What you need to know when buying fish, with Roger Berkowitz

It's also the source of the strangest Hollywood story you had ever heard.

I'm Malcolm Godwell, and on my podcast revisionist history we're telling a story that invites so much absurd speculation that we're going to have to tell it across two episodes. You will almost certainly feel compelled to see Zutopia 2 for yourself. And if you already have you may need to see it again. This into our bizarre 2-part series under vision history, wherever you get your podcasts.

Support for Catching The Codfather comes from Rogers Fish Company, founded by Roger Berkowitz, offering an array of New England seafood and entrees shipable anywhere in the US, more at Rogersfishco.com. And also from Boston's ghee and tennis, helping you and your family get outside and enjoy tennis.

The world's healthiest sport, boost your fitness, mood, and community connections.

Shop locally in Newton and Westboro or online at Boston's gheeintennis.com. As I was working on this series, Catching The Codfather, I would end my days with two somewhat conflicting feelings, one that I want to eat fish for dinner, two that I'm not sure if I should be eating fish for dinner, or at the very least, not sure what kind of fish I should be eating, where I should get it, what I need to know about it.

So all along, I wanted to do a bonus episode, looking squarely at the food piece of the story. A diner's guide, if you will, and a new exactly who I wanted to do it with. So I feel like I have to tell you, when I was growing up, if my family went out to eat and it was a special occasion, we went to one of your restaurants.

“To the point that I believe we did Thanksgiving dinner at one of your restaurants one year.”

Did you have turkey?

Can we did put it on the menu?

Really just for that occasion? Yes. I think we had seafood because I was asking my family about this, if anybody remembered that night. And one of my aunt said, she got lobster, and she asked for drawn butter. And the waiter came back with a picture of a drawing or a stick of mine.

That's funny. Roger Berkowitz is a legend in New England seafood. He grew up working in his father's fish market called legal seafoods. And then he built that business into an empire with dozens of restaurants all over the East Coast. When Julia child needed fresh fish for an episode of the French chef, she came to Roger.

When Ronald Reagan wanted a dish from every state at his inauguration dinner, he served Roger's clam chowder, truly a legend. Roger Berkowitz has a new business delivering frozen seafood direct to consumers. And as you may have noticed, he is also sponsoring this season of the podcast. We are, of course, grateful to Roger for that support.

But I also want you to know that Roger did not have any hand in the series itself. And that this was a conversation I wanted to have long before. He decided to sponsor the show.

“It was worth the wait, and I really think you'll enjoy it too.”

Could you tell me how you started out? Taking you back to your family's business. We started out well, probably about 10 years old, and people said, "Oh, that's slave labor." Well, my father worked long hours, and if we were going to see him, we really had to see him at the fish market. And how many 10 or 11-year-old kids get to wait on?

We had to stand up on a milk raid and order to do it. And then we learned how to fry and batter fish. And so we learned about fish really from the ground up. And we got an opportunity to see our father at the same time. Did you get to know Julia Child?

Absolutely. I got to meet Julia. I think I was 15 or 16 years old. And she would come in. She lived up the street.

She lived under Irving Street in Cambridge. And it's funny.

“One of the things you've heard of monk fish, of course, right?”

Yes. All right, so I got to tell you the quick monk fish story. And before you tell the monk fish, let me tell you, after working on this series, I kind of got interested in the so-called underutilized species. There's species of fish out there that we don't think of right away, like the cod and the flounder and the haddock.

And what are those species? I should get out there and try. And monk fish was one of the ones that I started trying to cook. And knowing, and then looked into and realized that you had this whole story that is probably the reason I can buy my fish.

So yeah, tell that.

“So I kind of stumbled over at my mistake.”

I was down the fish pair behind fish for the fish case.

And I was walking past one of the stalls. And I see a box of wooden crate with a grease pen marked monkey tails. I go monkey tails. That's what the sound of advertising. So I asked one of the doc guys, like, "What's this?"

And he said, "You don't you can bleep the sound." He goes, "You don't want any of this shit, but we send it to France for big money." I go, "Really?" I go, "Give me 10 pounds." And did you have the whole fish there?

Wow. Okay. So this was just the tail. I guess that was just the tail. And I put it in the case.

And as luck would have, Julie, it was by that day. So I said, "Jelly, do you know what this is?" She looks at it. "What? What?" Which is French for one fish.

And so she took it home. And then she called and she said, "Can you get me a whole one?" I didn't know what a whole one looked like. I said, "Sure, I'm sure it won't be a problem."

So I call it the first one.

And I said, "You know, I need a whole monkey fish." Took me two weeks. Because a monkey fish looks like a prehistoric creature. It has 70% head teeth and cartilage. And you cut it off and just use the tail section.

One story show. We finally gone into him. Woo! Look at that. This is a monkey fish. Or angler fish.

And it's, look at that. Look at those teeth. It's sometimes called goosefish. Yes. Because if you've seen the inside of a goose's mouth,

it's like teeth behind teeth, behind teeth. It looks like the alien from the horror. Yes. The horror.

It's really a crazy looking creature.

He's even got some teeth under the eyes. If you can believe that. But you never see that. You never see it. And it's funny.

I was on a friend's fishing boat once. And he knocked me away because I wasn't watching myself. And I almost stepped on a monkey fish that was about to bite me. What's interesting about it is that it looks so big. This weighs about 20 pounds.

But all you eat is the tail. She put it on her show. Time magazine that a photo should have been. She put it in her book. What the power of Julia, that particular time,

“is that when she said this is what you should be eating.”

It just took off overnight. And so that's what the fish industry needed. It needed someone who could champion the non-traditional underutilized. Sometimes they call it trash fish. Not trash.

But it was really underutilized. And so she would popularize her. And so if you happen to run into a monkey fish one day. Don't scream. Invite him home for dinner.

This is Julia Child. Bon appétit. Yeah, it's weird. Monkfish doesn't have that really flaky quality. That I think a lot of us prize.

But it has this chewyness. Yeah, I love it. It's in a child or something. The density of it. It doesn't break down.

It doesn't fall apart. People use it as a poor man's lobster. I mean, you can almost season it as such. It's really good in fish stews. I mean, that's really where it holds up.

Yeah. And really shines. One of the things that struck me and just reading up on the way we eat seafood is that Americans are pretty unadventurous in our taste and seafood.

“I think the figure I found was 86% of all our seafood is accounted for”

by just 10 species. Right? It's your shrimp tuna, you know, salmon and cod. Why do you think that is one word? Bones, bones.

Yes. You can't get past the bones. Yeah. Well, so in many countries and cultures, they're used to picking around bones and they're very adept at it.

Yeah. Not so much in the United States. You get a bone. It was a major issue. Yeah.

So you really needed products and the species you just mentioned with so it fish tuna fish. You know, really didn't have bones. It was a large bone, but you're not going to get a bone stuck in your throat. And that really was how I believe, you know, Americans really thought about seafood. No, you came from an ethnic background, whether it was Indian Asian, whatever.

You were already adept at maneuvering around bones, but not so much if you were. You grew up in America in the 50s, 60s and the 70s. Yeah. I talked to the marine biologist. He used to work with Julia to kind of help promote some of these other species.

And she's like, you know, in Europe, you know, the lead, macroe, and the lead, the fish out right off the bone. And she's talking with Julia.

What's your least favorite meal? What is it you don't want to eat? And Julia said, if I ever get chicken, that's not on a bone. I send it back. Uh-huh.

It should always taste better.

The protein always tastes better. Yeah. When it's on, you do much better, Julia. Yeah. Well, I do.

Well, yeah.

“The protein always tastes better on the bone, right?”

And that it is a bit of a mental block. Yeah. And if it's a, you know, certainly likes it. So one of the popular things you don't see it all that often is a swordfish chop. There's only two, you know, it sort of comes off the shoulder of us, and there's only two, obviously.

Yeah. In a swordfish. But to that point, it is always much more succulent coming off a bone. And, you know, the flavor profile is great.

The fats and the whales are great off of that.

Yeah. She was right. Yeah. Something I've been thinking about and working on this series in this story is that I think we all consciously know that fish are wild animals that we get this from the ocean. But I don't think we truly internalize the fact that this is our last wild, truly wild food that these animals live in an ecosystem that they're all mixed together out there large and small.

Um, that this is not a factory farms and not a, you know, a monoculture that we can just order up, you know, however much salmon we want. We cut these things all together. Mm-hmm. And so we should probably eat them all together or eat a bigger variety of them. Yes.

Yeah. Are they're fished? You mentioned the monkfish story. There are other species of fish that you've, um, kind of championed or tries to, try to raise awareness around. You know, it's kind of interesting now.

It's just reading an article and one of the things my father used to eat a lot in. And I remember through the years I started and I've got my, my grandkids eating it now. Yeah. Sardines. Oh yeah.

I mean, there's so nutritious. Mm-hmm. And I just read an article where the next couple of generations are really focusing more on sardines. Whereas, you know, most boomers as an example would, would not want to eat sardines. And it was their parents food.

We had a Yankee swap among our team here at GPH. Oh. And I'm looking over here. One of my colleagues. She's smiling.

Um, and you know, you never know going into a Yankee swap.

“What's going to be the thing that everybody fights over and what's going to be the dud, right?”

Right. And let me tell you, the tind sardines where, you know, we, we nearly came to blows. Uh-huh. Um, so we're, we're on the same way. So, so that the other thing that I think is going to get popular and for the right reasons is seaweed.

Mm-hmm. We're sea vegetables. I think that's better to call them sea vegetables. And we think of weed. It's not necessarily positive.

Um, there is, there is a lot of kelp farming now. Yeah. Taking place up in Maine. You see it more in, um, in salads and whatnot. And, you know, the Japanese are, are so sophisticated in terms of, um, understanding and appreciating

the minerality of what's coming out of the water. So I think is, is time goes on. Um, we should be shifting more and more, you know, towards that. Because they do eat more of a, of a rounded diet coming out of the ocean. And I just, uh, uh, uh, uh, a full layer of, right, a quarter of a headache.

Well, we're on the topic of, uh, rebranding. Maybe you could help us out with this. So, you know, um, there's been all this agonizing over cod, anyway. Yes. Right.

The iconic fish. And as you know, the stocks have been up and down. We, we tell this story in the, in the series. One of the things I learned that I didn't really know going in is that, um, fish that has come into fill that void in the ecosystem off New England is dog fish.

And there's a lot of dog fish out there. Um, but you don't see a lot of dog fish on menus. No.

“And I think the name might have something to do with it.”

So why, why don't we eat Spiny dog fish? It doesn't taste good. Yo, you think it's, yeah. You think the name is about the problem? No, no, I, I think yes.

No, to your point. Yes. There's no, there's no question. Shark in general is an acquired taste. Yeah.

And it's, you really almost have to purge it. And, and soak it take because the way it, it, it, it, it excretes waste through its, it's, it's through its flesh. It's, it's, it's not advertising. It's not advertising.

And I don't think it tastes good. I mean, that, that's me personally. I'm sure of those, you know, we'll, we'll disagree.

Yeah.

“So I want to turn out and run down kind of like a, like a diner's guide, glossary of terms.”

Okay. For, you know, for the average person out, sure, buying fish in the supermarket and wondering what all this means. Fresh versus frozen. What should we know? Yeah.

So, so, the, very, very interesting.

So, he fresh is, when you think of fresh, you think of something that's never been frozen.

You think of right off the boat. And then when it is frozen, oftentimes it's frozen mechanically, which means it takes several hours to freeze through. And in the process of freezing it through, it damages the cell structure. When you say frozen mechanically, you mean put in a freezer. In a regular freezer where it takes a period of hours to freeze the flush.

And then in that process, the cell structure breaks down and the flesh absorbs all the moisture. So, when you get a piece of fish that's been frozen mechanically and then throw it out and go to cook it. You go, it tastes watery. It needs to avoid a flavor. So, traditionally a fish that has been mechanically frozen is not good.

“You should really want last one or two days catch.”

Now, here's the thing. A fishing boat goes out for five days in a starch catching fish from day one. Right. Well, if you're in the fish businesses as we were in R, you want the last one or two days catch because that's impeccably fresh. But, you know, you've got to know exactly who you're dealing from because, you know, sometimes down at the auction, some of them will say, "Oh, you know what?

I want a thousand pounds of XYZ and you're getting a mixture of what that fish is." And then that fish could theoretically sit in someone's warehouse or wholesale operation for two or three days. And by the time it gets to you, whether it's in a fish market or a restaurant, you add all of that up. And it can be five, six, seven days. So, one of the things that has really intrigued me over time is just take one of the last two days catch.

Let's say grace always come in.

You don't know when the next grace old boat is coming in. So, taking it and putting that under nitrogen. That's really a Japanese technique. And if you've ever been to the Seaky Market in Tokyo, you'll see how they handle it. But if you get something that's impeccably fresh and put it under nitrogen, which freezes the flesh in a matter of minutes, not hours,

plus it also actually kills a lot of the bacteria that is naturally occurring. So, you end up really with a better fish. So, there's got to be an evolution in terms. But until that evolution is more prevalent, you're best off the last one or two days catch. Got it. So, that term, when you see that it's been frozen, that could mean more than what it could mean is mechanically frozen.

99% of the time it's been mechanically frozen, because it's a cost of putting it under nitrogen, because it's a more expensive natural way of preservation. So, they're doing that they're going to advertise that they're not. Yes, yes.

“And can you tell just looking at the fish at the fish counter if it has been previously frozen?”

Pretty much, yeah. There is sort of there's a dryness to the flesh. There's not a sheen to it. You know, something that's very fresh has almost a glossy sheen. When you look at fish that's been previously frozen, almost has a matted look of it. And why do they thought out at all? You know what I mean, if it's been frozen, well, it's been frozen.

Well, because they have learned that fresh cells better than frozen, it's more efficient for them. They have less waste, so they can take it out theoretically. But people know, well, it's kind of fresh and we can control it a little bit better. Yeah.

And how do you know if you're getting the catch from the last two days of the trip versus the catch from the first day of the trip that was sitting around the whole of the boat?

So the average person doesn't know. Yeah. If you're used to eating a lot of fish or you're going to a particular fish market or restaurant that's known for their fish, then you know that the turnover rate is pretty quick. Yep. And your chances are getting that impeccably fresh fish, particularly if you've experienced in one of those settings, you will keep going back to it because you're a trust in what they're doing. Coming up, the diners guide continues with Rogers' blind taste test of farm-raised versus wild salmon.

Next term, on our list, farm-raised versus wild.

What should we know? So it's interesting. Farm-raised has a bad rep. And maybe because early on, farming started to take off, they weren't the guard wheels on. They couldn't really, whether it was in terms of feed, whether it was in terms of how the volume of the stock was in a particular panor or pond. And then there was disease that early on that caused some fish to die off and so antibiotics were used in it. But that was early on.

And so as the aquaculture industry has sort of evolved over time, there are people that do it poorly and there are people that do it really well. And so obviously you want to migrate to the really well. Now, I'll give you a perfect scenario. So farm salmon was really one of the things. And I actually have to credit, actually, because back in the 70s, she was a big component of farm-raised salmon. Of Norwegian salmon, yes, she really got behind it.

“For sustainability purposes or for the flavor. I don't think we were talking sustainability at that point, but I think of just about availability.”

I mean, going back in like the 60s, there was still believe it or not, some wild North Atlantic salmon. It was fuel and far between, but it was really, you know, the amounts were really way down. And so you then could only get product out of Alaska, which was being shipped along way. And it was necessarily holding it well. Yeah. And for folks on the East Coast, farmed Norwegian salmon.

Yes, so a better option for her. And the other thing is, so you have farm Norwegian salmon. You have Scottish salmon. You have Irish salmon. You have Farrow Island salmon. And they really started to perfect the feed and the growth cycles of them. And you got some pretty good fish.

“And then the flavor profiles, because it was a very consistent fat content to those.”

So little by little, it started making inroads on the wild salmon. And if you, I would say eight out of ten people today in a panel, if you had farm versus wild and has people to take their choice, it would blind taste has flying tasting.

Flying tasting, they would migrate at least 80 to 90 percent on the farm.

Now, I'll give you one. It's a fat ear. It is fat ear is more consistent. So I'll give you one. So I'll share how far it's evolved. There is salmon now coming out of New Zealand. The south tip of the south island. There are raising salmon there on algae. They are not using other wild fish to feed the farm fish. They're feeding it algae.

So the Omega 3 content is off the charts. They have taken the Alaskan King salmon, which is different than the East Coast North Atlantic salmon, because of the fat content that it naturally acquires. And they are growing that. And that fish is just off the charts as some of the best fish I've ever had. And I think those will find that. It's interesting because on menus, I feel like all these words carry an overtone, like you advertise wild caught.

Just like you advertise never frozen.

Those things are implicitly good. Farm raised, frozen, implicitly bad. But actually, you're saying, you know, one is not inherently better than the other. You can have excellent farm raised. You can have very poor farm raised. You can have excellent wild caught. You know, it's on their own. Do you not tell you everything exactly?

“Exactly. And I think the difference is because when you look at meats, you know, they have, you know, different, whether it's choice or whether it's prime or whatever.”

You don't have that in fish. So people just sort of take fish as a whole and generalize at that point without appreciating the fact that it has many nuances. Next, local versus imported. How do you think about that when you're buying fish?

I look at it as a specialty item.

“And if someone in some country is doing a better job with certain species, you have to look at them.”

I mean, that's how I look at salmon. You know, there's another one of those things where I just have this knee jerk instinct when I go to a fish market that, you know, if I see the headache is from Iceland. This part is like, oh, I'd rather, I'd rather find the fish that was landed here. Yes. But I don't know if that's just the sentimental thing or that it fishes actually fresher if it's actually higher quality or if it's actually more sustainable even.

So again, it's very nuanced. But to your point, when you see that, I think going back 20 years ago, if you saw Icelandic car or headache, you think, oh, it's, you know, it's imported. It's not going to be as good. Yeah, I mean, that's the, that's the knee jerk on it.

The reality is a lot of the headache and car they believe have actually from New England have migrated over.

So it's kind of like the same species. Now I, what I will say about Iceland, it is probably the most sophisticated country in the world for fish handling. I mean, they really, they know how to handle fish. Like the shore side processing. Yes. Yes. And, and they have a lot of the species. So they have that this point, the waters are cold enough that they have a lot of the species and it's certainly more abundant than what we have now in the England.

Are you of the view that as our oceans continue to warm that the cod may just not be a fish that we can catch here in large numbers?

Yeah, I'm going to ever coming back. I am concerned about it certainly. I think that there might be opportunities they haven't perfected it yet. They've done it with some species. But I think at a certain point, you could farm those fish.

“And I think that would be one way of bringing it back. Why don't we have farmed cod? Well, it's funny. I do remember someone trying to farm cod. It almost worked.”

You would expect as you were farming the fish for it to get larger and larger. And this particular farm, which ended up closing down, the cod stayed maybe nine inches or ten inches, but the belly got really big. Interesting. And because of the diet. It was the diet. Yeah, it was the diet. Yeah, it was the diet. Yeah, it was sort of done in in sort of pens. And it was a great idea. They just hadn't perfected at that point. So I suspect, you know, American ingenuity being what it is. I think in the fact that we have so much shoreline, I think that someone will crack the cod on the species.

So the last item on my glossary, and maybe the thornyest, which we've touched on already, is sustainability or sustainable. Yes. There's all these color gradings, rating systems, labels that we see around seafood. What does, maybe just start with the term itself. What does it mean to say a fish is sustainable? It means that it's going to be there as long as we manage the stock appropriately. And it means also we've touched on a little bit where a lot of farm fish were fed wild fish. Well, that really isn't sustainable. You're running Peter to pay Paul at that point.

With new innovations, such as algae as an example, it becomes a little bit easier to do. But I think, you know, again, I keep heartening back to, you know, the Asian diet where, you know, it's smaller portions in balance is a healthier diet.

“And I think going back, I mean, I remember years ago when we were, you know, just had the fish market and in our early restaurant, it was like 12 to 16 ounces of fish on a plate.”

I mean, when you're thinking, you know, it's like a giant, you know, giant steakhouse, it just like we eat differently and we thought that that was better, but it's not. You know, if you're reading four or five ounces of fish at a time in proportion to carbs and vegetables and whatnot. That's really a healthier diet. So I think we can be more sustainable if we change how we eat and how we look at fish. Yeah, it's one thing I was in working on this series, you know, I focus a lot on the fishermen and the regulators and trying to, you know, kind of untangle that not of, you know, how we arrive at a sustainable fishery.

And ultimately, you know, if what we want is a big honking fillet of cod and salmon and that's all we want, then yeah, that's that's what the industry is going to try and serve.

Yeah, but but that's when it's really not sustainable because that big piece of had a cod is going to be so phenomenally expensive.

“That it's only going to be affordable by a certain percentage of the population. So I think by, I think people are going to continue to want fish because of the health benefits and the how it makes them feel and the minority of it.”

But I think that we are sort of entering a period where we're adjusting portion sizes in a way that's healthier. Yeah, it's interesting all all these fish have gone through cycles like there were times decades ago when the hadic was really really scarce and then when the hadic was abundant there were times in the yellow till flounder was really scarce. So I mean, on what level it's a lot to ask of a of a consumer to track the Noah survey and stock assessments for all these fish, but that it is sort of between the the industry, the consumer, the fishermen ideally there is some kind of

Circuit of communication about, you know, what we should be eating more of and what we should be laying off of a given time we need more Julia trials. Yeah, you know, she she could push yourself in a good direction.

“What is the secret of perfectly fried fish and chips that you learned at age 10?”

So it is it is about well obviously they're the quality of the product has to be there, but it's about the better and you want to coat the fish and I'm going to get wear a secret here a little bit of buttermilk. All right, and then it then I like a dry batter. I don't like this is not like pancake batter. We're talking about buttermilk and then and then a a dried flour batter put together and so it doesn't puff up. They were a lot of, you know, sort of, you know, these you can name fish and chips. Okay, no, no, well the it's a rather than taking, you know, sort of a piece of fish and putting in a beer batter where blows.

No, it's like balloons out and you bite into it in the half an inch. Right, exactly. And the batter tastes perfectly fine and you get a little piece of fish that's it's okay. I like it just a just a thin, you know, coating of breading on it. Because I want to taste the fish. I think that's a place to leave it. Roger, thanks for doing this. Thank you. I pleasure.

“Roger Berkoitz is the owner of Rogers Fish Company. And of course, if you want to try that flash frozen algae fed New Zealand salmon, you can find it at Rogersfishco.com.”

Next week, we've got one more fish tail for you before we call it a wrap on the season. This one about the search for the perfect lobster roll. Catching the cod father is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself Ian Coss. The executive producer is Devon Maverick Robbins. Video for this episode was shot by Howard G. Powell and Lance Douglas and edited by Annie Curerson.

And remember, if you are new to the show and you want more, check out our first two seasons, which are out now wherever you are listening to this, just search for the big dig.

You can also sign up for our mailing list where I share behind the scenes photos and stories from my reporting. That's at wgbh.org/TheBigDig. The BigDig is a production of GPH News and Distributed by PRX. (Music) Hey, I want to make sure that you know, this series you're listening to right now is part of an ongoing feed, telling stories from the past to help us understand our present.

Our first season is all about infrastructure, the second season is about gambling, and we've got more seasons planned.

We've got some really exciting stories coming up and I hope you'll stay with us. Thanks. (Music) From PRX.