PORTLAND — Grasping a silvery 18-pound chinook salmon by the tail, chef Greg Higgins ran his knife deftly along the spine, peeling back a bright-red filet.
"This is a really nice fish," said Higgins, owner of Higgins Restaurant and consistently one of Portland's top-rated chefs. "It's got great tension and firmness. You see the nicer color in that? ... You know it's really fresh. This is good quality. The scales are all intact. That shows it's been well-handled."
A member of the board of the Chefs Collaborative, Higgins believes in using fresh local ingredients in season. When it comes to salmon, that means wild fish, caught by a fisherman, for environmental as well as culinary reasons.
He backs up that belief by paying a premium of $1 to $2 a pound for top-quality wild salmon over the farmed fish that dominate the market.
"Local seasonal food raised in a responsible manner is better for the community, for the environment and for personal health," Higgins said.
Like the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Blue List, the Chefs Collaborative suggests wild salmon as the sustainable choice for green-minded seafood lovers. They argue that salmon farms concentrate waste, can pass disease and parasites to wild fish, and can damage habitat.
"Without getting into the environmental conflict surrounding the salmon-farming process, I want to preserve the lifestyle of people living and working in the fishery," Higgins adds.
Higgins fillets every fish coming into his restaurant, smelling for the complex aroma that indicates a wild diet, looking for a hole in the jaw to show it was hooked.
"They eat a varied diet based on nutrient cycles — krill, herring — which adds texture, color and flavor," he said. "If you have a monoculture diet like farm-raised salmon — to me the smell and taste of aquaculture fish is pretty much reminiscent of the smell of goldfish out of an aquarium, because they eat pretty much the same thing."
Chefs' blind taste tests sponsored by the Chef's Collaborative consistently rank wild fish over farmed.
"The fish connoisseur likes the fishy flavor," said Clare Backman, environmental manager for Stolt Sea Farm, which raises farmed salmon in British Columbia and sells most of it to the United States. "There is another consumer who doesn't like the fishy taste, who prefers the farmed fish because it's milder."
source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001815244_salmontaste15m.html 15dec03
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