The black art of murdering fish

I have a hypothesis. I have been thinking about it for some time. It makes sense.

I assume that everyone who reads this blog knows what ike jime is. For those whose minds it has slipped for one or the other inexplicable reason, you can read about it here, here and here. Even if it hasn’t slipped your mind, I highly recommend those blog posts anyway. They are great. For those in a hurry, ike jime is a technique for slaughtering fish by which the brain is spiked and the spinal cord is destroyed by a wire or needle that is pushed into the spinal cord.

It is among many considered a superior technique to slaughter some fish this way especially if it is to be served raw. I don’t know. I remain skeptical. For oily pelagic fish, it seems to make a difference. Most tuna is handled with ike jime technique, at least if it is to be exported to Japan.

The tests described in the three links above were conducted on farmed fish, which as a rule among other things have higher fat content than wild fish. How that might have impacted the outcome, I don’t know.

But this post is not really about ike jime but a closely related subject. As I said, I have a hypothesis. There are numerous studies that have concluded that stress before slaughter is detrimental to the quality of the fish. I think so too. But it also seems to vary between species. Some time ago I started to see a pattern, namely that fish that had been spear fished often displayed a particularly exceptional quality. It became eye catching. At first I thought it was just imaginary but the pattern was there if the spear had hit the head and cut the spinal cord and the fish had been left to bleed for a while in the salty water. There also seemed to be a pattern that fish of certain sizes were particularly good when shot with a spear. The sizes seem to range from around a kilo to maybe 2,5 kilos. Much larger fish that is spear fished is often shot several times and they seem not to have bled sufficiently. My theory is that the smaller sizes die instantly, while the larger ones will struggle and panic. I am of course speculating. But it seems plausible that a fish that is killed in an instant while swimming in its natural habitat will never feel pre-mortem stress or panic like with other fishing methods or the stress that a farmed fish is likely to be under for the duration of its life. It is incredibly difficult to validate or rather falsify this hypothesis that spear fished fish shot like this is better. How do you set up a proper control group with line caught wild fish e t c, e t c? To validate that there is basis for this hypothesis I would present the image above. The slices are photographed about 30 hours after the fish was killed. It is a Mediterranean grouper (merou blanc). What is the deal? The deal is the texture, which is firm yet tender and translucent, and the taste, which is incredibly clean. Though I would not call the texture crunchy, it does have a certain resistance to it when you bite it, while still being perfectly tender. It is like the opposite of being mushy.

I also think that the best storage solution is if the fish is slowly cooled without ice and kept cool.

This is what it looked like cooked.