Member map

[Bud Man]

And if one of those Michiganders puts up three dots I'll have to resort to posting some more  :  Any thing they can do I can do better !!  Well maybe not, some seem kinda of ........well you know........ :D :D

[psychotic1]

Now, I didn't say anything about grits.  If I can find somebody here in Alaska who could cook them right, I'd have some myownself.  
Let's face it.  It's only gonna take another three or four more hurricanes and most ofFlorida is gonna wash away anyhow, why not try to trade it for a bunch more forest and ocean front property.  But your right Kevin,  you've almost taken it over anyway.  I think I'll go join KiwiCharlie in NZ.  They, at least have cricket and australian rules football.  Think you can find a job for a ten-year veteran of the alaska seafood industry?  I'm a heck of a forklift driver.
And as for Texas, well, we've already covered that pile and marked it.
Bruce

[DanG]

Better bring a lunch if yer waitin' fer one of them Herrycanes to wash Flarder away. We git one from the left, and it washes the sand to th' right, then we git one from th' right, and it washes it back to th' left. We're just a'flappin' in tha breeze, and lovin' every minute of it.(Well, most of'em, anyway.)

[KiwiCharlie]

G'day Bruce,

Yeah come on down, weve almost got the same population density as you guys, well sort of!  We do have cricket, but no aussie rules.  Cant figure the rules in that game!
What do you do with fish??  Thats my industry for the present.  Got my own forkhoist even!!
Now please excuse my ignorance, but what are grits?.....
Cheers
Charlie.

[DanG]

KCharles, I'm about to present you with the opportunity to enlighten your entire country, concerning the ultimate culinary delight. :

A little history, first:  In the old days, in the Southeast US, times were hard for lots of folks. Wheat to make flour was a luxury that was not enjoyed by all. Since wheat will not grow in this climate, corn was substituted, and ground into a course flour, called cornmeal.  This was(is)produced by grinding the dried corn kernels on big milling stones, usually powered by a water wheel. In the process, some of the corn would dribble off the sides of the mill, before it was completely pulverized. The miller would give this by-product, called "grits" to the poor, rather than throwing it away. It has, over the years, become a staple in the southern diet.("Southern" is a relative term, here ).  The raw product is roughly similar in texture to very course sand.
Now, cooking grits is not rocket science. You simply boil some water, add some grits, along with some salt and butter, or cheese. Simmer it for a little while, and eat it. That's so simple, even a Mishigander or a Canuckidadian oughta be able to do it. :D :D

[KiwiCharlie]

G'day Dan,

Thanks for that, but I must say, the boiling part surprised me.  Thought it would be something akin to a pancake, fried tho'.  Aint never tried that.  Can you buy Grit mix at the supermarket, or is it something that you make from scratch?
Im serious, not taking the mickey!!  And are there really that many people that still eat them?
I learnt a saying many years ago that went something like 'you learn something new every day - even if you dont want to'!  Today is no different!
Thanks Dan, for taking the time to enlighten me.
Cheers
Charlie.

[psychotic1]

Hey Charlie,
You got off easy with the grits explanation.  Stand by, you might get a little more info yet.  Yes, it's amazing how many people eat grits in this strange country.  And while the cooking instructions sound simple, you'd be amazed at how many people can screw it up.
I've been working at a land-based salmon cold storage for about eleven years now.  I've done everything from shoveling fish guts to bossing a thirty person crew making salmon caviar.  I'm mostly a forklift driver nowadays (I got tired of being a boss).  We head and clean the fish, freeze them and then dunk them in a salt/sugar water solution to put a glaze to prevent freezer burn on them, then put them in boxes which hold a thousand pounds.  I take those boxes (40"x48"x48") and stack them five high in a big (50'x100'x25'high) freezer.  Keeping track of size, species, and grade.  It gets fun when your stacking 2000 pounds (about 900 kilos) of fish 20 feet above your head.  At full bore, I usually stack about 200,000 pounds a day.  Start at 6:30 am and finish around 11:15 pm.  I worked 64 days straight last summer.  Had some early nights in there though.  Got done around 8:30.  Just in time for some wobbleypop with the rest of the crew.
How's the aussie ODI cricket team doing this year?  I caught a few of their matches on satellite last year, but I'm missing it now.

Bruce

[Jeff]

Don't the Salmon actually make the caviar?

[L. Wakefield]

   'Virgin' grits have a subtle taste- you might think they were tasteless but not so. But the true soul of the food is in the additions that make a balanced, not to mention a raunchin good meal. 'Red eye gravy' is the juice and pan drippings from cooking salt-cured ham. If that is added to the basic agreeable taste of the unadorned grits you get a real wakeup call! Butter is good, cheese is great!, eggs over easy is wonderful too. The one thing it isn't all THAT good as is as a simple breakfast cereal like cream of wheat or cornmeal. You can DO it that way, but once you've had the full-dress version you'll be lookin around on and under the plate for more..

   (Now God help our miserable souls, sooner or later someone is going to get on here and say how much they like SPAM- I shudder to think...)    lw

[psychotic1]

Anybody who says they like spam should be made to eat it for a week.  I won't say it ain't usefull. I've had to survive on it in the bush once or twice. But me, I'd rather have grits plain.
No Jeff, the salmon just make the roe (eggs).  After that it takes time and a lot of work to make it into caviar.

Bruce

[Jeff]

I always thought caviar was simply just fish eggs. Tell me more. I have never been High falutin enough to have it...

[psychotic1]

In the broadest terms, it's just salted fish eggs.  But that doesn't take into account the processes necessary to get them to a "presentable" form.  

After the roe has been removed from the fish, the skeins (or sacs) are rinsed and the eggs are graded.  Large size, nice orange color, good opaque juice inside- number one egg.  The skeins are then dipped in a 100% saturated salt-water solution (no, it's not really 100%, but it's as close as we can get) to harden them up a little, and to give them a first "base" level of salt absorption.  The skeins are then placed on a screen of woven nylon string with approximately 5/8 inch holes, and rubbed and bounced back and forth across to seperate the individual eggs from the skeins and each other.  These eggs are then placed in another batch of brine for a timed period to absorb a certain amount of salt to bring them to the salinity the customer prefers.  I've done everywhere from 2.5% to 4.2% salt.  This "brining" helps to rinse off blood and other undesirable "nasty bits" from the eggs.  The eggs are then dumped out onto tables which are angled to drain the brine off, spread out and people with tweezers sort through as fast as possible pulling out broken shells and other stuff we don't want in the product.  The eggs are then dumped into baskets and place in a refrigerator overnight to dry and "cure".

The next morning (or about 8-10 hrs later) two different batches are mixed together to even out the salinity and then mixed on a table.  People then take very careful handfuls and drop them into rectangular 1 kg containers which are weighed, the nasty bits picked off the top, the rims wiped, a plastic cover placed on top of the eggs and smushed down to give a nice surface appearance, a top put on, the container wiped, and then placed on a piece of aluminum in a -20oF freezer.  The next day they are boxed and prepared for shipping.

We usually process 175# batches, and a normal day is 10-12,000 pounds of eggs. Everyday. For 40 to 50 days straight.  And every day's production has to be lot coded and kept track of seperately.  My last year of it, we shipped over 428,000 pounds of product.

Yup! Just fish eggs.

Bruce

Ps.  This is salmon caviar.  I don't know anything about beluga

[woodmills1]

i'll have some without so much spam in it please :D :D :D :D

[Frank_Pender]

Geeee I am all alone in Oregon. :'( :'( I have had at least 3 Saturday night baths this month. ;)  I even had one extra last Tuesday Morning.  8)

[KiwiCharlie]

G'day Bruce,

Well this is amazing, as 80% of your work explanation is exactly what I do!!  I run the freezer section for a smaller branch of a big fishing co here.  Albacore Tuna would be one of our larger seasons.  Frozen whole and shipped by container to the Islands (Pago Pago etc) and Thailand to the canneries.  The roe that we do is graded out from A-D and then Smoking grade.  We smoke a lot of fish for local sale.  The high price Snapper fish are frozen in metal trays, then glazed, then packed in 10 kg boxes for export to Japan mostly.  Around 1600 boxes to a 20' reefer.  Lots of shark sent to Australia too.  Hoki (Grenadier?) seasons another big one.  We alone have quota for 250,000 tonnes each year.  Thats a lot of fish, and they make sure we catch it all or you can loose the balance of your quota.  Orange Roughy quota has been cut way back this year, thought we may have to close a branch, but so far not.  The OR seem to be far slower growing than they first thought.
I run 2 blast freezers, and have 2 holding freezers, only of about 150 tonnes cap, the rest goes to offsite coolstores.
Tell me about it - getting a 1 tonne pallet of bait into the top rack - yikes.  Its -25oC, and ya just wanna get outa there!
I do all the stock records, nothing gets past me without a release!  Lots of money tied up there in product.
I start around 0330, hopefully finish 1530, 1730 if its busy.  If its blowing a gale and the boats cant fish, finish at 1230, nice when it happens!
Must be the same the world over, early starts and long hours.
By the end of a Saturday, it dont take much wobblypop to getcha wobbly either!
Yeah the Aussie cricket team still kick most teams a**es, including ours.  Even the English team just beat us!!  Cricket is not our strong sport.  Rugby - 15's and 7 aside is more us as a nation.
Cheers
Charlie.

[psychotic1]

Neat.  I've seen the All-Blacks play on Fox Sports World once or twice, but seeing as it comes on at lunchtime around here, I usually only get fifteen or twenty minutes.  We do so little roughy that we don't even seperate it, it goes with the "miscellaneous red rockfish" :D
Our blast freezers are set up to hold racks with aluminum sheets on them. About 100 pounds the the sheet.  Nine sheets to a rack, 25 racks to a freezer.  Depending on the fish size, we turn them around in 4-6 hours.  

Our parent company has had to shut down a couple of plants in other towns/villages/sites, and we've told about 40% of our purse seine boats we won't be buying their fish this year.  The market is swamped with frozen and canned salmon.  "Things are changing"  as always.

I've done some of the paperwork stuff, and we use a bar-code system to help with our inventory.  The last time the home office had a training seminar, the person who went from our plant had been trained by me and ended up correcting mistakes made by the trainer/instructor/ office person who does the "programming".  Gave me a laugh.  Office work vs. the guy on the floor.  They can keep their paperwork, I'll keep driving my lift.

Bruce

[KiwiCharlie]

G'day Bruce,

4-6 hours for a blast turnaround is good, far quicker than mine.  Do you use just standard forced air blasting or another method such as the liquid nitrogen freezing?  Some of the tuna boats are set up for immersion freezing too.
We are supposed to be going the bar code way also, but they seem to be having lots of teething troubles.
Sometime its nice to get all rugged up and disappear into the freezers for a while, funny but the office boffins dont hang around long to hassle you when its so cold!!
We have a few seine boats but mostly long-liners and trawlers for the inshore species.
You need to be processing all species, so you dont get hit by any particular downturn, such as you mentioned.
Cheers
Charlie.

Oops, sorry Jeff, gone a bit off topic here!!  ;)