in typically because it imprints and their brain’s only about so big, they don’t have much of a brain on it but they have a very strong sense of smell, and they can find each stream here has a different sediment count has a different mineral count and they can sense which stream that is based on a lot of those factors and so they come back to the same one or close to it, you’ll see them stray occasionally it does happen especially with like the pinks a lot of times they’ll they’ll come up with a stream but they’ll go a close one um but the bigger salmon the kings, the cohos the sockeye they’ll usually go back pretty much across the board to the same stream.

Andrea:
So this is definitely playing a factor then in why all of the contamination is throwing runs off yeah is that part of it because now you know content of the streams is changing are they able to.

Sam:
Distinguish yeah to an extent to an extent yeah they uh, Chemistry of stream, like, honestly, the freshwater, the rearing of these fish has more to do with survivability than almost anything else. Like, the size of a king salmon, how long it’s going to live is determined by the size of the pebbles or the cobbles where it lays its eggs.

Andrea:
Right?

Sam:
And so, like, freshwater conditions have so much more to do with what we deal with salmon in the ocean than people realize. Because, you know, there’s, for example, there’s two rivers behind Ketchikan up in the Misty Fjords. And one of them has really big king salmon. And the other one has a lot of small king salmon. And the difference is that one river has big cobbles in the nesting areas. And one river has mostly silt in the nesting areas. And so it’s the size difference of fish. So there’s just these little factors that, you know. Clear cutting, that has a big impact on fish. Clear cutting timber. we have lost runs even in this area because they clear cut all the way to the stream and killed these bedding areas and we have actually two runs here around Ketchikan that we lost in the last 15 years for that reason because they cleared all the way to the stream.

Andrea:
So is it not I mean, I know if you have enough money you can do whatever you want in this world it seems like but there’s like a rule of thumb around here about how much you can cut around.

Sam:
Often like waterways you’re supposed to leave a green strip on the side of the streams but that doesn’t always necessarily happen i won’t put names out there of folks who do that but it does happen.

Andrea:
Okay all right so just hope not to get caught.

Sam:
Is it sure is the thing okay.

Andrea:
But i can see i can see that affecting it you.

Sam:
Know also a.

Andrea:
Lot more sediment and everything would be washing down and even if you left.

Sam:
Yeah trees up around so yeah and water temperature has a lot to do with it um, So, you know, we’ve got the freshwater conditions that are very impactful in the salmon cycle, but also ocean conditions have a lot to do with it as well. We’ve got a lot of predation. There’s whales that have figured out when they release small salmon out of these hatcheries. You know, they’ll eat them all up. We hear about the pinnipeds, like the sea lions in front of the Columbia River. That’s… Pretty much every salmon that comes up the Columbia River has a seal mark on it. Really? Yeah, just about every one. Get to the hatcheries up around Idaho, almost everyone has seals marks. And so it’s just, you know, it’s these cycles, it’s predation, there’s just a lot of factors. You change the ocean temperature by a couple degrees and you’re going to delay runs. For example, this year, the pink salmon here typically show up about mid-July. And this year, they didn’t show up till August, like the second week of August. And we don’t know exactly what happened. There was an entire year class three years ago of fish that just didn’t show up or showed up late. There’s something that happened on the ocean. It’s an ocean condition. We don’t know what it is, at least as far as I’m aware of. There’s a lot of rumors that I hear, but there might be someone who actually knows what caused it. But I’ve heard a lot of different stories on it.

Andrea:
The problem is also when you have a bunch of factors and the weight of them is just enough to topple it over. and you can’t really pick one instigator.

Sam:
Yes, it’s cumulative. There are fishing practices on international waters that happen that are very destructive. You might have heard of these high-seed drift nets. You get some Chinese, lots of Russian nets to come out that might have five miles a net, and they’re all submerged, and they’ll catch an entire round of chum sand that’s happened. Right. Um, and just hoover it up and take it over to Asia. Um, but they would be small.

Andrea:
Right? Like these salmon that they’re catching?

Sam:
Yeah. Or if they’re on their way back, like they’re, they’re growing up in the summertime, you know, they’re cause most of these salmon are not shore based. They’ll go out in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska, they’ll go out in the middle of the Northern Pacific and they’ll just be out there feeding.

Andrea:
So this is then, I mean, besides all the obvious reasons of, you know, taking a hundred percent of a run, this is then a problem because they’re not going to come back and lay eggs. So then these nets are effectively closing the door on whatever that, you know, they’re killing the goose that laid the golden egg right there.

Sam:
Oftentimes, yeah, because there’s unregulated fishing practices. And coast guards out there searching for high seas drift nets, every once in a while they’ll blow one up. It happens. But, I mean, that’s all factors that affect these fish. We send the fish out in usually May, and then two years later, they come back. And it’s just largely a mystery what happens to them. But they’ve tagged them. Like I say, we’ve seen chum salmon go all the way to the Japan coast, coming out of Alaska. We had one year, we talked about coming back to the same stream, but there’s been years when they went to the wrong direction. Some of them, our fish went across. And our fish didn’t come back. They went to the wrong coast. They went to Japan. They got confused. And so there’s, there’s all kinds of crazy stuff that happens. And so there’s like, I think you said it, the cumulative effect, there’s a lot of factors that affect, sustainability, where they come from, how our runs do, the health of our runs, and a lot of it’s outside of our control because it’s outside of the US and Canada.

Andrea:
So it’s like when your neighbor’s tree is hanging over your fence and dropping zap on your car. Yeah. You know, there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not your tree, but it is causing problems for you. Or the problem that we run into, probably more relevant one that we run into in farming is somebody establishes an organic farm and then a chemical farm goes in next door and they have crop dusters and all kinds of stuff leaching down into the groundwater. That’s then affecting the biodynamic farm next door, which is a problem.

Sam:
I would say this about salmon, is that they’re like any other animal in that, the quality of, if we’re going to eat this as a food source, the quality of that animal is directly a result or reflection of the environment they live in. And, you know, I’ll take bears, for example. There’s a lot of folks who like to eat bears. I personally don’t care for them, but there’s folks who do. And they say that if you get a bear that’s in the berries, in the inland areas, he’s going to taste a lot like beef. But you take that same bear and you put him on the coast eating fish and you can’t even be in the same room with them. They’re gross. But it’s the same animal, but it’s just different environmental conditions. And I think that that translates into fish especially.

Andrea:
I believe you. I believe you. Somebody in our podcast group, and I wish I could remember who it was, but she said that the food, the animal should be a picture of the land where it was raised, which your coastal bear certainly would be. Maybe not the one you want to eat. I’ll take the blueberry one.

Sam:
Yeah, dragging tapeworm it around, you know, not the most advertising.

Andrea:
No.

Sam:
But I think that’s a good example of environmental, you know, the animal, it’s the same animal, but just whatever environment you put it in directly impacts the quality of that if we’re going to look at it as a food source.

Andrea:
How deep do salmon go? Like you’re talking about them going all the way to Japan. Are they staying in like the top of the water or what do they do?

Sam:
Again, that depends on the species. Typically, so there’s two salmon that dive deep and that’s going to be the chum salmon or the king salmon. Everything else usually stays in the top. Yeah, they usually stay in the top. 20,000 or so. It was 120 feet. And again, they mostly, like, you know, your cohos are going to be about that big for most of their life, and they’re up on top eating plankton and krill and whatever else they’re eating.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
Chums will dive deep, and kings especially, they’ll go to 2,000 feet deep. So, my uncle is actually one of the lead NOAA biologists on king salmon in Alaska. So, I get a little bit of inside information occasionally. Nice. And so, they go up and they tag these king salmon up in the Bering Sea in the Gulf of Alaska and they track them. And so, you want to hear some interesting facts. He was talking about this where they would track this and they would follow this squid. Because the squid, you know, daytime they go deep and then during the night they come up and these kings would be going to like 2,000 feet deep and they’d come up to shallow at night following these things around. And they’re cold-blooded, right? So they’re at water temperature. And he said that every once in a while, that tractor would go up to body temperature. And that fish got it eaten by a killer whale.

Andrea:
Oh, my gosh.

Sam:
And he said that every once in a while, it broke to 11 degrees above water temperature, and that fish got eaten by a shark. So they could track them, and they could pick up the tractor.

Andrea:
They know where they went with the thermometer. So that must affect the tissue, the meat, then, right?

Sam:
Absolutely.

Andrea:
Going that deep, that much compression.

Sam:
Typically… The deeper the fish, the more oil content you’re going to have, because oil is one of the nature of the way of compensating for pressure, right?

Andrea:
Right.

Sam:
You get down, like, the deep water cod, the sablefish or the black cod is super oily, and that’s one of the ways that they regulate their pressure down there. Or they just really compact, like a halibut. A halibut can go from 10 feet to 2,000 feet without really affecting the fish, because they’re built in a way that they’re flat, and the pressure doesn’t affect in the same way like a rockfish would.

Andrea:
Wow.

Sam:
So, there’s a lot of addictions.

Andrea:
Okay. So we’ve got then this basic understanding of the salmon that different, are there runs? This is going to sound so amateur. I know there’s runs in Alaska. I know there’s like runs out here in Washington. Elsewhere in the world, are salmon laying eggs? Okay.

Sam:
Yeah. So we hear of Ikura, like salmon roe, typically around chum salmon, because that’s one of the main fish that goes to Japan and Russia is the chum salmon. um and so yes anywhere around the pacific rome has salmon it might vary a little bit by region but okay but they’re more.

Andrea:
Or less going to be the same by called by the same name.

Sam:
Like if you.

Andrea:
Had a king salmon you wouldn’t necessarily know where it was.

Sam:
Caught and you know that’s why like on all our labeling we have to have the latin name if we’re going to go international because then you Yeah, platinum for fish that transmit across the board.

Andrea:
Yeah, that makes sense. And, I also didn’t know this before. I’m not a fish expert by any means. And part of the reason is because it’s so hard to find good fish that I just didn’t even bother. I kind of gave up until you guys came along. But all that to say that my education is fairly minimal. And I didn’t know all these types of salmon that were preferred and less preferred. And what’s interesting is when I talk to friends who are in, you know, Japanese or Filipino or very long seafood traditions, they have great respect for these fish that are known as like lower class or whatever. And they say, oh, it’s all in how you handle it. It’s all in how you prepare it. You know, people write it off too quickly. And I think we run into that in just farming. Generally, people write off liver and heart and tongue and they write off pigeon peas and, you know, small misshapen fruits and vegetables. But But sometimes that’s where the best food lies. Do you have a comment on that? Have you seen that from your customers?

Sam:
I got a lot of comments.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Sam:
Well, we talked about how environmental factors affect fish quality.

Andrea:
Right.

Sam:
But even more important or equally as important probably would be how you take care of that fish once you harvest it.

Andrea:
Okay. Right.

Sam:
There’s a lot of different gear types. There’s a lot of different ways that fish are harvested. Sometimes they’re harvested by net. the majority of seafood you’re going to have is going to be harvested by a net in some form. Either a seine or a trawl or a gill net or some sort of a net fishery. And then you got the troll fisheries, you got the high-end added value markets like trolling where each individual fish is caught on a line or a hook in a line. And so there’s definitely a difference in how things are taken care of. If a fish has bled right away, That’s a big factor on how that fish is going to last. Okay.

Andrea:
That makes sense. I mean, it’s the same with our animals. If you can bleed them right and thoroughly and properly.

Sam:
And chill them.

Andrea:
Yeah. Yeah, get them down to, you know, 40 degrees really quickly.

Sam:
Yeah. And that’s a big thing in the commercial industry is we have a lot of regulations about what you can and cannot do and certain temperatures that you got to have. For example, in the seafood industry, 38 degrees is the number. you want to keep your seat below 38 degrees when you tap them um, But, you know, a lot of times, there’s a difference in how fish are handled, even in industrial fish. So you can go to Costco, for example, and you can go buy a piece of sockeye at, what, I don’t know, it’s like 14 bucks a pound right now. It’s significantly cheaper.

Andrea:
I have no idea.

Sam:
They’ve got economy of scale, right? They can come in a little cheaper than, these higher added value markets, but you got to look at how that fish got there.

Andrea:
And That’s the part I’m scared about.

Sam:
Right. And so, well, I’ll talk you through how a lot of times this fish will get into Costco. And so, they’ve got these contracts with bigger processors and it depends. Like, if the fish is coming out of Bristol Bay, they’ll go into a facility and they’ll sit in an ice for a couple days. Okay. If they’re getting the saners in Southeast Alaska, so a lot of, there’s a good amount of Costco fish that comes out of Southeast Alaska. Okay. And they’ll go catch them on the coast where it’s 150 miles out. They’ll put them in a tote. They’ll sit on that tender for two or three days in ice with the guts in them. Wow. They’ll come back to the facility. They’ll sit on the floor of that facility for another day. And when they pull those kind of fish out of the boat, they use this big vacuum pump. It’s about, I don’t know, about 18 inches diameter. And they suck all the fish out of that hole with a big vacuum pump.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
So they come up through and they smash up. And so by the time you get that fish, it might be five days out of like real refrigeration by the time it gets cut.

Andrea:
Before it gets gutted?

Sam:
Before it gets gutted, sometimes, yeah. And it is, you know, if you’re just looking for fish that’s good price, it’s not going to hurt you. It’s just not the high quality as someone who caught that fish in a lap.

Andrea:
I don’t know. I’m just picturing the… like the texture of the meat after it sat with its juices in it for a couple days and then got kind of hammered around in a vacuum with a bunch of other, fish yeah i’ve never had it so i can’t really compare i’m fortunate in that i’ve only had your salmon, and then my uncle who you know caught salmon halibut all the things surgeon his whole life so i’m very fortunate i’ve only kind of been spoiled with the best but sure i just don’t know.

Sam:
Yeah it gets softer and to.

Andrea:
That yeah that’s what i’m picturing.

Sam:
Yeah it gets it gets mushy and yeah one thing to understand is that something that consumers demand today is that there’s no bones in these fish right.

Andrea:
They pull the pin bones.

Sam:
Out and the pin bone machines where they pull fish are these big wheels with teeth on them.

Andrea:
And they.

Sam:
Go they go across to the surface of this fish and they grab these bones and pull them out. Well, sometimes it takes five days for that fish to soften enough to be able to pull those bones out. And so they will lay these fish under refrigeration for five days until that protein breaks down enough that fish softens up enough to go through a pin bone machine. And so a fish that had gone through a pin bone machine, is not fresh it can’t be because it won’t work with these machines, um and so that’s another thing to remember about industrial fish and again there’s nothing wrong with industrial fish um as far as quality it’s going to be safe but it’s just going to not be as it’s not going to be as fresh it’s probably not going to be bled, um it’s going to be aged quite a bit longer than than going and catching it yourself or going to a higher end uh market you know like some yeah Yeah.

Andrea:
I have realized that secondhand by so many people down here in Bellingham have got your fish, people that I know. And they’re all people who know their fish. And they all come to me and they say, oh, my gosh, this is like the top class. This is the best salmon I’ve ever had, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m just like, I got nothing to compare it to, but I will take your word for it. so they i think they know because they’ve they’ve clearly can tell the difference and they don’t know you and leah so it’s not like they’re saying it to be.

Sam:
Nice to you.

Andrea:
But i feel like that’s pretty that’s a good marker you know that.

Sam:
People are noticing yeah absolutely it’s it’s uh fish care is important and you know in industrial fish there’s other things for example the final wash they put on a lot of times is a little bit hotter concentration of bleach, um you do that with chicken.

Andrea:
And beef too.

Sam:
They get chlorine washed and yeah it’s a chlorine wash like eight parts per million it’s it’s a it’s it’s higher than tap water, um and you do have to rinse your fish but there is they they want to be safe it’s more about industrial fish is more about safety than it is about quality if that makes sense.

Andrea:
Oh that is the if you could put any phrase on.

Sam:
The face of food.

Andrea:
In America today, that would be it. People would rather have, you know, something that they deem as safe, that, I don’t know. I find the term safe a tough one to grapple with because, you know, you end up with seven diseases at the end of the day. I don’t feel like your food was that safe. But there is this illusion of safety, perhaps. And so, yeah, we end up with it. It’s also part of mass production. So maybe that’s the fish. If they’re sitting with their guts in them, they’re also sitting with fecal matter inside of them. And some of that can expel, I know, from animals that have been butchered. And then when they’re going through the vacuum, they’re all swimming around and that stuff. And so with chickens and beef, there’s a ton of fecal contamination in these huge factories. And so then the meat has to be washed. And then it’s also considered, you know, you have to cook it to these exorbitantly high temperatures, in my opinion, for, you know, safety purposes. So you’re going to torture the meat on the washing end and they can torture it on the cooking end. So I see that then with the fish, you’re saying that it’s being produced in a manner that could produce bacterial contamination sometimes, but then they wash it and then you got to cook it to like some God awful temperature to eat it.

Sam:
145 degrees is the number they try to get to with seafood. When I’m doing my smoke statement, I have to hit 145 degrees for 30 minutes consecutive to be legal. And then they want to be able to safety factor in where I try to touch 150 and I try to run at least 40 minutes just so that it comes down to liability.

Andrea:
100%. That’s what the packaging is all about.

Sam:
Right? If I’m turning 50,000 pounds of fish out, there’s going to be someone out there who sees dollar signs or like, hey, I got sick. you build in a safety factor, right? And that’s.

Andrea:
You know what they’re getting sick on is their lettuce. It’s not the fish.

Sam:
Well, you know, there’s an interesting side to that. Like, it is a double-edged sword. Because I have a very clean facility, but not every facility operates the same way as mine. And so, from a regulation standpoint, there are a lot of folks out there who have permits that probably shouldn’t have permits. And so, they have to build a standard in so that across the board, it’s a safety factor. There’s layers of protection, right, for food safety.

Andrea:
Right.

Sam:
So I see where they’re coming from because…

Andrea:
Yeah, I agree.

Sam:
If one processor sends out listeria or botulism, it affects the industry as a whole.

Andrea:
100%.

Sam:
Right? It affects the profitability. It affects the sales. It’s reputation. Like this, we’re based on reputation. And so there is a reason that the rules are in place. And so that’s where seafood processing is probably half science and half art.

Andrea:
Right and so you have.

Sam:
You have the rules you have to follow but how do you produce a good product while staying in the confines of those rules.

Andrea:
And that.

Sam:
Is where production quality added value and final product quality come from is how do you how do you operate within those rules so you’re legal.

Andrea:
But also.

Sam:
A better quality product and that’s where that’s where the advantage of added value product in a small processor lies.

Andrea:
So your regulations that again it’s the same in raw milk it’s the same in you know cheese production everywhere in the food world they have to because they have to be broad sweeping and fair to everyone supposedly they, they operate based off the lowest common denominator and then everybody has to play by the same role okay i have another salmon question we’re going to take a quick break and then i’m going to come back and ask you another salmon question, All right. Here’s my salmon question. Farmed salmon, that is, I don’t know, what are they doing these days? Crossing it with eels or something?

Sam:
Oh, you’re talking about frankenfish.

Andrea:
Yeah. What is that? And why is wild caught? You’re talking about fish swimming to Japan and back, and I’m thinking a farmed fish isn’t going to be swimming that far. And is it kept contained when it’s farmed? And if they’re crossing these fish, I’m sure they can escape. Like, what’s, can you give me some insight on all of this? Or did I just open a can of fishing worms?

Sam:
Oh, there’s a whole bunch. There’s a lot of answers to that question. But if we just do broad strokes, yeah. Typically, the most common salmon that’s farmed is going to be the Atlantic salmon, which is actually a salminoid. It’s more like a steelhead than it is like a Pacific salmon because it spawns multiple times. And then like the Oro king salmon, they have this down, I believe, in New Zealand. I think it’s New Zealand. I could be wrong on that. But they farm some king salmon around the world. I believe some tovo in Chile.

Sam:
But typically, these fish, not typically, they’re all kept in pens. They’re fed a different variety of feed depending on where they’re going to be. And it was interesting to me, I went to the East Coast to try to promote some products and the culture there is much different than the culture in the Pacific Northwest, for example. They were more concerned about where those farms were than about the actual species of salmon. They would go, for example, after the Faroe Island salmons that are farmed out of Scotland because they have these open water pens. But the basic tenet of farming salmon is similar across the board. They have them in BC, in British Columbia, and they feed them a lot of times ground up fish meals, sometimes it’s other animal byproducts. There’s some of the highest level of dioxins in the animal feed that they send them of any animal feed across the board. And a lot of times what ends up happening is there’s these dead zones that form around these pens where there’s nothing living around them. They kill everything around them.

Andrea:
We call those lagoons in the land animal world.

Sam:
And this is on the ocean.

Andrea:
That’s terrible.

Sam:
In the solar, you get these dead zones where there’s just this animal waste is coming out. They’re just breathing their own waste. And they’re raised. And a lot of these genes that they put into them make them grow faster. So they have a higher production rate. And it’s a lot like factory farming. It is factory farming is what it is. And so there’s a lot of, downsides to it for sure. Is it going to kill you? No, it’s not. Is it good for you? Probably there’s, yeah, it’s fish. It’s good for you. But there are also a lot of, again, like going back to being a product of your environment, you take that same fish and you put it in a wild setting, it’s not going to have the same exposure to chemicals, to genetic mutations like they put in these things to make them grow faster, to the feed. Because obviously what you put in your body determines your health, determines how you are, and that’s the same with fish.

Andrea:
Yeah, there is this concept in, I think Dr. Catherine Shanahan talks about it quite a bit in her book, Deep Nutrition, where she talks about the food you eat as it is becoming the cells that you are, choose the food with the highest genetic purity, you know, food that isn’t being, tortured and um unhealthy you know why would we want to eat these unhealthy cancerous animals you know i’m referring to land animals as i don’t know about seafood animals but it’s the same same concept yeah because those, genes expression is going into your body, and i don’t know i feel like Like we are like, you and I and like we’re seeing the generation, the couple generations result of kind of messing with food really badly. And and that is probably why so many people right now are trying to sort of, take back some measure of control over their food supply as far as our kids go, at least, you know.

Sam:
Yeah, well.

Andrea:
Try to give them something better.

Sam:
Yeah, well, that’s that’s. So I recently had a bit of a health scare, right? Because I was eating a lot of processed foods and I wasn’t eating healthy. And one of the biggest things that I was told to avoid is processed meats.

Andrea:
Amen.

Sam:
It’s going to give me issues with cholesterol. I’ve got triglyceride issues. And the stress, it’s really due to the stress of the last couple of years. And that’s one of the biggest things that I was told to avoid is processed meat. But when you go to farm salmon, it’s the same thing. And here’s an interesting fact about farm salmon. The meat is actually gray on all-farm salmon.

Andrea:
I’m sorry, what?

Sam:
The meat is actually gray when it comes off the fish-bomb-bomb salmon. It’s dyed. And you have a scale.

Andrea:
They dye it pink?

Sam:
They dye it pink. And you can actually get a color chart from these places about what color you want your salmon because they’re going to dye that meat. Right?

Andrea:
Wow.

Sam:
It’s the same as going and buying processed meat at the store. Is it going to kill you? No. Is it healthy? No.

Andrea:
Oh, my gosh. It might kill you eventually. I mean, who knows?

Sam:
Yeah.

Andrea:
That’s gross.

Sam:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And they’re dying it pink because everybody’s like, I know salmon is supposed to be pink. But you know what? It only will take about two generations for people to forget. Like, they used to dye fake butter yellow. Now, they still dye margarine somewhat yellow because everybody looked at it and they said, I don’t know. The butter off my cow is pretty darn yellow. but now now people are used to such pale butters that they don’t have to make it very yellow people now are grossed out by dark yellow butters and, so yeah it’s not going to take long for people to forget and then they won’t talk about you.

Sam:
Want to talk about color in salmon meat that’s actually an interesting topic, um every salmon in wild is going to have a wide range of color variation it’s meat. It’s not all going to be just orange. Yeah.

Andrea:
I’ve seen that in the cuts you brought. I had no idea.

Sam:
Yeah. And it has to do with the diet of that fish. It has to do with the genetics of that fish. It has to do with, you know, where that fish came from. King salmon have the biggest variety. You can have all the way from like a dark blood red all the way to a pure white. They have color variations. Diet has a lot to do with it. If that salmon eats a lot of krill, it’s going to have a dark red meat. It would use a lot of other stuff. Um, here’s, here’s one, uh, the chum salmon, the key to salmon, they eat the majority of their diet is jellyfish or jellyfish like creatures. And their, their meat is more pale. They call it coral, coral colored, right? That’s the advertising. It’s just a different color. They eat herring. They eat, they eat krill. They eat all of it. But the majority of their diet consists of a jellyfish. I forget the name of it. It’s, it’s, it’s a bit more, a bit more consistency. you did a jellyfish, but it’s like the same thing with rockfish. You don’t have all the salmon and eat it, but their meat is going to be a lot more pale because of that. And so, I mean, I’ve been dealing with pinks, these pink salmon. You get one that’s bright orange and you get one that’s almost white because of the diet that they have in the ocean and where they came from. It’s just a wide range of colors.

Andrea:
So you’re telling me if I’m looking at a display of meat and it all is identical, I maybe should be wondering.

Sam:
Potentially.

Andrea:
Potentially.

Sam:
Potentially. I mean, and there are some that have a lot more consistency. For example, the cohos, they’re going to have a lot more consistency across the board. Cohos and sockeye are going to have very consistent color meat. But even there, you’re going to see some, for example, sockeyes, that they have the reddest meat of all of them, right? They’re also called reds for that reason. They got very red meat. But you’re going to have some that are just dark blood red, but you’re also going to have some that are orange. It’s just, there’s color variation. People are like, well, what’s wrong with that fish? Now it’s just a variation in that fish. And that’s natural fish. That’s wild fish for you.

Andrea:
This is where I always feel grateful for. I mean, in the seafood world, you’re more or less… having to cut the road through the forest. But in the world of chicken and beef and lamb, there’s people who’ve been going before me and doing tons of education with customers on why it even matters, you know, why the meat is different, the way they’re fed or whatever. But you kind of have to blaze the way. So it’s a lot. You’ve got to produce it and you’ve got to I mean, I know you guys have a lot going on right now, but I’m grateful that you took the time or you’re taking the time to educate us because I just don’t know these things and this is all. So if I live in landlocked Kansas or something, should I still be eating food?

Andrea:
you know cold water whatever salt water fish i don’t know what words you guys use or should i just be eating lake fish like trout or what how does this work how do people, well like is it sustainable is is it ethical yeah of questions well.

Sam:
When we talk about sustainability let’s let’s show that for just a minute um, because there are a few things to talk about with sustainability of certifications. But yes, you should be eating fish. It’s one of the best sources of omega-3s. The differences between, say, freshwater or lake fish and saltwater fish is typically freshwater fish are a bit leaner. And again, product of your environment, you know, if you get like a tilapia that lives in a dirt pond its whole life is going to taste like dirt, you know?

Andrea:
Yeah, they’re not swimming as far, going as deep. I mean, I guess if you’re up on Lake Superior or something, that’s kind of a different piece.

Sam:
But still. Yeah, and you get a free-range fish, you get a king salmon. That’s an exception to the rule, right? There’s king salmon at Lake Superior. Those fish are great.

Andrea:
I did not know that. There’s salmon like everywhere. I just don’t know.

Sam:
They were introduced into the Great Lakes.

Andrea:
Okay, okay.

Sam:
They were introduced in the Great Lakes and they have a very healthy population. You have the lake trout up there. You go to a high mountain lake and catch a rainbow trout, that’s a great fish. There’s nothing wrong with it. And there’s nothing wrong with freshwater fish. They’re great eating. They’re just a little different than saltwater fish in times.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Sam:
But look at the environment where that fish came from. You know? Um… But as far as what you should be eating, there are, that’s an interesting discussion, which, again, there could be another several hours of discussion on sustainability.

Andrea:
Episode two.

Sam:
Yeah, yeah. But, again, broad strokes about sustainability. There are a few organizations or certifications out there that deal with sustainability. The big one is the MSC certification, which is the Reign Stewardship Council. Another one is the RFM certification, which is the Responsibles Fisheries Management certification. again, it’s a two-edged sword. They are preventing the high seas drift nets boats from having this MSC certification. You got to, what that is, is a traceability.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
And so when you talk about sustainability, the way that we regulate this and track this in the industry is traceability back to that fishery. And so you’re going to have fisheries that are MSC certified, right? And so at its core, what it does is like you have these auditors that go look at your fishery, make sure there’s sustainable fishing practices, and then they give you the certification. Now, enter politics.

Andrea:
Oh, no. Everybody’s favorites.

Sam:
Yeah, whenever we put politics and money in the same room as science, politics and money, we’re always going to win, right? That’s just the…

Andrea:
Science is the slave of politics and money.

Sam:
So you’re going to find that, not in every case, but there are a lot of instances with this MSC certification that if you pay your fee, you’re going to get the certification. So…

Andrea:
Yeah, same in farming out here. Literally the same. You want GMO certification, you want organic certification. You can pay, if you’re big enough, you can pay for it. And if you’re big enough, nobody can walk out to your field and look at what you’re doing.

Sam:
Sure. Well, let me give you a couple of examples of some things that have happened in our sphere up here in Alaska. A couple of years ago, the Canadians tried to take are MSC certification for Southeast Alaska Fish. It’s the same fish that they’re catching, but it was a political thing because they want to cut out competition. And at the same time, you get these Pollock trawlers that are trawling these big midwater drift nests that are MSC certified because they pay their fee.

Andrea:
Oh, man.

Sam:
And so it’s not. And then how long lines have been off the coast of Oregon and Washington is not MSC certified, even though it’s the same practices as the stuff you have in Alaska. And so there’s politics that go along with this that you take it with a grain of salt.

Andrea:
Yeah. Right.

Sam:
By and large, if it has an MSC logo on it, you’re going to be okay. But just be aware that it’s a racket in a lot of ways.

Andrea:
Nothing beats. Nothing beats. I mean, this is the thing Allison and I come back to. I feel like almost every time we end up talking about food is, you know, there’s certifications and regulations trying to usually start it out of some measure of wanting to provide visibility and transparency. but they do get harder and harder to really make sense of as a consumer who’s just standing in the store flipping over a container looking at you know what is written on the back of it, and nothing beats at the end of the day finding out who’s doing the work like the farmer who’s raising the cattle or the person who’s fishing and.

Andrea:
Slicing up the fish whatever you call it and that’s and that’s, Which is hard. I mean, that’s a challenge to present to consumers. Oh, yeah, go ahead and meet everybody who produces your food. That is a big challenge. But I do see more and more people really do make the effort. I think people are just weary of these certifications. And people are watching documentaries on, you know, seafood and things. And they’re saying, okay, I see that there’s kind of scams being run here and there. Like you said, in some places, the certification is legit. And in other places, there’s farms all around me that say, you know, and there’s a farm I’ve shopped from for years and they lost their organic certification only because they weren’t able to pay the fee to re-up. And they told all of us customers, we haven’t changed a thing about our processes, but we can’t pay the thousands of dollars extortion fee this year to maintain it and still be profitable. And we all said, that’s fine. We know what you’re doing. We drive past your fields every day. We don’t care about the certification.

Sam:
But that’s tough. Yeah, I was talking to the MSC logo. Like, I’m going to go get my MSC certification this year because I can’t even touch Costco. I can’t touch U.S. Foods, Cisco, Whole Foods, anything. I can’t touch them without it because that’s the criteria that they base their sourcing on, is the MSC, because it’s an easy way. Are you MSC certified?

Andrea:
I mean, they’re operating in terms of millions of pounds. Yes, absolutely.

Sam:
And how do you police where your stuff comes from? the organization does definitely help as far as that goes right and so.

Andrea:
That’s you said it was for traceability is that something consumers can go to some website and look up is there resources on that.

Sam:
Okay yeah you look up the msc number on that fish and you can go check it through msc and you can trace it back to the facility that that.

Andrea:
Caught that so that would give you more information now again this is this is where this is one reason why like when i find something something like like Ketchikan Sam’s or Ancient Grains or different companies that I’ve talked about on the podcast. I talk about them so much because by the time somebody has done the legwork on this company, it’s like, come on, let’s just tell everybody we know. Like, it’s so hard to look up every single company, but it’s worthwhile.

Sam:
Well, you know, there are answers to this question, right? And…

Sam:
The stuff that is mass-produced is going to be much more easily accessible. But if you are looking to source it from smaller fishermen, there are places where there’s a lot of this fish. And a big one is farmer’s markets. A lot of my business is going towards these high-end distributors that are going directly to customers in the farmer’s markets.

Andrea:
That’s awesome.

Sam:
Oftentimes, if you want to find higher quality fish, not every time, again, be careful. Be careful because there’s definitely issues with that as well.

Andrea:
They’re also, the farmer’s markets will also happily sell you freeze-dried candy. So yeah, you still have to have your eyeballs open.

Sam:
And so you build relationships with vendors. And that’s the biggest advice that I can give about sourcing good pitch is get to know your vendors. Get to know, because the seafood business at its core with what I’m doing is relationships. That is what I am in the business of. My commodity is seafood, but I’m in the relationship business. And that if you want to source your fish and if you want to have good quality fish, or any food for that matter, it really does come down to some aspect of relationships. Build your relationships with your suppliers. I love that. Yeah. That’s, that’s, if you want to get around that, like certifications are a good starting point, but getting to know where your food actually comes from, talk to your, talk to your fishermen, meet your fishermen, meet your, meet your vendor who goes to the fishermen. Yeah. You know, the whole farm to table, the sea to table thing, there’s a reason that’s taking off right now. And it’s such a popular thing is because that’s, people realize that. Well, I don’t know where this fish is from out of Costco. It could have come from, you know, Russia. It could have come from, you know, and, And, you know, just a quick side note about that.

Sam:
Speaking of like where your fish comes from, this year the prices are double what they were last year to the fishermen, the prices. So it’s a really good year to be full. And the reason for that is, well, there’s a high demand. There weren’t a lot of fish that came in, but there was these tariffs that happened on Russia. And they cut off the supply of cheap fish coming from Russia. And so therefore, our prices went up. And then almost complete run failure of chums over in Japan on the Asian coast, limited the supply, so our demand went up when we got our prices raised.

Andrea:
And are the run failures related to these drift nets catching the fish before they ever get back? Or is that a different issue?

Sam:
I think it’s probably no ocean conditions.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
Warmer waters and things like that? But what I’m saying about that is that if you think about how much that affects our market, think about how much this fish typically is in our market. If for us to cut those supplies off through these tariffs and it affects our market that Just think about how much of that fish is being used in our markets to cause that much of the riffle.

Andrea:
That’s a great point. And you’re not being told because what’s the meat rule in the U.S. is if you value add it in the U.S., you can buy it as a U.S. product, right? So if I weigh it, if I package it, which obviously Costco is going to be packaging it, you know, then it’s mine now. And I don’t have to tell you exactly where it came from, which is how people don’t realize that so much of the beef on our… what is it, like 80% of the beef in the U.S. stores is actually not grown in the U.S.?

Sam:
That wouldn’t surprise me. Most of our grain is either.

Andrea:
Yeah, a lot of that comes from Russia too.

Sam:
Russian, Ukraine, yeah.

Andrea:
And I do not think about this in the fish world because it, I don’t know, I don’t, I’m not thinking about it as much as you are, but you’re so right. And I remember telling people, hey, if food supplies, you know, we have such a global food supply. Even if you look around and you say, well, I don’t buy anything out of the global food supply. Everything I buy is raised within a couple miles of my home. Well, your prices are still going to be affected because when everybody else is stuck without it. Yeah, exactly what you said. The supply and demand changes.

Sam:
A big example of that is king crab. King crab out of Alaska, they shut the season down because there was a loss of biomass here a couple years ago. The biomass has since recovered, but it was pretty much all rushing crabs. So they went out and did their studies. There was no crabs to be caught. There was no crabs. And so they shut the commercial season down. Like the whole deathless catch thing, they shut it down.

Andrea:
That TV show? I’ve heard of that.

Sam:
Most of our crab actually comes from Russia because there’s not the regulations there. Most of the red king crab that we eat in America comes from Russia. And they shut that down. All of a sudden, the price is at like over $100 a pound for king crab legs. Wow. My price as a wholesaler, I can’t get it for less than $80 a pound.

Andrea:
Jeez.

Sam:
Yeah. And that’s wholesale price.

Andrea:
That’s wholesale.

Sam:
It’s crazy.

Andrea:
That’s off the chain.

Sam:
Yeah. Like there’s crazy stuff.

Andrea:
And that’s happening with fish too, huh?

Sam:
Yeah.

Andrea:
The price is going up.

Sam:
That’s happening with fish. Like last year for my challenge, I paid 90 cents. This year I paid $1.50.

Andrea:
Gosh.

Sam:
It’s double.

Andrea:
That’s a huge jump.

Sam:
Last year I paid about 60, 70 cents for pinks. This year I paid about 25.

Andrea:
And that’s before processing and all of that. Good gracious.

Sam:
And so it’s a terrible year to be a processor because what people don’t see is you get a great price in fishermen, but above me there’s a ceiling where people are willing to pay. And I’m competing against the Costcos of the world that have direct contracts with these processors. And so they can keep that price low by economy of scale.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Sam:
And so what happens is it squeezes folks like me out of the market because I have to pay market value for these fish to the fishermen or I can’t get fish.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Sam:
And oftentimes I have to pay above market value. If I want the best fish, I have to take above market value. But then my margins go from a couple dollars to less.

Andrea:
Yeah. You know. That absolutely happened during COVID. I saw that with a lot of big producers, you know, somebody who sells, I don’t know, onions or potatoes or something, and they’re contracted like on a 13-month contract with Safeway or whatever. And so they have to provide it at that price. And then lo and behold, you know, their expenses doubled or tripled, but they’re locked in. So consumers have such a lag in feeling those shifts. I remember with the vanilla bean crisis and like all of these things, it happens out there in the wholesale world. You know, it can be a year before people feel it on the ground just because of these contracts but yeah that’s that’s crazy and you’re right about there is like a top a top end that people are mentally prepared to pay.

Sam:
There’s a high ceiling or excuse me a low ceiling of.

Andrea:
The prices.

Sam:
They’re allowed to reach and that’s where you know my stuff when going direct to consumer people are complaining well your stuff was too expensive well i have to also run a business.

Andrea:
Well i also see the i think this is one of the things that has brought seafood home a lot for Allison and I whenever we have talked about it is… You could buy the cheaper seafood, maybe where they caught the entire, what do you call it, the school of, the run, where you caught the entire run in a net, you know, and a bunch of other stuff that you threw away. But, and like you said, maybe it won’t kill you, but you’re just shortening how long you can continue to even eat salmon. I would rather, if I had the choice, which I do, I would rather eat far less salmon at a much lower price and see the salmon still running when I have grandkids, you know, rather than just say, I’m going to burn through all this now so I can get it cheap. That’s a crazy reason.

Sam:
Yeah.

Sam:
Well, I don’t know if we want to bring up the subject of our hatcheries. And we talked about sustainability. I don’t know if we want to talk about that today.

Andrea:
I don’t really know anything about hatcheries, other than that y’all get a lot of eagles because of them. I know there’s a hatchery out here. I don’t really know their function. I mean, they hatch fish, I guess. I know that.

Sam:
You know, we talked about like a deep dive into salmon. It would be, we’d be remissed if we didn’t talk about the hatchery programs as well.

Andrea:
Yeah, if you could mention some about that.

Sam:
I’ll kind of go over the basic idea. So, early 1900s, they had fish traps. and all these salmon are turned to the same stream. They put out these fish traps and they catch 90% of the brood stock and put them in cans and ship them overseas. That’s something that happened. And so we had, around the 20s and 30s, we had an absolute just collapse of our salmon stock. So they were almost extinct.

Andrea:
How did nobody see that coming? Anyways, carry on.

Sam:
It’s the same as the buffalo, right? It’s like you see dollar signs, but there’s no science behind it. And there’s a reason. Like we talk about the two-edged sword of these regulations. There’s a reason these regulations are in place. It’s because of things like this in the past.

Andrea:
Yeah. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Sam:
This is why we can’t have nice things. But this is kind of the thing that happened with salmon is that these fish traps came in and just decimated all of our stocks. And then in the 70s, an organization came in, the Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association or SARA and then there’s a northern version and then other organizations and hatcheries and so what they do is a lot of our stocks of the money fish meaning chums.

Sam:
Coho’s and Kings come from these hatcheries. And they’re not the same as salmon farming. It’s called salmon enhancement. And for example, the one in Heron Cove, where I live, Woodman Lake Hatchery, they went and got their broodstock from the Chickamut and the Eunuch River. So they’re wild fish. And they have their broodstock from there. They raise them in a metal box in the same way they’d be raised in nature with natural water running through. They check the levels of the sediment. They’re just piping stuff from a lake down. them. It imprints on these fish. They raise them in a controlled environment the same way they’d be raised in nature, and then they release them out to the ocean. So they live their entire life on the ocean as a wild fish. Then they come back, and then they spawn them out in this controlled manner. And so the numbers on this, when a king salmon lays her eggs, there’s about 7,000 eggs in a king salmon. 3% of those make it to the ocean. And of that 3%, 3% make it back. So, it’s one-to-one. You get one fish, it brings one fish back. And when you do it in the salmon enhancement program, it’s the opposite. It’s about 97% hatch rate. And it comes back, and it’s a natural run. They release them at the same time they’d be raised in nature. They just raise it in the controlled environment.

Andrea:
Okay. So, is this trying to kind of rectify the damage, if you will?

Sam:
Yes.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
That’s a direct result of these fish traps, and it’s called the Salmon Enhancement Program. And they clip their fins, they put tags in their mouths so they can track them. And so that, a lot of our fisheries, that’s what saved the fisheries in Alaska, was these Salmon Enhancement Programs. And, you know, there’s a lot of confusion around those, like, well, isn’t that farming salmon? No, they call it salmon ranching. And what it is, it’s just… You know, it’s artificial insemination. So artificial insemination, right? And then they raise these fish.

Andrea:
The original AI.

Sam:
Yes. They raise them. They go out in the ocean, live their life as a normal salmon. They come back to the stream. And what that is paid for, it’s a nonprofit organization. Wow. When I, as a fish buyer, buy salmon, I pay a 3% tax on gross sales for salmon. And that’s how that’s funded. They also have cost recovery programs, right? Where they can then sell the fish that come back to them. and patrol. So they release about 100,000 king salmon a year here, and that takes 1,500, adults to get that brood stock. They only need 1,500 returned.

Andrea:
Wow.

Sam:
And so that is how our salmon stocks have been saved, essentially. Now, that’s not always the case. Pretty much all the pink salmon in Southeast Alaska are wild. The chum salmons are starting to push a lot more chums out because there’s a lot of marketability in that in the overseas markets, China particularly. And it costs, for each king salmon that returns, the cost is about $20 a head. Okay. For each chum salmon that returns, it’s about $0.50 a head. And so, you know, there’s all those factors.

Andrea:
So that’s part of that whole picture of why, I mean, the king salmon also live longer, it sounds like.

Sam:
Yeah, it just costs a lot more to bring them back because they spend longer in the freshwater and there’s just all these other factors. But that’s in a nutshell what the salmon enhancement program is. And it’s the same process as there would be in nature. It’s just in a box and then they release them out.

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah. Okay, kind of like Yellowstone, I guess. Like, they try to repopulate their wolves and things like that. Sure, sure. Allison was wondering, besides salmon, you’ve mentioned about a gazillion kinds of salmon.

Andrea:
But short of those gazillion kinds of salmon, you’ve also mentioned a couple other fish. What would you suggest as, say, if somebody needs an alternative or they want to mix it up, have some variety, something besides salmon?

Sam:
Well, there’s a lot of folks that are allergic to salmon. That’s one of the biggest allergen as far as a fish species. Allergen is shrimp and crab are typically, and then shellfish are typically.

Andrea:
Why salmon?

Sam:
There’s some folks that just, you know, there’s a kid here that he eats salmon, he swells up and has to go get an EpiPen.

Andrea:
Jeez.

Sam:
It’s just some of the compounds in there that do that. There are good alternatives. Obviously, halibut’s a good one, but that is getting to be so expensive that, you know.

Andrea:
Yeah. No. Unfortunately, you guys introduced me to halibut just in time for it to get really expensive.

Sam:
Sure, sure.

Andrea:
But it is delicious.

Sam:
It’s good. There are alternatives, though. One good one is Pacific Cod. Pollock is not as sustainable. It does have the MSC syrup, but that one is almost exclusively caught by midwater trawls. The Pollock is. And that’s what goes into cerimi, like your fake crab and your sushi roll. that’s almost all pollock. It’s denatured.

Andrea:
That’s the kind of fish?

Sam:
It’s a cod, and it’s denatured, and then the protein is denatured, and then, for a gelatinous compound, then it’s then colored and then it’s, that’s where your fake comes from.

Andrea:
Okay, I just don’t, okay, I know you said crab is getting really expensive, but I would rather not eat crab. I don’t understand this drive to create these fake versions of things.

Sam:
Talk to your social media folks, talk to your shows. It’s what drives. That stuff’s powerful. Yeah, I guess so. But if you are looking for an alternative that is more sustainable and a little bit better price point, I would go with Pacific Cod. That’s a good one.

Andrea:
Pacific Cod, okay.

Sam:
Pacific Cod is good. Rockfish is a good one.

Andrea:
I love rockfish.

Sam:
Ling Cod is a good one. That’s a bit more expensive and harder to get a hold of.

Andrea:
What is black cod?

Sam:
Black cod is, yeah.

Andrea:
We’ve got your smoked black cod before, but I don’t know what, is that just a…

Sam:
So, black cod is actually not a cod. We call it a cod because it looks like a cod. It’s a sablefish, and it is…

Andrea:
Oh, okay.

Sam:
So it grows, it’s a deep water fish starting at about 600 feet all the way down to about 3,000 feet.

Andrea:
And so it’s- That’s why it’s got that fattiness to it.

Sam:
It’s super high oil content. It’s just, it’s one of those things that some people like and some people don’t like. It’s, there’s opinions on it.

Andrea:
We like it. It’s so tender. At least the smoked one is. I don’t think I’ve ever had like not smoked.

Sam:
Yeah. It’s super delicate, super high oil content.

Andrea:
Even the skin, you can eat the skin like it’s not tough or anything. Like smoked salmon skin is kind of tough, but you can just easily eat this whole thing. Yeah, we love it.

Sam:
Yeah, they’ve got an interesting skin on them, actually. It’s more like a shark skin when they’re fresh. It’s sandpaper, you know, like a shark skin you can touch it. It’s sandpapery. Cod don’t have scales, and the sablefish does.

Andrea:
Okay. Yeah, I think your package does say in parentheses, like, sablefish.

Sam:
Sablefish, yeah. So that’s the market name. And any of these salmon or any fish out there has a book of names. I don’t know. This guy.

Andrea:
Oh, wow.

Sam:
And so that’s…

Andrea:
Botanical names or whatever.

Sam:
Yes, that’s market names. And that’s what I can and what I cannot call this dish. And so a bat rod is a sablefish. It has to have that name on the touch.

Andrea:
That’s a nice name, sablefish.

Sam:
Sablefish. Yeah, it’s very marketable. Well, you talk about marketability. I won’t go down the rabbit hole too far, but I’m sure you’ve heard of Chilean sea bass.

Andrea:
Uh, nope.

Sam:
Well, it’s a common one where this is, oh, it’s the top of the top. It’s Chilean sea bass. Well, the marketing…

Andrea:
Maybe I’m too poor. I’ve ever heard of it.

Sam:
Well, that’s, it’s more expensive than halibut. Oh, my. But the real name of that fish is a Patagonia toothfish.

Andrea:
That’ll sell.

Sam:
That is not marketable. So they changed it to a Chilean sea bass, and all of a sudden you have this super marketable fish. And then it’s somewhere else that doesn’t have the regulations, and they fished that fish to the point where it’s almost like they just completely destroyed the fishery trying to get that fish.

Andrea:
Do they have to put the toothfish thing in parentheses or they don’t have to put it on?

Sam:
No, the market name is Chilean Seabass. Chilean Seabass, wow. That’s why with the chum salmon, you call it chum salmon because chum salmon, it’s a great fish. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s got an unfortunate name, right?

Andrea:
I’ve been the recipient of it and it is quite good.

Sam:
What’s the chum salmon? Well, it’s a chum salmon. Well, what’s a chum salmon? You know, it’s a dog salmon, right? And then it just gets worse. It just gets worse and people don’t want to eat it. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s because of the name. And so marketing oftentimes comes down to how it presents, you know.

Andrea:
I remember going to this super fancy, like a business club and, you know, the 80th floor of some building. And I remember talking to the, like the waitress concierge or whatever. And she said, we do these really fancy wine tastings on Tuesdays for businessmen or something. and she goes, we put them all in brown bags and everybody goes crazy for like the $10 wines and they’re like, this must be the most expensive one. And she goes, they don’t know what it is. They really like them. I thought that was kind of hilarious. I guess, yeah, it’s all in the marketing. If they knew that it was expensive, they might like it more.

Sam:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Interesting.

Sam:
Absolutely. And you talk about other whitefish that might be good. It’s not all Alaskan fish that’s good, right? There’s a lot of warm water fish that are great. You also got flounder, you got petrolli, you got a lot of these other fish out there that are a lot more cost-effective, but great fish.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
And so a lot of options out there.

Andrea:
Jacob had a question for you, which is… just so you know your smoked salmon is the uh, it’s the peak culture here at the house and if jacob sees a package kenton the two-year-old he’s like fish fish fish and if jacob sees it he goes um what’s that for how much how much of that can i have so i always have to have a tax to take off the top if i’m making anything, but he wondered what sea creatures can you smoke.

Sam:
Well, technically, you can smoke anything once. But the biggest thing, if you want to have good smoked fish, is oil content. The higher the oil content, the more likely it’s going to be to be able to smoke it.

Andrea:
Because you’re essentially drying it, right?

Sam:
You’re drying it. Yes, you’re drying it. And when you smoke fish, when you break it down, every part of that process is an ingredient.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Sam:
Right?

Andrea:
I agree.

Sam:
Smoke is an ingredient. You use a certain amount of it for a certain time. Airflow is an ingredient because you use a certain amount for a certain time. Temperature. The biggest thing is airflow because what happens when you smoke fish is you, form this crust over the top. It’s called a pellicle. And what that does, a pellicle, P-E-L-L-I-C-L-E, a pellicle.

Andrea:
Pellicle, okay.

Sam:
And so that’s what that crust on smoked fish is. If you don’t form that pellicle, a lot of that moisture is going to escape. And so essentially what you’re doing is you’re turning these fish into little tiny slow cookers. And that’s why keeping skin is really important on the smoked fish because that traps that oil. It gives a place to trap that oil. It condenses all those oils down to the center of the fish. And so you blow your air across it. And if you want good smoked fish, you control your airflow and then you bring it up, you know, through the smoking process. Halibut doesn’t do great. You can cold smoke it. But a hot smoke process, you know, salmon is probably the best. Tuna does okay. you can also smoke stuff like shellfish but it’s just smoked flavor.

Andrea:
So like those smoked scallops then, those would just be kind of smoked for the flavor, not necessarily brined and then smoked until they’re cooked.

Sam:
A lot of times they’ll get brined and salt. Okay. You can smoke smelt. You can smoke anything. And one thing to note is that smoked fish, the definition of smoked fish, or rather the expectation of smoked fish, changes wherever you go in the world, right?

Andrea:
100%, yeah.

Sam:
You come to Alaska, they expect the stuff that I make, that it’s called hot smoke, where it’s cooked, it’s like the safety factor. Almost everywhere else, think of smoked fish as lox or grab rocks.

Andrea:
Yeah, no, I think you’re right. I ran into that because I grew up eating my uncle’s smoked fish, and he built his own smokehouse, and his smoked salmon… is like yours that’s why leah first sent me a box was because i was always going on about how much i missed his smoked salmon and every time i bought smoked salmon it just wasn’t it wasn’t what i was expecting and i didn’t know what it like what it was called so uh, you know the first time she sent me a box i literally i threw the box in my car, um i drove straight down to there’s like a little bakery like a coffee bar type place and i bought a bagel and cream cheese And I just sat in the parking lot and I ate the smoked salmon. I was like, this is all for me. It was so satisfying.

Sam:
She showed me the picture of that text.

Andrea:
Yeah, I remember that. It was like, I don’t know how to describe it, but it was like what I’ve been looking for for so many years. So it was a good feeling. So yeah, I know what you’re saying about like that’s what they’re expecting because that’s what I was always trying to find.

Sam:
Sure. Well, I was talking to some folks in Iceland, right? We were looking at moving some stuff to Iceland. and I send them a sampler like what is this? We want smoked salmon.

Andrea:
What’s happening?

Sam:
Right? You know, they’re like this is totally different than anything I’ve ever had before.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
But it’s just like, it’s just, you know, different places in the world you expect different things. Sure.

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah.

Sam:
There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just cultural differences. Hmm. Essentially.

Andrea:
Well, it’s really good. Yeah. I see now also why the sablefish does so well

Andrea:
since it’s so oily and that’s why it comes out so well. Let’s take a quick break and then I’m going to come back and ask you a question about seasonality and freezing because this is something that I’ve learned about, since talking to you and Leah. So, I didn’t, I mean, I knew that fish had certain seasons because down here, you know, they’ll open a season for this or that. It’s not something that I feel like if you shop at a grocery store, you’re probably not going to be made aware of it because salmon is just always going to be there in the freezer or whatever. And canned tuna is always going to be there on the shelf. And sardines are always going to be hanging around. if somebody’s shopping at a farmer’s market for fish i imagine they’ll be seeing those seasons reflected but even then you know if somebody buys 20 000 pounds of coho from you they can stretch it over market for a while you might not be totally aware of what the exact season is so, could you talk a little bit about some of the seasons for these fish, how long we might see them and i know also leah said like she had said to me oh the um what is it the rockfish she said it’s not going to stay frozen as long, maybe six months, whereas like a smoked salmon, you could keep frozen for like a couple of years. So yeah. So if you could tell me a little bit about those things, that’s something I’m very interested in as a hungry consumer.

Sam:
Sure. Well, I guess, I guess that answer changes based on what type of fish we’re talking about.

Andrea:
Right? Okay. Well, let’s talk about the fish you, you have.

Sam:
Yeah. So, so when we deal with salmon, we’ll start with salmon.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
The seasonality of that is typically you’re only going to get about a three-week window for any of the salmon species to catch them, right? And, you know, now we have the advent of freezers.

Andrea:
Three weeks. Wow.

Sam:
About three weeks to a month. Yeah, that’s about all the season.

Andrea:
I didn’t know it was so short. Okay, so each species is going to have…

Sam:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
Okay, so now I’m thinking back. We had the coho, then you have what? No, you had the sockeye, then the coho. Yeah.

Sam:
So, start with kings. I don’t know. Typically, the first fish to come in is going to be the king salmon. They come in in May sometimes. Okay. And it depends on the stream. It depends on the species. It depends on the year. And you’re going to see fish around, but your peak season is going to be about three weeks. So, for example, where we’re at in the terminal harvest fishery here, these hatchery fish come in, the spring kings come in middle of June to the end of June. That’s their peak season. You’re going to catch them in May, but that’s when they’re mostly here is around mid-June. And then around the 1st of July, we start seeing the pinks and the chums start coming in, and we start catching those. And then those are going to be, the pinks are the longest running season of all of them. You’re going to start seeing them from about the 2nd week of July to the middle of August. And then you get the summer cohos, which are different subspecies of coho that come in. They’re smaller. They come in in 4th of July is about when they come in. and then you see your sockeye there around the 4th of July is their peak season. And then you move a little bit later on, you start seeing the cohoes start coming off the coast, the fall cohoes start showing up. You’ll catch them out there for about a month and then as they move into September, they move in close to the streams and then the end of the salmon run is essentially about the late September. It’s about the last you’re going to see a salmon. Then you’re going to have like winter kings, the kings that aren’t spawning, You’ll be able to catch those year-round.

Andrea:
Really?

Sam:
That’s one of the more unique things about them.

Andrea:
What do you mean the winter kings that are not spawning? I’m so uneducated. You have to tell me what you mean by that.

Sam:
So when we’re talking about salmon seasons, we’re talking about the fish that are returning to spawn that year. Right. Because all salmon species, once they spawn, they die. And so you’re intercepting them on the way into their stream, right? They’re getting darker as they come in. They’re losing their fat content as they come in. And so you’re catching them as they’re coming by. If you catch a feeder salmon or a winter king, for example, is one that is not coming into the stream. They’re still feeding out in the ocean. And kings, they’ll grow as they age. And they’re one of the few salmon that does that, where you might catch them in January. You might catch a 30-pound king salmon in January that’s not spawning. It doesn’t have eggs or sperm in it. It’s just… It’s just a salmon, right?

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
The bellies on them will be that thick on a big king, and the summer kings will be about that thick. So the fat content, it’s a completely different ham. It’s not even the same critter as a summer king. It’s just that.

Andrea:
Wow.

Sam:
Wow. And you’ll also catch them in the summer that are the same way, though, too, right? You’ll catch summer kings on the ocean that are feeder kings as opposed to spawner kings.

Andrea:
They’re just eating and growing.

Sam:
They’re not coming back to start a family and die. They haven’t gone into the freshwater yet. They’re not heading to freshwater. It’s not they’re feeding. And you’ll intercept them. Like, a lot of the salmon that we get in Southeast Alaska are actually Washington and Oregon fish.

Andrea:
You’re welcome.

Sam:
They’re living out there. Yeah. Well, there’s a whole discussion about that, too.

Andrea:
Oh, okay. Never mind. Drop it.

Sam:
But, yeah.

Andrea:
No, I went down a rabbit trail one time just from the perspective of, this was before we had started the podcast, But this was just from the perspective of like contamination. And I was just looking at what had happened to our salmon populations. And the farther I read, the more studies, the more research papers I read, the more depressed I got. I got to the point where I was like, I can’t believe there’s any fish left at all. So, yeah, we’ve got a lot of medication in the water down here.

Sam:
Yes. A lot of opioids.

Andrea:
We got a lot of chemotherapy drugs, a lot of birth control drugs. I know that all comes up in the water and that turns up in, you know, the mussels and the clams and things like that. So, yeah, yeah, again.

Sam:
It comes back to there, but back to the question of seasonality, um, So you got the salmon season where you’re intercepting. The rest of the salmon, or excuse me, the rest of the fish out there typically would be a year-round thing except for there’s, you got to go catch the stuff, right? And so you got regulations. You got seasonal openers. Take our shrimp, for example. Our spot shrimp. You can catch it right now. I can go out today and put a pot out and catch spot shrimp. But you got a two-week season in May that you can actually go catch the things because that’s when it’s open. Ah, okay. And halibut, you can go catch halibut 12 months of the year, but you got these openers you got to go work on. And then there’s quota. There’s certain amounts that boats can catch.

Andrea:
Are there different seasons for like sport fishing versus commercial? Okay.

Sam:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Andrea:
So if you’re just going out there like you and Ireland in the boat and a line, you can probably fish different things versus if you were.

Sam:
Correct.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
Yeah. No, there’s, it’s way more restricted when it’s commercial fishing.

Andrea:
I mean, that makes sense.

Sam:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s, you know, when it’s open, it’s open. But, you know, that’s the biggest factor on availability of seafood is the regulatory aspect of it. Where, you know, not only that, it’s most fishermen that fish these fish fish multiple fisheries throughout the year. And so the folks that have halibut quota, they do most of the season opens the end of March.

Andrea:
Okay.

Sam:
So they’re going to fish through the March and April fishery. and then they’re going to transfer all their equipment off that boat and then they’re going to put their salmon gear on then they’re going to go salmon fishing in the summer okay right and so there are a few folks who do, fish howled in the summer there are landings coming in occasionally but most of the people the prices are so high for salmon that they’re going to go salmon fishing, and so you know not only is there regulatory aspects of it but there’s the business aspect of it where people are going to go they’re out there running the business they want to go where the money is oh yeah, And then there are fish that stay longer in the freezers. So salmon, you’ve got about a year. Fresh salmon, you’ve got about a year. Rockfish, you’ve got about six months. Just something about it, it gets fishy after a while. Halibut, you’ve got a couple of years. Wow. So stable. It’s a very lean meat. You’ve got a couple of years. Once you do into the realm of smoked fish, I mean, we’re eating stuff from four years ago and it’s just fine. Yeah. It’s cooked at that point, right? It’s cooked. So it’s a different product.

Andrea:
I mean, I just opened a package that Leah had brought out when she came out here a year ago. And I know, but… Nobody could tell. It was indistinguishable. So I was like, well, that’s kind of nice. It was like a big package you had made for the camp out. You had made us a couple. We didn’t use them all. And I was kind of hoarding it. And then I was like, well, okay, more fish is on the way. I guess I can open this package.

Sam:
A rule of thumb, and this doesn’t hold true for everything, but a rule of thumb when you’re freezing fish is the higher the oil content, the less time it’s going to last. You know, you got your Pacific cod. That doesn’t last super long, but then you got your king salmon. You want to eat that in six months to eight months because the fat’s going to go rancid before the meat will. But you got a coho salmon, you might have over a year.

Andrea:
All right.

Sam:
And halibut, it’s very lean, so it’ll last a couple of years. So does it. So oil tontent, again, that’s not every case, but that’s a good place to start. Like the high halibut tontent fish are not going to last as long as the leaner fish.

Andrea:
But smoking is its own preservative. in the brining.

Sam:
It’s cooked and it’s cured. Basically, you’re making like fish bacon.

Andrea:
That sounds pretty good.

Sam:
For us, when we brine our smoked salmon, because of the quantity that we do, it takes about 18 hours for the sugar to fully set into the meat. Salt takes about three or four hours. So you reduce your salt content and up your sugar content because it takes longer to infuse into the fish. But when you get it done, And if you’ve got a fish that is fairly soft, you get it out of that brine, it’s going to be springy. You’re going to feel it.

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah.

Sam:
It cures it.

Andrea:
That makes sense.

Sam:
And so it’s just a different product.

Andrea:
It’s the same with hams and things. We brined and cured meats down here. I guess it’s the protein or something. Like with milk, you do a similar thing. You use lactic acid instead of sugar, and you make a curd by stiffening up those proteins.

Sam:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And it makes it last longer.

Sam:
Sure. And so, as far as… Yeah, as far as your question about, like, how long things last, I mean… you’re oftentimes we don’t really have the option of getting fresh but yeah if you do that’s the time to get it and it is a very like the salmon that we’re doing right now the coho, you got about two months where it’s this really good quality and then the quality is going to start to decline and that’s just the nature of the product it’s not going to be bad but it’s not going to be as good a quality as like it was caught last week.

Andrea:
You’re talking about the fresh.

Sam:
Yeah the fresh yeah the fresh fish um which.

Andrea:
Is where what do you use like a blast freezer or.

Sam:
Something yeah yeah And if you want to get that frozen down, yeah.

Andrea:
I guess, and then, yeah, this is… uh another thing you run into with like chicken and turkey and stuff, um is people will say we want fresh chicken and you know they’ll go out to a farm and buy like 20 or 30 fresh chicken and, sometimes people are just doing it because that’s the way the farm setup is you know and they can only their license is just to sell off the farm obviously that that works and freezing could be considered value added but um sometimes people say they want it fresh and then they take it home and they freeze it. And, if you have the choice, I would throw it in a blast freezer just if you had the option because it would freeze it so quickly that it’s pretty close to fresh, I feel like.

Sam:
Yeah, there is actually something to that. So you talk about sushi-grade fish. You have to freeze it for seven days, at least seven days, below four below, because that’s parasite destruction.

Andrea:
Right.

Sam:
Or I think it’s 18 hours below, 30 below, I believe it is. Wow. Which that’s not possible for home freezers, but four below is. And so that’s, if you’re going to eat fish raw, to be safe, there’s a safe factor of seven days at four below or colder. And so if you’ve ever eaten, unless you get it right off the boat, every fish you’ve ever eaten has been frozen pretty much.

Andrea:
Hopefully.

Sam:
Unless you get it right off the boat.

Andrea:
What I’m seeing the difference is what you’re saying is in production, and there could be a huge lag between how fast it gets put into, like, it could be kept chilled.

Sam:
Yes.

Andrea:
But the lag between getting frozen is key.

Sam:
Yeah, and that comes back to fish care, right? And, you know, how you take care of that fish as soon as it comes out of the water is going to determine how that fish is. Like, if you have a fish that didn’t get bled, cut that shelf life in half.

Sam:
If you take that fish and whack him over the head and you put him in your tote and you just put him in there, leave the guts in him, you cut that shelf life in half. Yeah, you got fermentation happening there. If you take that fish and you don’t chill it, you’re going to get what you call gaping. And that’s the meat will start separating on these fillets, especially towards the mid-tail section. You’ll see it just start pulling apart. And that is a product of being too warm. That’s what causes that. All right.

Andrea:
These are good things to know and things to look for.

Sam:
Sure. But fish care, and I’m to the point where I don’t even eat fish that I didn’t take care of because I know what goes on in some of these boats.

Andrea:
Let me tell you, I don’t eat chicken. You guys would be getting a box of our chicken just as a gift from us, but I do not eat chicken if, I mean, you can eat our chicken raw.

Sam:
Sure.

Andrea:
Like, you take that to the bank. Our stuff is clean.

Sam:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
Maybe it would not taste very good, but you could.

Sam:
Sure, sure.

Andrea:
It wouldn’t be harmful.

Sam:
Give it to Ella. Ella would.

Andrea:
Yeah, Ella. She’ll eat it wrong. She don’t care. But, uh… that’s the difference in processing.

Sam:
It is. Yeah, it’s the process. And if you want to have good fish for yourself, if you go catch your own fish, it’s the same thing. And, you know, if you’re going to bleed a fish, something that folks, you don’t need a knife to bleed a fish. You reach in and one of those red gill plates is under there, break one of those and that’ll bleed it. That’s sufficient. That’ll bleed everything that you need to do.

Andrea:
This will not shock you by this point in the interview. I have never caught a fish. Sure.

Sam:
Never once but there are ways to do it that like you, bonk them over the head to keep that adrenaline down you kill them right away and you break one of those red gill plates it’ll bleed itself out you see an arterial spray coming out of it yeah you know the heart punts for about three or four minutes after that fish is dead yeah and so you break you know it’s just like any other animal you break that break that gill it bleeds out you wash them down you get the guts out of it really quickly, the closer a fish is to the ocean particularly a salmon the hotter that stomach acid is. So you look at a coho salmon and, You catch them on the coast in July when they’re coming in, they double their body weight in three weeks. And so they have…

Andrea:
So they’re like a coal oven.

Sam:
They are. And what’ll happen is that once they die, that stomach acid is so hot, it’ll burn through the bellies and burn into the meat. You get something called belly burn. And you’ll open it up and it’s all like burned out and all the bones are exposed. It’s because that stomach acid ate through the stomach and ate into that fish.

Andrea:
That is your memory.

Sam:
You know, that isn’t the same case when you get them near the stream because they’re not eaten, they’re not as hot. But those cohos, those summer cohos on the ocean, they’re just hot fish. Same with the pinks, same with all of them out there. And so it’s just, you bring ice, you put them, a lot of times people just throw them in a cooler, they get warm, they’ll start that gaping, the meat will get warm, it’ll get mushy. And so it does matter how you take care of those fish personally. And, you know, I buy from a lot of different boats. You know, I buy mostly from trollers, but I also buy from saners. I buy from gill netters. And there is a difference. There is a very, very big difference that you see. Even amongst trollers. They say troll caught fish is the premium. Well, did that person do it correctly? Did they get it and they held it correctly? It’s just, you know, and so sourcing even amongst the elitist trollers is important there as well, you know. Absolutely.

Andrea:
It all matters what people are thinking. And you said relationship, business, and as far as I know, farming and raising food is a lot to do with the relationship you have with the animals, kind of the general environment where you’re raising them as well, and your relationship towards the generations that are coming after you.

Andrea:
so being being able to find good quality fish like this is a is um, not easy but it is a boon to us um, i’m thinking we should end the episode and then if you have the time i would like to record a tour, of your facility that we could put up separate from the episode that people could watch on youtube would you be, do you have time for that i know we went a little over time but Okay, then let me just ask you if you have anything else you want to add here, before we end the main feed episode. Anything you want to say generally to people looking for fish? Or feeling discouraged about fish?

Sam:
Sure, sure. Well, we did cover a lot of things today. There are a lot of direct-to-customer boxes online that you can look for. Okay. There are direct-to-consumer boxes, but then go find your farmer’s markets. Go find the smaller distributors that are more direct-to-customer from the fishermen. That’s going to be your best bet, probably, as a starting place. Buying fish from Costco is not a bad thing. And if that’s what you have access to, then that’s not a bad thing. But typically it’s the smaller producers that may not have the certifications.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Sam:
Pick your people well. Get to know them.

Andrea:
Our audience is very good at doing that.

Sam:
Yeah.

Andrea:
They know they’re farmers. They put the time in. So I have no doubt they’ll be doing that.

Sam:
And one thing about that, it’s if someone is good at sourcing their fish they’re going to be proud of it they’re going to tell you um yeah they’re a small distributor makes his bones on, relationships and relationships like i’m working for example i’m working with someone in austin right now sabre alaska he’s very clear about where that comes from he’s very happy to show, where his fish came from and that’s that’s the selling point that’s what they’re doing is looking at that added value stuff to the market And that’s, you can go ask these folks, where do you get your fish from? And they’re going to tell you.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Sam:
You know, so that’s a good starting point.

Andrea:
And for, you do ship to pretty much everyone in the U.S., right? Okay, so if somebody’s trying to find you, I’ll put your name in the show notes and everything, but could you just say your website?

Sam:
Yes.

Andrea:
And if you guys… Sorry, carry on.

Sam:
Yeah, catchacansams.com. Catch a can, Sam’s.

Andrea:
And did you guys have like a social media? You have Instagram.

Sam:
Right. We have Instagram. We have Facebook. I’m trying to put a few more videos. It’s kind of been a struggle to get our social media going this summer because I’ve been running a knife.

Andrea:
Well, it’s hard when you’re also doing the work. Social media, like Allison and I have definitely experienced that. Social media can eat up so much time.

Sam:
Oh, man.

Andrea:
But I’ll put those in there.

Sam:
I personally cut over 40,000 pounds of fish with this hand and this knife this summer, in the last two months. So it’s been…

Andrea:
Why doesn’t someone just film you doing that?

Sam:
Right. I think I’ve got a few videos around.

Andrea:
Somebody needs to just film you filleting. Right.

Sam:
I’m getting pretty efficient at this point.

Andrea:
And then film me filleting. Right. It’ll be fantastic. Yeah. There’ll probably be a head still attached by the time I’m done. Oh, yeah. Amazing. Okay, well, I will put all the links to everything in the show notes. And you’ve been so generous with your time and so much just wisdom and knowledge that you have to share with all of us. So I’ll be probably fielding more questions about seafood as time goes on. And if it ever works out that we can talk more about it. I know our audience is asking a lot about seafood because it is one of those things that’s hard to find. And it’s really hard to find experts on it because they’re very few and far between. So thank you for the time. And then we will go on and record. So if you’re listening to this now, you can go check the YouTube channel and either see Sam and I recording this right now, or you can watch the tour of the fish plant. Thanks so much, Sam.

Sam:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.