We have some recipes for canned pink wild Alaskan salmon for people who, like many of us, live on limited budgets. Hughie Kearnley, a chef who is fighting prostate cancer, shares his recipes for wild Alaskan salmon both canned and fresh.
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Marian Burros has written a few articles on salmon in the NY Times. The first that got my attention claimed that some farmed salmon has almost no omega-3. The feed is often highly unnatural animal byproducts, resulting in high omega-6 & greyish flesh. In the period before harvesting, the fat content & flesh color (via dye) are modified for the purchaser. For example, a high-end restaurant may favor a delicate pink hue & a high fat content. Diners will choose it over the porterhouse steak, thinking it is healthy. Wrong!
The second piece from Burros follows naturally from the first. Many people started looking for wild salmon. This has a darker color & less fat. Both can be controlled by the farm. Sure enough, a lot of places in NYC were unknowingly selling farmed as wild. No-one seemed to wonder how wild salmon suddenly became plentiful.
Basically, you need a supplier who is really on the ball (they can easily be fooled). Incidentally, farmed can be OK. Clare Island salmon [Ireland] has a good reputation.
As for canned, it was an occasional treat when I was a kid, but you didn’t want a lot & you didn’t want to eat it again for a while. However, canned is a reliable source (at present) of wild salmon.
I love the skin & bones. It’s the flesh that gets a bit boring to me. The fish-cake idea makes sense. You can add all sorts of stuff to make it interesting. Otherwise, canned fish is a tough sell.
Another canned fish that deserves mention is the sardine. So far, the sardine is not farmed (as far as I know). There is no reliable definition of what a sardine is (as far as I know). If you look for sardines from Maine, they will almost certainly be baby herring. Herring is a great fish for omega-3 & used to be plentiful, but I never see it now. The Maine products are very inexpensive. They come in various sauces, e.g. Mustard. But it’s still a tough sell.
And yet people are happy to eat canned tuna – a deeply compromised fish. Since tuna has such a strong track record in the U.S., I suggest looking for tuna recipes with a mind to substitute canned salmon. The standard tuna salad mix is not a good idea, since men with PCa should stay away from mayonnaise.
-Patrick