Some Fin to Talk About By David W. Brown
F
or Rouses Markets, offering the best products, including seafood, at the lowest prices is everything. When you are talking about creatures harvested from the sea, to ensure quality, you have to go the extra mile and do things a little bit differently. The telltale signs are subtle but important, and how the seafood is handled every step of the way must be expertly done. Seafood moves very quickly from the sea to your shopping cart, and along the way are several quality checks by the best in the business.
ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT Below: Tommy Williams of Great Escape Fisheries in Slidell, LA ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT Opposite: David Maginnis of Jensen Tuna in Houma, LA Photos by Romney Caruso
“The first thing is to know who you are buying from,” says Denise Englade, the Director of Seafood for Rouses Markets. The seafood group buys straight from the source to make sure Rouses sells only the freshest fish possible. To that end, Denise and her team work with producers, processors, and fishers directly. “For the majority of our fish — especially our local fish — we buy it whole, and then we fillet it at the store level,” she says. This
is important because when you get a whole fish that still has its scales and its skin and its belly lining (among its other parts), you are ensuring that the fish, first, stays fresher on the bone, and second, has the parts necessary to allow for a more in-depth inspection of its quality. When the certified seafood experts at Rouses Markets get a fish, the first thing they do is look in the fish’s belly. “You want to make sure the belly bones, as we call them, and the belly wall, is fresh and the bones are poking through,” says Englade. Next, when the Rouses team member threads up the spine, he or she is looking for red blood — in other words, that it has not yet oxidized. For a head-on fish, the fish experts check its gills, which should also have nice, fresh, red blood. When the gills have turned brown, that means the fish has been around too long, and has begun oxidizing. A lot of people pay special attention to the eyes of a fish to determine freshness — that cloudy eyes mean trouble — but Englade says that isn’t always true. A saltwater fish pulled from the Gulf would immediately be packed in ice, which would cause its eyes to be cloudy. Because the Rouses seafood team handles so many types of fish from so many sources, they have to be meticulous. Rather than looking at eye cloudiness, a fish inspector will look at eye concavity.
