When you belly up to the bar, would you be surprised to know that your fish is fresh from the deep . . . freeze? It's the law. And that's a good thing.
By JANET K. KEELER
Published April 28, 2004
[Times photos: Michael Rondou]
Michael Chan of Tokyo Sushi Cafe at BayWalk in St. Petersburg displays a lineup of the restaurant’s frozen seafood. Such seafood is later defrosted and turned into works of art by skilled sushi chefs.
Though already cooked, this octopus is kept frozen until it’s needed at Tokyo Sushi Cafe.
Sushi lovers debate and scrutinize the freshness of fish. Silky tuna and salmon should disappear in the mouth with a flavorful poof. Squid and giant clam will offer resistence to the teeth, but hopefully not conjure comparisons to rubber bands.
Sushi skeptics don't bother. They refuse raw fish and wouldn't eat it even if certified fresh from the heavens above.
Both camps, however, might be surprised to know that most raw fish that's sliced and draped over rice is frozen first.
That's the law.
The Food and Drug Administration requires that seafood to be eaten raw as sushi, sashimi, ceviche or tartare must be frozen first to kill parasites. Oysters and sea urchin, which is really roe, and tuna are some exceptions. Tuna is a deep-water fish with clean flesh.
But according to a recent article in the New York Times, tuna is often frozen for economic reasons. As global consumption of sushi increases, there is more demand for tuna and it is less expensive to buy frozen.
"I would say this is not common knowledge," says Andrew J. Moos, owner of Go Sushi Catering in Tampa and founder of the Tampa Bay Sushi Society. "I think most people think the fish is freshly caught and shipped in two minutes to the sushi bars where they eat."
Sushi restaurants don't make a point of printing on their menus: Our Fish is Always Frozen! That's a proclamation likely to drive away diners, especially in Florida where consumers like to imagine the fish on their plates was swimming yesterday.
And in some cases it was, but that fish is probably served as a grouper sandwich or sauteed and served with tropical fruit salsa. It's cooked fish and the heat has killed most anything harmful.
Prospective clients ask Moos what kind of sushi he has and where the fish comes from. The f-word never comes up, he says.
Yoko Nakamine Hall, owner of Yoko's Japanese Restaurant on S MacDill Avenue in Tampa, says a customer will occasionally ask if the fish is fresh or frozen.
"We tell them yes, it's frozen, this is the law," she says. "This is Florida, not Japan where it's served fresh. They (customers) understand."
Americans have embraced sushi, eating it not only at Japanese restaurants but at fusion ones as well. It's bought at grocery stores and nibbled at charity functions. Those who won't go the full monty, are satisfied with California rolls of imitation crab and avocado or Tampa rolls, a local specialty featuring grouper fried in tempura batter.
The number of Japanese restaurants across the country has steadily increased in the past five years, according to the National Restaurant Association. Certainly there has been a boom in the Tampa Bay area.
Association figures, though, don't include the supermarkets, cafeterias and membership stores where sushi can now be purchased, reports the New York Times. AFC Sushi, a Los Angeles sushi franchiser, supplies Florida State University and the U.S. military with sushi for its commissaries. Although the company's Web site touts "fresh sushi," AFC uses only frozen fish in its products.
Alton Brown, author and host of Food Network's Good Eats, says we've been brainwashed into thinking frozen food is less desirable than fresh by restaurant chefs, who chant their mantra on TV shows and in cookbooks.
"We turned away from our mothers and grandmothers and what's right," he says. "They (restaurants chefs) have food deliveries showing up three times a day. They live in a word that's unreasonable for the rest of us."
He says that we equate raw with fresh, but that's not always true.
"I can catch swordfish off of Georgia's bank, stick it on ice and bring it in after nine days," he says. "Is it raw? Yes. Is it fresh? No. We've decided we can use the word fresh for raw."
Brown says he's got no problem buying frozen fish, as long as it's frozen properly. That can only be done in a commercial freezer.
The FDA requires fish to be frozen at minus 20 degrees for 24 hours or minus 35 for 15 hours to kill parasites, says George Hoskin, a director in the agency's Office of Seafood in Washington, D.C. Seven days would be better, Hoskin says, but after 24 hours the "risk is very low."
"Home freezers are storage freezers and not designed to accomplish freezing," he says. Residential freezers are set at 0 to 5 degrees.
According to the FDA, that fish Brown hypothetically pulled from the Atlantic and put on ice was not frozen, but chilled to about 4 degrees, which is enough to arrest decay and preserve the fish until it is brought to shore. Commercial vessels that don't have flash-freezing capability store freshly caught fish this way. Hard freezing aboard ship is not an FDA requirement.
The longer it takes for fish, or any food, to freeze, the larger the ice crystals are that form in the flesh. This translates to more moisture when the fish thaws. Since fish is mostly water, the additional liquid makes it mushy. To preserve the fish's nutrients and texture, it should be frozen quickly at very low temperatures.
FDA guidelines aside, Marie-Claude Desrosiers of Largo won't be eating sushi any time soon. She recently moved to Florida from Quebec and tried sushi, the cooked kind, last year at the insistence of her husband, Michael.
"I didn't know the fish was frozen first," says Mrs. Desrosiers, who worked as a food scientist in the milk and soft-drink industry in Canada. "Even if the parasite is frozen and dead, it is still in the fish, so I am not inclined to eat it. So even if they would tell me that it was frozen, I still would have a problem with it."
Gib Migliano of Save On Seafood in St. Petersburg supplies fish to many sushi houses, but he doesn't freeze it. That's up to the restaurants. FDA guidelines don't stipulate who freezes the fish, just that it's frozen sometime before it's served as sushi.
"We don't sell any frozen fish here," Migliano says.
Migliano doesn't have as rosy an outlook on frozen fish as some folks. He says he can tell the difference between fresh and previously frozen, and he likes it fresh.
"Fish that's been frozen for a year would float in milk like cereal," he says, adding that freezing alters nutrition and taste. He doesn't eat sushi because he doesn't eat frozen fish.
Moos, the sushi caterer, says his chef freezes everything but tuna and locally caught hog snapper. Hog snapper, he says, is a predator fish that doesn't bottom-feed and therefore is clean.
"My chef has worked in a few different sushi bars and has been a consultant to others. To the best of his knowledge, they all freeze the fish or get it in frozen," Moos says.
Despite regular restaurant inspections done by local health officials, some diners are still squeamish about the safety of raw fish. Gary Frank, foodborne illness coordinator for the Pinellas County Health Department, says there have been no illness complaints about sushi or sashimi since January 2003, when the department began keeping a database of that information.
"One reason definitely is the FDA requirement and the special handling," Frank says. "Another is that many of the chefs get special training, sometimes even in Japan."
