Hmm. People often have historically had strong preferences for more-expensive wine, but when put to the test in blind tests, price comes pretty decoupled from ranking. I wonder if anyone has done that for farmed and wild salmon?
Washington Post ran a blind test in the US and found that there was indeed a difference between farmed and wild rankings…but they found that farmed salmon ranked higher than wild salmon.
And the top-two ranked entries were the two farmed Norwegian condenders, with the cheapest one coming out on top.
Read a story about salmon, and the odds are good that, somewhere, it’ll tell you that wild salmon tastes better than farmed. But does it? We decided to find out in a blind tasting, and assembled a panel that included noted Washington seafood chefs and a seafood wholesaler.
The fish swam the gamut. We had wild king from Washington, frozen farmed from Costco, and eight in between, including Verlasso farmed salmon from Chile, which is the first open-pen farmed salmon to get a Seafood Watch “buy” recommendation. The tasters came from the Food section and the local seafood scene.
Scott Drewno, executive chef of the Source by Wolfgang Puck, was gracious enough to prepare the fish; this was like Usain Bolt consenting to go for a jog. Drewno steamed portioned fillets simply, with a little salt.
The judgments were definitive, and surprising. Farmed salmon beat wild salmon, hands down. The overall winner was the Costco frozen Atlantic salmon (Norwegian), added to the tasting late in the game — to provide a counterpoint to all that lovely fresh fish, we thought.
Well bugger. I live in Germany now, and salmon imported from Norway is disgusting. I miss Scottish salmon.
The wild ones are fine, only farmed salmon tastes boring.
Hmm. People often have historically had strong preferences for more-expensive wine, but when put to the test in blind tests, price comes pretty decoupled from ranking. I wonder if anyone has done that for farmed and wild salmon?
googles
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/farmed-vs-wild-salmon-can-you-taste-the-difference/2013/09/23/3a2650a2-1fcb-11e3-8459-657e0c72fec8_story.html
Washington Post ran a blind test in the US and found that there was indeed a difference between farmed and wild rankings…but they found that farmed salmon ranked higher than wild salmon.
And the top-two ranked entries were the two farmed Norwegian condenders, with the cheapest one coming out on top.
The Scottish entries took positions #3 and #5.