Cooking with 'ground' ocean fish.

Rockfish, Lingcod, Greenling, Flounder, etc.  So many of us love catching them, cooking them, eating them and there are so many ways to prepare them. But what about grinding the meat up raw and then cooking it? I had never tried that.

On a recent cooking competition show (FoodNetwork TOC3 ep5), Chef Jet Tila used a technique on ocean fish (mahi-mahi) that I had not seen- he processed it into ground meat raw, explaining that by 'working' the raw protein and then cooking it, the result would be like ground pork and less like crumbly fish.

It worked really well for him, one judge actually thought it was ground pork, and I thought about all sorts of dishes that I could try using ground lingcod or rockfish in, things that I could swap in a firm ground fish protein for ground pork/chicken/turkey.

Spoiler alert: I tried it. lol  I used an electric meat grinder on lingcod caught earlier this year and froze, using the result to make Thai Larb salad which normally would use ground chicken. Result was amazing, fresh and again the next day.  I can't wait to try it in more recipes.

First half of the video is from my salt water trips so far this year, jump to about 5m20s to get to the processing/cooking part. I don't talk about it but I also ground up half a limit of razor clams, tasty result but very different- small chewy bits perfect for chowder but not a replacement for ground meat.

cheers, roger



PS- I got that meat grinder for ~$55 from Amazon in January primarily to process salvage tag venison/elk and love it, comes apart and cleans up in seconds. Never dreamed I would be using it on ocean bottom fish.









 

Thanks for posting this sir!
It's giving us all sorts of tasty ideas...

Great idea Roger, I don't have a grinder but will just chop up the meat till it's pretty small. We make fish cakes in HI with milk, lady, and bone fish. I make it here with salmon by scraping the leftover meat off the carcass with a spoon after filleting but I have not tried it with other fish.

Great idea Roger, I don't have a grinder but will just chop up the meat till it's pretty small. We make fish cakes in HI with milk, lady, and bone fish. I make it here with salmon by scraping the leftover meat off the carcass with a spoon after filleting but I have not tried it with other fish.

I'm not a food chemist/scientist, I'm sure an expert in this field could address it better, but there seems to be something important about the smashing and stretching of the raw protein molecules in the meat that changes it. And once the protein is cooked this doesn't work.

Scraping raw salmon off a carcass would seem to accomplish this to some extent but leaves out the 'extruded into pellets' step. I think just cutting a fish fillet into pieces would be like cutting a piece of pork or chicken into pieces, the result isn't going to be the same as putting that same chunk of raw meat through a grinder.

What really hooked me on this process was being able to thaw a fillet from the freezer, slice into strips, run it through the grinder (seasoning it first?), into a pan to cook and soak up seasoning/flavors then into whatever I'm cooking.  I'm also considering grinding some of my fish fresh and freezing it ground, just like is done with all other types of meat.

Did anyone else think running lingcod through a meat grinder was going to create fish mush? I sure did. 

 

   

Great idea Roger, I don't have a grinder but will just chop up the meat till it's pretty small. We make fish cakes in HI with milk, lady, and bone fish. I make it here with salmon by scraping the leftover meat off the carcass with a spoon after filleting but I have not tried it with other fish.

I'm not a food chemist/scientist, I'm sure an expert in this field could address it better, but there seems to be something important about the smashing and stretching of the raw protein molecules in the meat that changes it. And once the protein is cooked this doesn't work.

Scraping raw salmon off a carcass would seem to accomplish this to some extent but leaves out the 'extruded into pellets' step. I think just cutting a fish fillet into pieces would be like cutting a piece of pork or chicken into pieces, the result isn't going to be the same as putting that same chunk of raw meat through a grinder.

What really hooked me on this process was being able to thaw a fillet from the freezer, slice into strips, run it through the grinder (seasoning it first?), into a pan to cook and soak up seasoning/flavors then into whatever I'm cooking.  I'm also considering grinding some of my fish fresh and freezing it ground, just like is done with all other types of meat.

Did anyone else think running lingcod through a meat grinder was going to create fish mush? I sure did. 

 

 

That makes sense, when we made the bony fishes (milk,lady,bone) we would work the fish with a rolling pin or the old coke bottles to mash and loosen the meat from the bones before scraping. The old timers could pop off the tail and squeeze out the mush meat. This would probably accomplish what the grinder does.

I know freezing will also help to break down and soften meat so I will see what kind of texture the defrosted lingcod has. If nothing else I can put it in a bag and smash it up a bit.

The salmon does come out more chunky but works as a fritter.

I'm going through the freezer right now

Thanks for posting this Roger!  I would have never considered "grinding" fish.   I have some rockfish in the freezer I will try this on from my last Alaska trip.