Whole foods fish

[Anonymous]

I paid $25/lb for halibut that I now realize was previously frozen. I expect this from Safeway but did not realize that whole foods did this with fish in their "fresh" case. Where the heck do people buy FRESH fish in this area?

[Anonymous]

The District Fishwife, at Union Market.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I paid $25/lb for halibut that I now realize was previously frozen. I expect this from Safeway but did not realize that whole foods did this with fish in their "fresh" case. Where the heck do people buy FRESH fish in this area?

If you want FRESH, you pretty much have to buy local or some shallow water fish from the carribean. Meaning no halibut, swordfish, tuna, patagonian toothfish, etc. These are deep water fish that are harvested by boats out on the water for weeks at a time. Everything gets deep frozen immediately. Local fish include rockfish, bluefish, possibly flounder/sole in the winter, some others... But much of the "high end" stuff that most people love gets frozen at some point.

[Anonymous]

^^^
Yep.

[Anonymous]

And BTW, there's nothing wrong with fish that was flash-frozen on the boat. When they did that, it was fresher out of the water than the "fresh" stuff is by the time it travels from the nearest shore to your local fish case and then sits there all day.
I wouldn't sweat it. Unless I'm somewhere where I can see the boats on the water and the fish on the dock, I don't expect fresh-from-the-sea.

[Anonymous]

A lot of the fish we get is frozen. in case you haven't seen footage of the fish markets in Japan, even there, the tuna often comes in as frozen carcasses which are then cut up by band saws while still frozen. Just read an article about the technology they use now to freeze the fish so quickly it doesn't give water time to crystalize and cause cell rupture.