Thursday, January 7, 2010
Conversation Bites / Restaurants A Cautionary Fish Tail
Posted by Chris Chamberlain on Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 7:28 AM
About fifteen years ago, I was lucky enough to go on a fishing trip with some customers to Lake Huites in the remote mountains of western Mexico. And I do mean "remote." Like fly into Culiacan where the drug dealers roam the streets brandishing machine guns and then ride five hours in a Suburban with tinted windows over some of the worst godawful roads in the world to a fishing camp consisting of three old RVs with their tires shot out. It was the best fishing trip of my life.
The lake was a reservoir created by some public works/graft project that happened to be virtually unfished for twenty years, so an angler could easily catch and release 200-300 bass per day. If you used a Rat-L-Trap® lure with two treble hooks, you could double your productivity by catching two bass on one cast. The fishing was that good.
Anyhow, our guide was a quiet Mexican named Sixto who spoke very little English to complement my high school Spanish of years past. Together, we had several deep and meaningful converstaions about how blue the sky was and how pretty and tall and strong and pregnant (oops) the mountains were. Mostly, he sat in the back of our rickety boat and caught almost as many fish on a clothesline and safety pin rig as we did throwing the entire Cabela's catalog at the stumps near the shore.
I did notice that Sixto was keeping a few of his fish, but I didn't really pay that close attention since I was getting a sore shoulder from reeling in three-pounders myself all day. Eventually the wonderful monotony was broken when I brought in strange fish that I had never encountered before. It was smaller than a bass and sort of looked like a crappie, but with a red belly.
"¿Que es esto?" I asked.
"Ees a tee-lah-pia," replied Sixto.
"What should I do with it?"
"Give heem to me."
"What will you do with it," I wondered, ever the curious culinarian.
"We feed them to the peeegs."
Tilapia is a good candidate to be "seasoned and grilled," because it is basically a flavorless protein on its own. Unfortunately Captain D's took advantage of this blank palette to add a soupy ginger/soy mayo sauce that turned the sandwich into a three napkin mess and, according to their website, added about 40 grams of fat to what one could normally expect out of a plain fish fillet.
It turns out that Sixto was right. ¡Ay, caramba!
Comments (7)
Showing 1-7 of 7
Americans think they like fish until they can actually taste it. We've overfished all the other low-taste species, so the tilapia is this year's Orange Roughy until we screw that up as well.
like
dislike
Virtually all Tilapia for sale in the USA comes from aqua-farms or whatever they're called. And it's cheap as hell to raise, because Tilapia is a bottom feeder, a dainty euphemism for "eater of other fishes’ crap"
Chris, in the interest of fairness, when you write Spanish dialog spoken by an American add a bunch oh "h's" to give it that 'merican intonation
"¿Queh ehs ehstoh?"
I still don't understand the appeal of tilapia. No taste, soggy texture. Must be easy to raise, dress and freeze -- at least that would explain why we get so much of it.
That's right...you've heard my Spanglish.
"Dawn-day ehs-tah el cassa day pay-pay?"
As elzorro stated, Tilapia are often farmed in a tiered setup separated by netting, so that they are on the bottom level below all of the other farmed fish. They might get some feed that gets past the good fish, but mostly, they just eat feces.
Tilapia are very easy to farm fish. They aren't picky about water quality and can be (and are in some cases) raised in plastic garbage cans. I don't care for them much either but, in a pinch they'll do for a light fish meal. At least farming them doesn't represent a threat to the environment as far as I know.
