All About Albacore Part II: The Market – Gourmet fare or cheap lunch?
The last entry into this series about Pacific Northwest albacore tuna focused on the catching aspect of the seafood process—largely through the misadventures of a greenhorn deckhand (me) during a lousy commercial season. Now we follow these lovely caught fishies ashore to market where, to my analysis, the albacore faces a crossroads: go upmarket to sashimi-tier or down market into the can for ma’s casserole. Regardless as to which route is chosen, there are methods that maximize quality versus economy.
Ultimately, there’s only one place to turn to get the real scoop behind the seafood—the fishermen themselves at the docks, in this case Captain Joe Malley of the 95-foot fishing vessel St. Jude in Seattle’s Fishermen Terminal.
“I have a certain amount of empathy for the fish,” says Malley from his seat around the galley table. It’s a sunny, crisp October afternoon for a Seattle dockside sale. The quick-to-smile crew of South Pacific Islanders are relaxed on deck, rousing when a customer approaches to buy their catch. Frozen loins and flavored cans are popular, steak medallions and even whole fish are also offered.
“They [fish] are good creatures,” says Malley. “And they are food. We figure we have a right to food. I guess that’s true. But when you catch a fish, I consider it a moral responsibility to optimize the utilization of that fish.”
If St. Jude rings a bell, if you are familiar with the Seattle area you may have seen their table at the Ballard Farmer’s Market or posts on social media announcing an incoming dockside sale. When in town, St. Judesells their sushi-grade albacore directly to the public in addition to partnerships with whomever wants—and pays for—their topline product. James Beard chefs Maria Hines and John Sundstrom have been customers along with Seattle-area retailers like Whole Foods, QFC, Town and Country, and more.
“In the case of albacore tuna, there wasn’t any albacore tuna being sold in restaurants in America,” says Malley. But one need only look to the Japanese sushi and sashimi scene or the ceviche of Central and South America to realize this is an odd outlook on the fish. Abroad, albacore is a real prize.
“You wonder, is it the fish’s fault?” ponders Malley. “Well, it’s not the fish’s fault. It’s really because for years and years, the albacore fleet fished for the Starkisseds and Van Camps and they produced a fish that really only belonged in a can. So now that that has changed and we do know how to make a sushi grade albacore, why don’t we try and put it on somebody’s plate and serve it at a first-class restaurant?”
“The Bad Old Days”
Going indie isn’t just for hip urbane landlubbers. This regional ethos of cutting out as many big corporate middlemen as possible between the people and our food in the name of quality and sustainability is as Cascadian as it comes. For Malley, it’s been a decades-long career of defying corporate practices since he bought St. Jude in 1990.
“We used to just haul ‘em and pile ‘em on deck,” explains Malley. “When the bite was over, we’d move ‘em down into the hold and lay ‘em out. That was in the good old days, bad old days really. Because in those days, we were selling to Starkissed, Van Kamp, and Bumblebee. In all honesty, their product and their methods are not designed to take advantage of a quality fish. They are really just trying to put meat in the can.”
This was the era of the “Chicken of the Sea” taglines and “Where’s Charlie?” jingles. “We know all those stories and all of that marketing money was spent basically to convince people to eat their canned tuna,” says Malley. “And their canned tuna is… well… it’s a very inferior product to what can be made of albacore.”
The conventional, big business process for canning tuna is hot pack canning. As much tuna as possible is delivered from the sea to a cannery, usually at 20 above zero—frozen but not cold by captain Malley, sushi-grade standards. These fish tend to be the fully grown, larger adults that have less of the fatty goodness of the “lazy teenagers” Malley targets in the six- to twenty-pound range. The tuna are transported to a massive oven where they are cooked until white.
“I’ve seen when the fish come out of that oven. Honestly, it’s like a scene from Auschwitz,” says Malley. “Their gills are falling apart; they’ve been cooked whole. Fins, feathers, guts, and all.” At this point, the fish have essentially been steam boiled. A lot of those healthy and delicious oils and fats are toast. “How much flavor is left in this fish? Is it still a tuna? Or is it now a maraschino cherry?”
After a cooldown rinse and meat removal, the tuna is put into the cans. “Essentially flavored vegetable broth that they wanted us to think tuna tasted like” is squirted into each can. According to Malley, there have been incidents of these industrial broths containing sulfides to which people are allergic. The cans are then cooked again.
Why do things this way?
“It’s all about the money,” says Malley simply. But he knew something was up even as a new tuna boat captain doing what everyone else was doing in the “bad old days”.
“We just, out of I guess orneriness, bled all our fish for no compensation,” explains Malley of the early years. He did this even at a cost considering the blood is real weight that contributes to pay in the big business structure of doing things. Bleeding and braining may sound gruesome, but the quick dispatch method is the most humane while also increasing the quality of the meat.
“When you land a fish, he’s obviously stressed out,” says Malley. “If you allow him to expire naturally, his body temperature can raise six to eight degrees. That’s a big deal because we’re going to freeze that fish and it takes another hour or so to knock down that temperature to what the ambient water temperature was.” Freezing the brained and bled fish rapidly is the name of the game when it comes to quality. “How important is it to freeze fish rapidly? Well, it’s very important if you want to make sushi.”
Raising the American Albacore Standard
Word got around that Malley was trying to do albacore the high-end way, and he was encouraged by a fellow Ballard Farmer’s Market regular—Aiko, a local cattle rancher—to send samples of his goods to her former employer Mitsubishi.
“Aiko took a few of our fish and we air freighted them to Japan,” says Malley. “And they loved the handling, that is to the say the bleed and brain stunning. They loved the oil content in the fish. But they said oh, they didn’t freeze fast enough. I was like come on… I had probably one of the best freezers in the fleet, but that’s what they said.”
Ultimately, Malley set aside his pride to investigate Mitsubishi’s claims. “I got a nice 18-pound fish, I cut a poker chip right out of the middle of it with a bandsaw. I had this disc about an inch thick and this big around. I started sampling the flesh from the outside and worked my way in towards the core of the fish. Initially it was great, it was that nice meaty texture.” But as he worked deeper into the core of the fish, the consistency changed for the worse. “It became kind of mushy almost, like oatmealy. And I said, by god, that’s what they’re talking about. They do know their fish.”
He promptly upgraded his freezer system in the 2000s and tweaked his methodology. The game was no longer about loading up as many fish as possible. A good day now is capped at around 500 fish so the freezing can keep pace. All those hot bodies raise the fish hold from the 25-below-zero goal to closer to 15- or 10-below. Additionally, all tuna are hung by the tail, maximizing the frozen air exposure for more rapid freezing. This also ensured the fish freeze solid in an easily cut, non-twisty form.
St. Jude also cans some of their catch, but they are doing it with brained, bled, and flash frozen young albacore delivered at 35 below to local cannery Pelican Packers. The raw fish is added to the cans plain, in olive oil, or with desired St. Jude flavors like garlic or dill. The sealed cans are then cooked in essentially a pressure cooker. If this sounds a lot like old school home canning methods, that’s because it is.
“That’s where the process came from,” says Malley. “It used to be like a fisherman secret. You want to taste some really good albacore? Can your own and you’ll get something special.”
While Malley started his career following the standard practices of the fleet and selling to the big guys for cans, he realized that the corporate way of doing things wasn’t maximizing the quality of the fish. First of all, the tastiest of albacore aren’t fully mature, sixty-pound fish, but rather the fatty, eight to 20-pound “teenagers”. These were the true prize for high-end tuna.
“Bigger albacore are actually not a good choice for sushi because albacore at the age we catch them are the fattiest of all tuna,” says Malley. “Basically, when they get to be about 25 or 30 pounds, they leave our zone, the cold-water zone, and they move down into the thermocline and down into the tropical water. That’s the nature of the beast. That’s what they do.” During this adult stage of their lifecycle, the tuna are lean feeding machines that no longer chow on anchovies, squid, and krill. Now they are going after speedsters of the sea: ballyhoo, somma, and flying fish. The adults work harder for their meals.
“Our fish are really the lazy ones that are fat, dumb, and happy,” says Malley. “They basically find a ball of anchovies and they eat when they’re hungry. And they eat all they want because it’s all there. And no chasing involved to speak of, just slither through and grab a bunch to eat. So that’s the fundamental change that basically makes for a much leaner adult fish than these teenagers that we catch which are very fatty and delicious.”
Malley is proud that troll caught Pacific albacore fishing is almost completely bycatch-free. “A good tuna trip we might catch 10,000 fish,” he explains. “Out of 10,000 fish, on the average, we might catch four yellowfin, which is Hamachi. We might catch one or two ono. We might catch two or three mahi. And you know what? They never make it past the BBQ. That’s our food, that’s what we eat.”
“Also there’s no marine mammal bycatch,” he continues. “I did once hook a dolphin because the little f***er was playing with my lures. He was flipping them up into my rigging so they’d get tangled up in my rigging [as a game]. Little a**hole! And he did that once and my hooks are really sharp. It hooked him and bang! Torn out of his tail and went way up in the rigging.” The dolphin stopped playing with Malley’s lures afterward.
In all his years, he only caught two sharks. “They were both baby threshers. Same day!” Both survived just fine.
Zooming Out, Market at a Macrolevel
The market forces of land have made the year of this interview, 2024, a scrapper for St. Jude.
“Right now, the price of tuna is about half, a little better than half, what it was two years ago,” says Malley. “So we made a lot of money two years ago. This year we ain’t making squat.”
The albacore prices and demand for sushi quality product has always fluctuated dramatically. Just about anything can affect fish price: foreign wars, a struggling restaurant scene, whims of the average consumer, the wingbeat of a butterfly in Central Park. This volatility is one of the reasons St. Jude cans a portion of their product, taking the sting off bad years and the unsustainable sugar rush of the high price years. But Malley also has a decades-long perspective, and the American outside tuna fleet is a shadow of its former self.
“When I started fishing this boat for tuna there were about 60 boats in what we call the outside fleet,” notes Malley. Now, depending on how you count them, half a dozen to a dozen.
“We’ve had an attrition of the outside tuna fleet,” says Malley. “This was once the pride of tuna fishermen, this fleet. That’s basically indicative of the price of fuel.” Bottom line, chasing albacore across the Pacific wilderness burns a lot of gallons. Diesel used to be 85 cents per gallon. Now in the 2020s, diesel is around $5 a gallon. It’s due to this reason that St. Jude is probably going to skip the South Pacific fishery next year, cutting out New Zealand.
“It becomes a real math challenge whether it’s actually worthwhile to go to the South Pacific,” says Malley. “To go to the South Pacific, you basically got to run 26 days to Tahiti, or 29 days to Fiji or Samoa. And then 10 or 12 days from there to the grounds. So, just in doing that you’re likely to burn 20,000 gallons of $5 diesel, so you’re out 100k right there. And you haven’t caught a fish yet. Then you fill up with fuel in Pango or Tahiti or wherever you are and go fishing and you burn another say, 15,000 or 12,000 gallons depending on the fishing. And that’s another 60k. Now you’re doing this in the hopes of getting a full trip of albacore, which is 70 tons of tuna. Well, now the question is what is the price going to be?” Bottom line, without a guarantee of a decent price, going deep into the red ink on fuel just isn’t smart.
Another major factor is the dragon in the room: China.
“We’re competing with fish from China,” says Malley. “China subsidizes its fleet, fuel. I’ve never gotten a subsidy for a nickel in my fishing career, which is since 1978. Seems very wrong to me.” The independent, American fishermen-entrepreneurs are sitting ducks economically when facing what’s essentially a paramilitary branch of the Chinese navy. China’s infamous “dark fleet” has made international press many times in the 21st Century. These vessels are named such because they don’t broadcast their positions or abide by standard identification procedures. This fleet of armed factory fishing boats pretty much does what it wants. An example of this was reported in 2020 when an estimated 300 of these vessels stormed the exclusive economic zone of the Galapagos Islands, pillaging the waters in a sort of fish raid.
The Chinese seafood industry has none of the qualms of sportfisherman Malley. They are the ones flooding the big canneries with their mass longliner ships. The pressure is especially painful in the contentious Western Pacific waters the closer one gets to the Chinese mainland.
“I’m glad I’m not trying to make a living in the Philippines,” notes Malley dryly. At the time of this writing, Chinese coast guard and merchant vessels recently rammed Philippine vessels in Philippine waters in several incidents.
The high price of fuel, the Chinese dragon, and other factors are putting the squeeze on the whole industry. Companies that previously embraced bleeding are stepping back. To the minds in the office, more blood weight with less labor is more product. If the American consumer doesn’t know any better, it all works out for them.
“I know that there was one group of albacore jig boats, the word got out from the head office, hey guys, stop bleeding your fish,” says Malley. “We just want to put ‘em in, we just want to load up the boats and sell ‘em cheap.” He shook his head. “That was a sad, giant step backwards. Really was.”
Ultimately, what’s the takeaway from an afternoon at St. Jude? I fork over the $50 for a 10ish pound whole fish, determined to attempt my own tuna processing. What should I do with the head? The crew recommends throwing it in a soup the Fijian way.
“As a fisherman, I consider it to be a matter of integrity that if I take a fish’s life, I have to optimize the utilization of that fish,” says Malley. “It’s just wrong to kill fish for a less-than-ideal utilization. Yet, that’s a lot of what goes on in the seafood industry.” At the end of the day, knowledge is power. Captain Malley encourages people to maintain curiosity, do their research, and make up their own minds.
“My message to the world is try and learn about fish,” says Malley. “Learn about bycatch. Learn about method of catch. Learn about the proper handling techniques for a frozen at sea product. And be very demanding, be sure to get the right fish. That’s really the message. You’re either doing it right or doing it wrong.”
Tune in the for next and final installment of this All About Albacore series as we, at long last, get to eat.
All About Albacore Part III: The Feast
All About Albacore Part I: The Catch
