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Colossal scallop impresses even veteran New Bedford fisherman

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — September 21, 2015 — Danny Sylvia stopped by The Standard-Times on Monday with a just-caught sea scallop almost the size of a hockey puck.

At .39 pounds, he called the scallop a “U-2,” meaning only two would come in under a pound. It’s about five times the size of an ordinary large scallop.

“I’ve been out since 1968, and I have never seen anything that big,” Sylvia said.

The scallop was brought up by one of the New Bedford boats where Sylvia, 65, manages the lumpers, off-loading catch at the dock.

He wouldn’t name the boat, but he insisted that the beast was caught in legal waters.

Read the full story from the New Bedford Standard-Times

Salmon that will get you baked: weed-infused fish the latest in cannabis cuisine

September 17, 2015 — Sliced thin with flecks of dill peeking out, the salmon looks like any other of gravlax you would have for brunch. But put it on a bagel with a schmear of cream cheese, and you will get pretty stoned eating this delicacy.

The mastermind behind the THC-infused salmon – cured in salt, dill, lemon, sugar and a weed tincture – is Josh Pollack, owner of Rosenberg’s Bagels and Delicatessen in Denver.

“I love bagels and lox, and I love cannabis,” Pollack said.

Pollack, a New Jersey native who grew up going to establishments like Russ and Daughters, moved to Colorado for college. He loved the state, but missed the bagels from back east. After graduating, he worked in finance for a while, but tired of that and moved on to a more fulfilling passion: food.

“I’ve always been food obsessed,” Pollack said. “Bagels and lox has always been a comfort food.”

It was tough to find his favorite comfort food, so specific to the New York and New Jersey area, in Denver. So last year, Pollack opened Rosenberg’s Bagels and Delicatessen to serve up classics like bagels and lox.

Read the full story at The Guardian

 

Zeke Grader, lifetime advocate for fish and fishermen, died at 68

September 10, 2015 — Zeke Grader, who was born into the fishing industry, spent a lifetime representing fishermen and was a staunch advocate for sustainable seafood, died Monday of pancreatic cancer at a San Francisco hospice. The longtime Sausalito resident was 68.

For almost 40 years, Mr. Grader served as executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, the largest trade group of commercial fishermen on the West Coast. He retired this summer. Since 1992, he had also been executive director of the Institute for Fisheries Resources.

“There are a lot of guys who would say that there wouldn’t have been any small boat commercial salmon fishermen for 20 years at least if not for Zeke Grader,” said Tim Sloane, who took over Grader’s post as head of the Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “He built bridges between fishermen, policy folks, environmentalists and the scientific community. His ability to unite people around preserving the fisheries was unmatched.”

The son of a Fort Bragg fish broker, Mr. Grader was an early advocate of seafood sustainability, and was particularly passionate about protecting wild salmon.

Read the full story from the Marin Independent Journal

The Shark Fishermen of New England

August 6, 2015 — MARTHA’S VINEYARD, Mass. — Ever since Steven Spielberg set a shark fin gliding through the waters of a fictional New England town, Martha’s Vineyard has become irrevocably associated with the movie “Jaws.” The photographer Maggie Shannon was born more than a decade after the film was shot on the island, in 1974, but growing up on the Vineyard she had a “Jaws” poster hanging from her wall, and would attend the annual Monster Shark Tournament that took place each July. Since then, the Vineyard—its close-knit year-round community, the legacy of “Jaws,” and the island’s relationship to the many tourists who descend upon it each year—has become a central subject of her work.

For her new series, Shannon joined one of the fishing crews who participated in this year’s Monster Shark event, documenting the bait, the blood, and the physicality involved in hauling sharks from the ocean.

Read the full story at The New Yorker

On Prince Edward Island, a Seafood-Dining Excursion

July 29, 2015 — PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND — “Which one should we try first?,” my husband asked, staring at the three equally enticing kinds of clams before us. The picturesque Gulf of St. Lawrence glistened on a sunny August evening on Prince Edward Island, Canada, and our 6-year-old daughter was running around on the grounds of the resort we were visiting for the afternoon called the Sundance Cottages.

But our attention was on the clams.

There was a raw quahog variety spiked with Tabasco and two soft-shell versions, one sautéed in oil and salted butter and the other puffing with an aromatic chorizo and white wine steam.

We had spent the better part of the afternoon on a beach nearby digging dozens of these shellfish from the sand and raking them from the water with the help of Stephen Flaherty, a handyman at Sundance who takes people clamming, including nonguests like us.

Finding them was only the start. Linda Lowther, a former owner of Sundance who offers cooking classes, had invited my husband and me into her home for a lesson on how islanders like to eat the mollusks, and now we were sitting at her kitchen table looking at the fruits of our half-day’s work.

It was one of several foraging trips we took during our summer break to the 175-mile-long, crescent-shaped province that’s famous for its picturesque setting of more than 90 beaches, rolling hills and sandstone cliffs and the abundant seafood in surrounding waters, including oysters, clams, cod, lobster and mussels. Agriculture, too, is big, with close to 1,500 mostly family-run farms growing a variety of produce and crops.

Restaurants were the obvious way to enjoy this bounty, but I had heard that the island was rife with opportunities to enjoy it through foraging, a tradition that locals practice. Given my primarily pescetarian diet, it was a particularly appealing proposition, and on our visit, we canvassed the area to find nearly everything we ate.

Read the full story at the New York Times

TV Production Company Searches for Multi-Generational Fishing Family

July 25, 2015 — Is fishing in your blood? Have you been raised on the ocean with a “fish or die” mentality? Are you a hardworking commercial fishing family determined to keep your way of life alive? If so an award winning production company developing a documentary reality series about multi-generational fishing families is looking for you.

Relativity Media, a global media company engaged in multiple aspects of content production and distribution, including movies, television, fashion, sports, digital and music, is currently in the first stage of developing a documentary series about a multigenerational family-run commercial fishing business which would explore the challenges and triumphs faced in today’s day and age.

“We are open to any kind of offshore fishing, in any area of the US but I’m particularly interested in finding a family in the Gulf coast region”, Andrea McHugh a Development Producer with Relativity Media/Press Start Productions told Gulf Seafood News. “We develop and produce movies, documentaries and TV series for networks like Nat Geo, Discovery Channel, History Channel and many others. In an ideal world, We’d like to find a family commercial fishing business where more than two generations are still actively working.”

According to McHugh, the series will celebrate American fishing families and give a birds eye view into the immense dedication they have to their craft and each other.

Read the full story at the Gulf Seafood Institute

 

New England Filmmaker Documents an Industry Under Siege

July 24, 2015 — MASSACHUSETTS — As a kid growing up in Rockport, David Wittkower remembers driving down along the Gloucester waterfront and being greeted by the sight of the expansive Gloucester fishing fleet at port and the scent of fish, either being cooked or unloaded.

That memory stayed with the 55-year-old filmmaker when he returned to visit his parents, Andrew and Mary, about a year-and-a-half ago, especially after what he observed in subsequent nostalgic drives along East Main and Rogers streets.

“Every single day, I would drive down there and think, ‘Well, the entire fleet can’t all be out at once,’” Wittkower said. “I thought, ‘Where are all the boats?’”

That singular thought became the seed for Wittkower’s newest documentary film project on the demise of the once-mighty Gloucester fishing fleet. The working title is “Dead in the Water.”

Read the full story at The Gloucester Times

 

 

Chef Marc Murphy shares seafood menu strategies

July 20, 2015 — His company, Benchmarc Restaurants by Marc Murphy, operates two Landmarc restaurants, which serve French- and Italian-inspired bistro food, as well as Ditch Plains, inspired by Long Island seafood shacks. His newest restaurant, Kingside at the Viceroy hotel, opened in late 2013 and serves New American cuisine with a focus on seafood. He also operates a catering company, Benchmarc Events by Marc Murphy.

A graduate of The Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, Murphy is a judge on the Food Network show “Chopped,” and also appears on other food shows and morning news shows.

Murphy recently discussed strategies for putting seafood on the menu with Nation’s Restaurant News.

Your restaurants go through a lot of seafood. What are your strategies for sourcing?

I work with suppliers like The Lobster Place and Sea to Table. They’re incredibly conscious of what’s going on. They work with a lot of local fishermen and with people who try to help sustain the fishing industry — and they try to ship within 24 hours.

Of course this winter was a little rough for some of the guys because it was so cold. We had to actually 86 mussels for a while because the fishermen couldn’t get through the ice to get to the mussels.

Where do you get your mussels?

Prince Edward Island. The lobster guys were really having a hard time as well.
But we usually seem to get what we need, and with pricing you go with the flow. You don’t get to say much about that.

I definitely try to buy as local as possible, and I do that as a restaurant customer, too. If I’m in California and I walk into a restaurant, I want oysters from that coast. But I only sell East Coast oysters in my restaurants. I have a strict rule that I don’t want my oysters to have jet lag.

Read the full story from Nation’s Restaurant News