Post: #1

Anybody know if the Kirkland brand frozen wild Alaskan salmon from Costco is safe to eat as sashimi, i.e raw?

Post: #2

I'd ask the fish monger they have on staff before trying it. Your best bet would be trying to find a fish market real close to the ocean. My fish market is the native reserve, sockeye salmons for $10.

Post: #3

Ehhh I wouldn't eat any frozen grocery store fish as sushi. Best hit up a premium market to get the sushi grade fresh off the plane stuff.

Post: #4

(09-25-2012 03:33 PM)presidentcarter Wrote:  Ehhh I wouldn't eat any frozen grocery store fish as sushi. Best hit up a premium market to get the sushi grade fresh off the plane stuff.

Yeah, but if I am eating it numerous times a week it might get quite expensive. Just wondering if anybody had eaten the Kirkland brand and lived to tell the tale. Apparently freezing it to a particular temp kills all the parasites, but I don't know if Costco freezes it down to that temperature.

Post: #5

(09-25-2012 03:32 PM)WesternCancer Wrote:  I'd ask the fish monger they have on staff before trying it. Your best bet would be trying to find a fish market real close to the ocean. My fish market is the native reserve, sockeye salmons for $10.

I am guessing you are in BC.

Post: #6

Yeah. I guess I'm kind of lucky in that aspect

Post: #7

I eat Kirkland salmon 2-3 times each week.

I'll sometimes pan sear mine in some coconut oil, medium rare in the middle.

Still here...

Post: #8

(09-25-2012 03:51 PM)MikeCF Wrote:  I eat Kirkland salmon 2-3 times each week.

I'll sometimes pan sear mine in some coconut oil, medium rare in the middle.

Still here...

Yeah, I was pan searing before, now I don't think I want to pan sear anything. I steam it in a foil wrapper. But, I am trying to move towards less cooking and more raw, if possible, hence the question.

Post: #9

What's wrong with pan searing?

Post: #10

Any fish you buy from a store has been FAS (frozen at sea) to help eliminate parasites and bacteria. What screws you is when the fish is thawed to process and THEN frozen again. No good for the texture, the developing ice crystals make it mushy.

So assuming the fish you bought is "fresh", that is, it was never re-frozen, and it's high quality like wild alaskan salmon, yes, you can eat it for sashimi. However sashimi is not merely raw fish. Most fish you get from a decent sushi restaurant has been cured or treated in some way. Japanese mackerel usually warrants a rice vinegar cure. More delicate fish can be cured in kombu sheets (salted seaweed).

For a home method, I would simply brine it in saltwater for about 15 minutes. There are recipes for exact brine percentages; I simply do it by taste. I keep adding salt to a volume of water until it tastes roughly HALF as salty as seawater, submerge my fish fillets in there and let it sit in the water for 15 minutes. This will firm up the texture and also add a nice patina of seasoning to the exterior of the fish while gently imbuing it with seasoning as well. Pat dry the fish very well. The slightly firmer texture will allow you to slice the fish more easily and get nice clean slices to lay on some seasoned rice or use in a salad.

Post: #11

I don't believe it would be a good idea to eat it raw. Google it and I bet you can find the answer, but I would go with no.

Post: #12

There's a Korean salad called hwe dup bap. It's basically a giant bowl of salad greens with warm rice and raw fish all mixed together with some scallions, soy sauce, and sriracha. Fucking delicious, I highly recommend.

In this recipe (copy and pasted from some korean cooking website) you'll see it calls for "Gochu Jang". That's korean chili paste and can be found in asian markets. If you can't find it, sriracha is a worthy substitute:

Main Ingredients
Fresh or frozen salmon, tuna or any other sashimi
2 Tablespoons flying fish roe
2 cups white rice
1/3 onion
1 cucumber
1/3 carrot
2 cloves of garlic
Lettuce or salad leaves
1 sheet roasted seaweed (keem 김)
(optional) sesame leaves
(optional) radish sprout

Sauce (cho-goh-choo-jang 초고추장)
4 tablespoons chili pepper paste (goh-choo-jang 고추장)
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon sprite
1 teaspoon of Diced/Crushed Garlic (mah-neul 다진 마늘)
2 pinch roasted sesame seeds
2 tablespoons sesame oil

Sushi Rice Seasoning (dahn-cho-mul 단촛물)
1 tablespoons vinegar
1/2 tablespoons sugar
1 pinch salt

Preparation
Seasoning sauce (cho-goh-choo-jang 초고추장) – Mix everything together except sesame oil and sesame seeds which you can add when you serve. If you can prepare ahead, leave the sauce for an hour.

Rice – Make rice for 2 people.

Sushi Rice Seasoning – Mix the ingredients together and mix with warm rice.

Fish – Fresh sashimi always taste better, but frozen ones are just fine. For frozen fish, thaw it under salt water for 5 minutes and cut. You may heat up the knife under running hot water to make cutting easier. Cut into bite sized cubes and save them in the fridge (it’s raw fish!) until everything else is ready to eat.

Onion – Julienne as thinly as possible and put them in cold water for 10 minutes. Drain and remove excess water with paper towel.

Lettuce – Cut into desired size or use spring mix salad leaves.

Cucumber – Julienne. Use on the outer solid part and discard the soft seed part.

Carrot, garlic, sesame leaves – Julienne.

Seaweed – Slice thinly or grind to powder.

Serving
Arrange prepared ingredients together. Rice in the bottom and vegetables (lettuce, onion, cucumber, carrot, garlic, sesame leaves..) on top of rice. Add sashimi and fish roe on top. Put the sesame oil around.

Serve the sauce (cho-goh-choo-jang 초고추장) in a sauce bowl and sprinkle roasted sesame seeds on top. Enjoy!

Post: #13

^^^ I'm starving now.

Post: #14

(09-25-2012 04:02 PM)presidentcarter Wrote:  What's wrong with pan searing?

Cooking any sort of meat, including fish at high temperatures causes the creation of HCAs which are a known cancer risk. I don't know, maybe I am just being paranoid.

Quote:Some heterocyclic amines (HCAs) found in cooked and especially burned meat are known carcinogens. Research has shown that heterocyclic amine formation in meat occurs at high cooking temperatures. For example, heterocyclic amines are the carcinogenic chemicals formed from the cooking of muscle meats such as beef, pork, fowl, and fish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterocyclic_amine

Post: #15

(09-25-2012 04:17 PM)thedude3737 Wrote:  Any fish you buy from a store has been FAS (frozen at sea) to help eliminate parasites and bacteria. What screws you is when the fish is thawed to process and THEN frozen again. No good for the texture, the developing ice crystals make it mushy.

So assuming the fish you bought is "fresh", that is, it was never re-frozen, and it's high quality like wild alaskan salmon, yes, you can eat it for sashimi.

It sounds like I MIGHT be ok with the Costco brand. This is what the bag looks like.

Post: #16

(09-25-2012 04:38 PM)ManAbout Wrote:  

(09-25-2012 04:17 PM)thedude3737 Wrote:  Any fish you buy from a store has been FAS (frozen at sea) to help eliminate parasites and bacteria. What screws you is when the fish is thawed to process and THEN frozen again. No good for the texture, the developing ice crystals make it mushy.

So assuming the fish you bought is "fresh", that is, it was never re-frozen, and it's high quality like wild alaskan salmon, yes, you can eat it for sashimi.

It sounds like I MIGHT be ok with the Costco brand. This is what the bag looks like.

how much is that stuff?

i'm getting tired of paying 17.99/lb for wild caught sockeye at wholefoods. we eat about 1.5 lbs twice a week, every week. in fact, tomorrow night is salmon night.

Post: #17

$30 for a 3 pound bag where I live.

I live on that stuff. Just had some, actually.

Costco has also stepped up its organic food game.

Post: #18

Raw meat you buy from the store is never safe to eat as is, especially since you mentioned that you want to do that at least semi-often. The sashimi you get at the restaurants have been specially processed to be made more safe.

Post: #19

Eh, I'd steer clear of eating it raw. It's simply too processed, wild caught or not.

If it comes in plastic, you should--at minimum--sear/cook the outside.

Post: #20

(09-26-2012 12:46 AM)chakri Wrote:  Raw meat you buy from the store is never safe to eat as is, especially since you mentioned that you want to do that at least semi-often. The sashimi you get at the restaurants have been specially processed to be made more safe.

That's not entirely true. At the restaurant I run my seafood purveyor supplies a lot of sushi restaurants in Los Angeles. Yes, it's a damn good purveyor and the quality is excellent, but they follow the same HAACP standards as any other food retailer or purveyor. The quality that you get at Whole Foods, Costco, or Safeway isn't going to be as good as what I get, but it will be as safe. I would say grocery stores are more stringent in their standards actually to avoid food poisoning lawsuits.

For anyone concerned with bacteria, you can cook the outside of the fish with a very simple Japanese cooking method where you hold your fish in a strainer and ladle boiling water over the fish. This way you're not searing it and exposing it to high temperature fats, but you're "sanitizing" the outside which is where the majority of bacteria are harbored. Traditionally after doing this you would let it sit in a marinade of soy, ginger, and scallions for 10-15 minutes, then slice and serve.

On a final note, in the U.S. we have an abnormally high rate of allergies and food-related illnesses. I have two theories for this, both vaguely supported by data that's out there:
1) Processed food, whether it's ground beef or bagged spinach, comes from HUGE producers and HUGE processing plants and HUGE distributors. Because of the logistics at each one of these steps you open yourself up to many more risks of contamination than if you bought the same product from a small farmer who can directly supervise how he brings food to the table. And when outbreaks happen, they happen on a huge scale. It's never 3-4 people getting sick, it's hundreds.
2) Despite the occasional outbreak, the food that most Americans consume is, by and large, sterile. It's clean. Our meat is processed in laboratory-like conditions. Contrast that to a place like Mexico where meat is butchered and left to hang in open-air markets. The result? It's my belief that Americans have a weaker immune system because of it. We expose ourself to less bacteria, yet we have more allergies and sicknesses. The Mexicans and Central Americans I work with are almost never sick.

Eat some raw meat.