Yellowfin

As a heat wave baked most of America, some fishermen found cool breezes in the Northeast where both recreational and commercial anglers wait patiently for their favorite time of the year, striped bass season. While recreational guys have been able to live line bunker since April, the commercial season for striped bass finally opened in July.

There is no mistaking the feeling of hooking up with a striper. They slam into bait with such force and abandon your line whirls away in a fury until you’re able to set the hook and the fight can begin. The power that awes fishermen is the same reason striped bass is prized for its firm meaty flesh where it’s diet of bunker, eels and clams gives it a sweet delicate flavor. Open a box of these fresh line-caught stripers and smell the ocean. It’s taken a little time for everyone to get over their initial excitement, and dock prices have come back down to earth. They are landing both in Montauk and Cape Cod, and are a highlight of every summer season.

Small boats are running out south of Martha’s Vineyard with hopes of landing local yellowfin tuna. The steam to Hudson Canyon is not short, but the reward is usually well worth the time and effort. In the style of our friends in Tobago, Massachusetts fishermen are dropping metal jigs on hand lines with hopes of hooking up with yellowfin. The sustainability of a hand-lining is unmatched - one man, one hook, one fish - almost a zero by-catch fishery.

In NY and PA the controversy surrounding fracking of the Marcellus shale for natural gas is heating up. A new study is concerned with chemicals seeping into Pennsylvania drinking water, while chef and goodfood advocate Mary Cleaver discusses Fracking and Its Dangerous Effects On Local Farms. If you are in Brooklyn this week you can enjoy some delicious food from Mary, Michael Anthony of Gramercy Tavern, Peter Hoffman of Back Forty, Zak Pelaccio of Fatty 'Cue, and a host of others at a benefit called Taste of the Marcellus to raise fracking awareness.

As the Bristol Bay sockeye season winds down, awareness of the Pebble Mine threat increases. This week the Huffington Post asked people to share Sea to Table’s videos, as the EPA comment period ends. Remember, the best way to save a salmon is to eat a salmon.

Most days in Destin, Mullet Mike takes his boat The Sand Gnat into Choctawatchee Bay and cast nets for Striped Mullet. People in seaside towns around the world prize mullet, but they get little respect here. They even have an awful haircut named after them. When eaten fresh from the sea these under-appreciated critters are delicious. Arriving next day from Mullet Mike’s net at a good price, they are awfully good to eat.

In Washington, the House of Representatives voted 220-191 to halt funding for new Atlantic and Gulf catch share programs, with the sponsors saying “catch shares are no different than any other inside-the-Beltway style tactic determined to destroy every aspect of American freedom under the guise of conservation. By capping the amount of fish that may be caught annually and gifting a select few with shares of the annual catch, NOAA is privatizing access to a once open fishery. Make no mistake about it: catch shares are nothing less than a cap-and-trade management system for our oceans.” The problem with this ideological rant is that it has nothing to do with fisheries - it does not address the problem of limiting catches - universally agreed to in the industry - and making vessels economically viable. The huge number of industry supported buyouts show harvesters recognize acutely the problem of too many vessels chasing too few fish. Unfortunately, Congressional grandstanding for 'freedom' won't solve the problem.

Catch shares provide each fisherman with secure access to a portion of the total annual harvest of fish, allowing them to plan their fishing over the entire year. Two things happen under this new approach: uncertainty goes down, and stewardship grows. Fishermen and managers find they have new tools to conserve fish stocks, and the evidence is compelling. A recent study of fisheries published in the journal Marine Policy looked at fisheries before and after they adopted catch shares. Since the implementation of catch shares, fishermen on average are earning significantly more, fisheries are stabilizing, and safety has dramatically improved. For example, in 2010 alone, catch shares in three fisheries in the Pacific, New England and Gulf of Mexico saved enough fish from being tossed back dead to feed an estimated one million Americans for a year.

Yellowfin tuna has been in short supply, with a good part of the reason being an increased number of FDA rejections of “adulterated” tuna from Asia. In a disturbing story from Peru, fishermen began finding dead dolphins, hundreds of them, washed up on Peru’s northern coast. Now, seabirds have begun dying, too, and scientists have yet to conclusively pinpoint a cause. “Never in my 40 years as a fisherman have I seen anything like this,” said Francisco Ñiquen Rentería, the president of the Association of Artisanal Fishermen in Puerto Eten, in the Lambayeque region. “Sometimes in the past, you’d randomly see a dead dolphin or a pelican, but this, what’s happening now, is really alarming.” It is bad to fool with Mother Nature.

The trend of chefs butchering and utilizing everything from snout to tail reaches from coast to coast. Now we are seeing some amazing dishes from parts of fish that rarely see the plate. Michael White is serving sablefish collars at Marea in NYC. Yoshi Tome, owner of Sushi Ran in Sausalito, describes the Japanese delicacy monkfish livers as "very rich and creamy, but yet at the same time very light and delicate, feeling silky and velvety to the palate". When grouper fishermen came in from sea, they used to put the grouper cheeks aside for themselves; the cheeks are that good. We like no waste.

Things have gotten very challenging in the tuna world. US imports of treated yellowfin tuna fell almost 30 percent last year. The word from Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, is that the fish are nowhere to be found. Moon Marine USA Corp. of Cupertino, CA is voluntarily recalling 58,828 pounds of imported yellowfin tuna that has been linked with an outbreak of salmonella. It has sickened more than 100 people in 20 states, federal health authorities reported Friday.

Our boys in Beaufort, NC have been steadily landing line-caught yellowfin, but high market demand has been forcing prices steadily higher. The lack of fresh yellowfin has pushed prices of 2+ loins above $15/lb. As spring turns to summer the fish will migrate north, and we will see steady supply landing in Montauk, NY. We are grateful that the well managed US fishery is allowing a sustainable yield, and that our chefs can serve a safe and delicious product.

Cardinals fans should join us on Tuesday afternoon at St Louis’s Sidney Street Café where we will be hosting an event along with Chef’s Collaborative, enjoying Bristol Bay wild sockeye and Florida wild white shrimp with a glass of wine. Promises to be delicious and fun.

Crawfish season is back in swing, and we are shipping live bugs from Natchitoches, LA. From Martha’s Vineyard, MA we are landing live scallops and beautiful steamer clams. A golden tilefish boat will be landing in Portland, ME this week, and will be shipping whole fish at a special price. Beginning next week we will be working with a mid-water trawler from Prince William Sound landing twice weekly at Seward with the famous Alaska side-stripe shrimp. These are the super sweet shrimp that the Japanese call ebi, and most of his catch will be headed for Asia. They can ship together with beautiful halibut, pacific cod, or trolled king salmon.

“Stick to American fisheries, and ‘wild caught’ is best,” Fox News quoted 'Deadliest Catch' Captain Keith Colburn. “When you start buying from overseas without the same health regulations, the quality issues can become scary. There are places that raise chickens above the fish pans, and use the excretions as a food source.” Yum.

It is hard for chefs to balance customer demands, costs, and sustainability. "It can be a struggle,” chef Andrew Carmellini says, to balance his desire to promote lesser-known sustainable fish with pressure to serve the standbys. “It would be easy to put tuna on our menu, but I don’t want to. Instead, I offer wahoo, which is tuna-like. People ask why we don’t just sell tuna instead of this funny fish that sounds like yahoo.” Our friend chef Rich Garcia is the fishermen's best friend, using all types of little-known, lower cost fish in his cooking, like sea robin, dogfish, and porgy. “There are a lot more fish in the sea, my friend." says Garcia. Another approach to controlling costs while supporting fishermen is by utilizing whole fish, creating interesting dishes from “scraps” as well as delicious stocks. For example, this week we will be landing Golden Tilefish in Portland, ME and are able to offer whole fish delivered at $6.90/lb.

"The key to sustainability is having the close relationship to those that are providing the resource” RI fisherman Chris Brown writes. “Ultimately my point is to know your fisherman, become aware of the current state of the species you are interested in, and generally become more educated. Lack of education and awareness are major hurdles to overcome." We need not only worry about the fish, but the traditional fishing communities the resource supports. Around the world, lack of fisheries management is not only devastating fish stocks through illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, but some of the largest US companies have recently been tied to allegations of slave labor practices on foreign vessels. Buy direct from the dock.

And to think that on Thursday night for only $35,800 a plate you could have joined the Obamas in NYC at ABC Kitchen and dined on some of our beautiful Yellowfin Tuna from Montauk.

People in Destin, FL refer to their town as the "World's Luckiest Fishing Village".

Destin traces its history to a fisherman, Leonard Destin, who settled in Northwest Florida about 1845. For decades, he and his descendants fished and navigated the only channel passage to the Gulf of Mexico between Panama City and Pensacola, known as Destin’s East Pass. In 1879 Leonard hired a 13-year-old boy named William Marler. Captain “Billy” sailed the mail in and out of East Pass and created an informal post office. In 1904, an inquiry from Washington requested the name of the official new post office and Captain Billy responded with “Destin” in honor of his first employer. Destin remained undiscovered and pretty much an island unto itself until the mid-1930’s when the Marler Bridge was built and the world began trickling in, with Destin becoming officially incorporated in 1985.

Luck was none too good in 2000, when declining fish populations and a state ban on net fishing effectively put Destin’s 11 commercial fishing boats out of business. But due to new management practices fish populations have begun to rebound. In 2007, the National Marine Fisheries Service instituted a “catch share” program in which commercial fishermen are pre-assigned a quantity of snapper they can land, ending the free-for-all frenzy of the past. Now, red snapper numbers have more than doubled. This year’s red grouper quota was increased, and yellowfin tuna populations are up. Chatham Morgan is landing the F/V Toni Lynn each week with snapper and grouper, as is Captain Gary Jarvis and the F/V Miss Shannon with line caught yellowfin tuna. Striped mullet, an under utilized and under appreciated species, is almost always on the dock. Not only can we support the rebound of this traditional fishing community, but it is our good luck to enjoy some of the best fish anywhere.

Just down the road in sleepy Port St. Joe, the Wood family has been shrimping for five generations. Two years ago Ed Wood invested in state-of-the-art high-speed blast freezing equipment that allows Wild Florida White Shrimp IQF (individually quick frozen), both head-on and tails-only. Using the efficiencies of FedEx, we are shipping these shrimp from cold storage, using Next Day Ground within about 300 miles of either New York or Chicago at a significantly reduced carbon footprint and cost. When you taste the difference and compare the price of these crustaceans with the Asian farmed product that has flooded the market, you will be shocked- in a good way.

Although we haven’t yet won the battle against overfishing, we have turned a corner and are beginning to see many of our important stocks rebound. A remarkable milestone has been achieved with all federal fisheries having catch limits in place in time for the 2012 fishing season. “It’s something that’s arguably first in the world,” said Eric Schwaab, NOAA administrator for fisheries. “It’s a huge accomplishment for the country, and we recognize the tremendous amount of effort and sacrifice on the part of our nation’s fishermen and fishing communities to get us here”.

This week Michael will attend the TEDx conference “Changing The Way We Eat”. Our friend Michel Nischan, whose talk was the highlight of last year’s event, is honored in Food and Wine as one of 10 superstar chefs who are helping to make the world a better place. We love seeing special people get the recognition they deserve.