Fisherman-style cuts
The seafood-obsessed Huang combines marine expertise with a foodie’s adventurousness, traveling all over to taste different seafoods. He is also active on social media, sharing his experience via a Facebook group that he set up on fish farming and seafood culture.
But Huang doesn’t focus on the pricey fish popular with the masses. Instead, he directs his gaze to what the seafood industry thinks of as “downmarket” varieties and cuts. Rarely offered for sale in retail markets, many can only be tasted on a fishing boat. The reason so few of these inexpensive and largely unknown varieties of fish stray far from the harbors where they are landed is that sometimes they are simply too ugly in appearance or too few in quantity to go to market.
A fixture in harbors and fish markets for the last 30-some years, Huang’s closeness to both fishermen and fishmongers has provided him with opportunities to go to sea with the former and trade cooking and tasting notes with the latter. This has in turn enabled him to enjoy fresh, quickly prepared authentic harbor cuisine that includes these less common varieties of seafood.
Though there are some harbor-area restaurants that are willing to buy unusual fish and cuts, restaurants don’t include them on their menus because the fishes’ availability is too limited and too sporadic. Unless you are yourself a foodie or are connected to someone in the know, you’re unlikely to run across them except by chance.
This isn’t because fishermen are keeping secrets, or because the fish are hard to prepare or keep fresh. Instead, Huang explains, it’s simply because the fish lack a market price, and few people ask about them. Wholesalers therefore lost interest in buying them, and they became rare on the retail market.
That said, goose barnacles, and the unattractive-looking and hard-to-pronounce Harpadon microchir, a close relative of “Bombay duck” (Harpadon nehereus) and colloquially known to Taiwanese fishmongers as “that fish,” are gradually becoming better known thanks to social media.
Or take various species of billfish. The meat may be popular, but offcuts like the voluminous stomach, belly meat, dorsal fin, ozutsu (the area behind the dorsal fin) and even eyes all have their own flavor and mouthfeel that, when paired with other local ingredients, make them aspects of fishermen’s cuisine worth trying. Huang discusses these and other unusual fish and cuts in his book Oddball Seafood: A New Guide for Island Dwellers.
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Stout red shrimp (upper photo, Aristeus virilis) and goose barnacles (lower photo) are delicious but hard to find outside the areas where they are caught.