They seem to be present in most Asian cultures. The ones I've had were similar to fish balls, mildly sweet and quite different from other sausages in taste and texture. They weren't terrible but I didn't really care for them.
I used to eat them all the time -- and yeah they taste pretty bad. I'm the kinda guy that says flavor be damned, if I just need a quick source of protein.
They're usually sold in convenience stores quite cheaply as otsumami (booze food). Since I'm now engaged to health-food buff, the last time I reached for one, I was told to look at the ingredients list -- which was a mile long. The commonly sold variety just ain't that healthy.
As the Japanese economy took off a more western style diet was adopted, with a stronger focus on meat. As well sausages are typically lower quality/cheaper protein so an increase in wealth would correspond with a move away from sausages.
I’ve recently had a smoked trout sausage dish in a restaurant. It was amazing, and really hit the textures of a sausage with a great twist on the flavor.
Perhaps there are different kinds? If they are anything like fish balls, I can imagine they're good in some dishes, although perhaps not appetizing on their own.
Huh. I have fish balls in white sauce with potatoes on the side all the time. Sprinkled with some curry. One of my favorite dishes.
But after thinking about it I think I understand. I would never eat one fish ball on it’s own. That sounds disgusting. On the other hand, a butter sautéed fish cake is delicious. And a fish cake is more or less the same as a fish ball, just a bit different shape.
Yep, in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US, we have Scrapple. it's the rest of the pig that doesn't end up as sausage. The tagline reads "Everything but the oink"
I've had fish sausages from a street food vendor when visiting Greifswald, Germany a few years back and they were delicious! But these were "artisanal" rather than industrially produced to be the cheapest source of protein.
Fish sticks (fish fingers) are not processed all that much. A crab stick [1] is maybe closer to a sausage in the amount of processing that has been done.
Honestly I would love to buy ground haddock or salmon at the supermarket. Especially if they can produce it cheaper than frozen fish.
But why haven’t fish sausages etc. been created before? I imagine there are logistic challenges and reasons why ground fish is kind of a dumb idea especially vs. frozen fish. Like i bet ground salmon would go bad much quicker than frozen salmon, and it wouldn’t get a nice texture and cook nice like ground beef or turkey.
Fish sausages have been created before. They are pretty common here. I live in the Northeastern US, and big regional grocer here carries a couple different types. Most of the local sausage shops have an offering or two as well. Fish sausage is big in Asia too, they have all sorts of fish balls and even NOODLES. Both are essentially a firm fish sausage without a casing.
Both delicious. Fish balls should be heated in a white sauce (based on the “sauce” from the package) and served with potatoes and with a sprinkle of curry on top.
Fish cakes are best sautéed in butter and eaten on the go imo, but you can also serve it in a brown sauce and of course with potatoes.
Fish doesn’t seem to preserve that well. Even smoked salmon only lasts a little while. This doesn’t prevent you from making fresh sausage, but the fresh sausage market is not very big.
Growing up with parents that were small scale fishermen, I grow up recognizing that the store bought fish taste and smell was actually just fish that people hasn't manage well enough to keep fresh. Most of the catch we got was actually alive when we came back from the lake, and then generally imminently gutted, fillet, and put in the freezer.
Smoke salmon is an other thing that really should not be in fridge temperature for more than a few days, I would say max 5-7 days from when it was smoked. Smoked salmon freeze well through, and one can also grind up smoked salmon that has been frozen to make quite nice Pâté and other dishes. Naturally, if the fish was mishandled before it was smoked then the result is likely to be bad also.
Fish at the supermarket is really hard to determine how long it been unfrozen, or how many times the fish got thawed and refrozen during processing, or if all the people involved between has been handling the fish with the care needed to not allowing the rotting process from starting.
I've cooked this (baccala/salt cod) at least a year old and it was fine, I would reckon that it'd be fine for multiple years if kept cool (in refrigeration).
If you have had fake crab on a sushi roll, you have pretty much got 90% of the way there.
I will say that I don't think the spice blends used in a western sausage would do particularly well in fish. When you see fish balls or fish cakes in Asian cooking they're seasoned differently, light and a bit sweet.
>But why haven’t fish sausages etc. been created before?
Apparently they have been. Google fish sausage or seafood sausage. There's a ton of recipes and there's other vendors selling them. To be honest I hadn't heard of them until now but it seems to be a thing.
It’s a characteristic of the food industry, which is shaped by business practices where big names will only sell their (fish finger) product next to acceptable other products that don’t challenge their brand, in combination with the high bar of meeting food regulations to protect consumers which makes it hard to invent processed food and of also getting consumers to try new food things. Not many people are food adventurous especially for fish type produce which is high risk.
What makes fish type produce high risk? Given that fish don't share as much biology with us as mammals do, I thought that there are far fewer fish parasites that can both survive cooking, and are harmful to humans.
I think that the concern is more about consumers and risk aversions.
Fish, particularly anything with "fishy" taste, is looked down upon in some cultures. It's also not really cheaper than other kinds of meat, so you kind of get the worst of both "a lot of people have a dislike of fish" and "it's expensive".
Fish sausage is already pretty popular. McDonald's Filet-o-fish, salmon cakes, fish sticks etc are all _roughly_ sausage. I suppose it depends on how strongly you feel about the casing part of the sausage definition, but for my money "ground up meat (and binders) in a shape" captures the essence of sausage well enough.
I would also love a ground fish option, even if it's frozen. Fish burgers can be phenomenal when done right! I usually settle for canned, but the canning process definitely seems to have a pretty pronounced effect on flavor.
I wonder how palatable the structure, mouth feel and bite is. Seasoning is unlikely to be issue, but the rest are quite critical for sausage eating experience.
I always worry about our oceans. We farm them as if there is a limitless supply and our actions have no consequences. Frankly African consumption is probably nowhere close to what the west has an appetite for or some of the Asian countries have. Can only wonder about what happens when the consumption goes up in other parts of the world including Africa.
To be clear, this story is about farmed fish from inland, fresh-water fish farms. No sea involved. Fish farms can still cause pollution, of course, but if well managed they should be no worse than any other farm.
Agree but the small independent fish farmers in Africa are not to blame. These are like 1 or 2 people operations. Really nothing compared to the ocean raiding by western and eastern fishing vessels.
Speaking of food, dried corn snacks are practically non existent even though they're great with beer (also dried bread snacks).
Not dried unprocessed corn, I'm talking corn flour baked/fried into a chips-like snack, like we do potatoes. Bet you never heard of it.
Also, in the UK, they don't have dried fish/octopus snacks in pubs! A fucking island nation! It's the same old peanuts everywhere, come on!
Actually, that's most of Europe. Dried fish with beer is quite popular in Asia and even Russia.
Quite literally a multimillion dollar market right there.
On the ocean food issue: They've been in terminal decline for a while now. The future of seafood is farming. Today, half of the fish for human consumption is already farmed. Shame about the less farmable species.
> I'm talking corn flour baked/fried into a chips-like snack,
Those are quite common, they are called nacho chips or nachos, usually in a triangular shape.
> Dried fish with beer is quite popular in Asia and even Russia.
Besides beer, many types of fish-based chips are popular in Asia, I remember my daughter snacking on the when we were still living in Thailand. By the way they are not that hard to find in the West (you will have to visit an Asian food store).
Another type of chips that are not popular in the West, but absolutely delicious are dried seaweed chips (they are similar to the nori seaweed that wraps sushi, but dried).
That's nice, it is also quite common here in Australia, due to the fact that Asian food is generally easy to find at least in large metropolitan areas.
> > I'm talking corn flour baked/fried into a chips-like snack,
> Those are quite common, they are called nacho chips or nachos, usually in a triangular shape.
I am curious where you have heard them called that.
I've lived for 40 years on the San Francisco Peninsula and South Bay, an area with a large Mexican population and a multitude of Mexican restaurants.
Here, and I think in most areas, those roughly-triangular chips are called tortilla chips. You may notice that one edge is rounded. This is because they are made from corn tortillas sliced into sections like a pizza.
In a context where it is clear that you mean tortilla chips and not something else like potato chips, they are often just called chips, e.g. chips and salsa or chips and guacamole.
There are also chips made from tortillas sliced into thin strips, used as a topping on a salad or soup. These are called tortilla strips.
The thicker, smaller chips like Fritos are called corn chips.
One difference between corn chips and tortilla chips is that corn chips are made from cornmeal. Tortillas and tortilla chips are made from corn that has been nixtamalized (cooked in an alkaline solution) and then ground into masa. This gives them a milder flavor than corn chips.
Nachos are something else entirely. Nachos are a plate of tortilla chips topped with cheese and baked or broiled until the cheese melts. Other ingredients like meat or peppers may be added, and the nachos are often topped with salsa after they come out of the oven.
Nacho chips don't exist here. If you were to order "nacho chips" in a Mexican restaurant, they would likely ask "Do you want nachos, or do you want chips?"
I'm not sure where I've heard the term first but I grew up in Italy and lived in Australia for 10 years, neither of the two has a large Mexican minority and so it might be that people are more likely to mix up these terms or use them incorrectly. I did not know the difference between "nachos" and "tortilla chips" and I was under the impression that they were synonyms until I've read your comment, thank you for your detailed explanation! Also I did not know that tortilla chips and corn chips were not the same thing, that process that you described is really interesting, Mexican cuisine in general is very interesting I think
You'd be amazed how insular some people in the developed world can be. I had a house mate who moved from a major UK city to the other side of the world, but in her late twenties had never in her life eaten rice.
Run the Japanese Wikipedia page through a translator for more background: https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%AD%9A%E8%82%89%E3%82%BD%...
This is a graph of fish sausage production 1953-2020 https://www.jca-can.or.jp/~sausage/tokei-htm/ in Japanese, left axis is tons.
I've translated a 1939 paper on fish sausage and whale ham production methods, comment if interested.