September 25, 2014 — Farmed salmon is becoming the surprise darling of top chefs and food-loving home cooks.
The pink fatty fish has long been dismissed as environmentally harmful, chemical-laden or simply not that tasty by many fish lovers. Now farmed salmon producers are courting high-end chefs and improving some aspect of how they farm to win over naysayers.
Restaurants from Red Lobster to New York's revered Le Bernardin say they must have some version of salmon on menus.
"It's the chicken of the sea," says Eric Ripert, co-owner and executive chef at Le Bernardin where a prix fixe seafood dinner is $135 a person. The restaurant splits the difference, serving farmed at lunch and wild for dinner, says Mr. Ripert. He prefers the clean, sea-like taste of wild, but his lunch menu's lower price can't support it, he says.
Whole Foods Market Inc. cut the number of farmed salmon suppliers it worked with to three from about eight in 2007 when it instituted rigid environmental and quality standards for its farmed fish. The grocer is now back up to five suppliers and plans to add more soon, says David Pilat, global seafood coordinator for Whole Foods Market. A blog post about farmed salmon on the grocer's website starts, "MYTH: All fish farming is bad."
Read the full story at the Wall Street Journal