New at Costco Wholesale: Farmed salmon that costs more than wild

At $12.99 a pound, this artificially colored farmed Atlantic salmon costs more than the fresh wild sockeye salmon I bought at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack in September, when fillets from Canada were only $8.99 a pound.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Verlasso is an "ocean-raised farmed salmon" that comes all the way from Chile.

I noticed it on Friday at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack, where it was being sold for $12.99 a pound next to other farmed Atlantic salmon for $7.99 a pound.

A handout says Verlasso is the first ocean-raised farm salmon to receive a "Good Alternative" buy rating from Seafood Watch, the Monterey Bay Aquarium program  that rates seafood sustainability.

On each shrink-wrapped package of the skinless-and-boneless fillets, an oval sticker declares Verlasso is "Salmon Raised in Harmony with Nature."

That's a clever marketing phrase, but you'd think only wild salmon could make the claim.

Verlasso says it uses a "proprietary yeast feed" that is genetically modified.

The feed is packed with omega-3 fatty acids "that provide health benefits to salmon and to us."

I bought wild salmon almost every week at Costco from late May until late September for $8.99 a pound to $14.99 a pound.

Now, I am buying fresh wild-caught cod, haddock and flounder fillets for $7.99 a pound to $8.99 a pound; wild-caught salmon burgers and crab cakes.

Thanks, Verlasso, but I'll stick to wild seafood.

A new item at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack is Chunk Light Skipjack Tuna in Water. A dozen 7-ounce cans were $15.49. The tuna, from Thailand, carries a Kirkland Signature label.

Another new fish at Costco

Another new item is what Costco is calling "a more responsibly caught premium tuna" -- Skipjack Tuna in Water from Thailand.

Only one species is used, and the skipjack are "free school caught," using a large net called a "purse seine."

The Kirkland Signature packaging doesn't mention mercury, but the Natural Resources Defense Council lists skipjack tuna as containing "moderate" mercury.

But the group claims skipjack are one of the "fish in trouble!" 

Today, I made a skipjack tuna salad with chopped scallions and honey crisp apple dressed in Dijon mustard, a little mayo, fresh lime juice, curry powder and ground cumin.

I added extra-virgin olive oil for moisture.

I've been buying Genova-brand canned yellow fin tuna from Costco for a few years, but that tuna is listed as being "high" in mercury.

I picked up more Kirkland Signature Roasted Seasoned Seaweed ($7.89 for 10 0.6-ounce packages). The addictive sheets can be used for snacking or to wrap tuna salad, organic brown rice with pomegranate seeds and other food. The packages are larger and the sheets have less sodium than brands sold at Korean supermarkets.

At Costco Wholesale in Hackensack on Friday, the low-quality rotisserie chickens were in high demand.

I scattered pomegranate seeds over reheated organic brown rice with organic diced tomatoes, low-sodium black beans, peeled whole garlic cloves and saffron, above, and over an Earthbound Farm Organic Spring Mix Salad with hothouse cucumbers and tomatoes, below. The rice was prepared in an electric cooker with two cups of organic chicken stock for every cup of rice, plus sea salt and a couple of ounces of extra-virgin olive oil.

Three large Pom-brand pomegranates from California yielded 6 cups of seeds. Six pomegranates were $14.99 at Costco on Friday.

I stuffed an omelet made from Kirkland Signature Egg Whites and whole Organic Eggs with slices of smoked wild salmon and reduced-fat sliced Swiss cheese, both from Costco, and za'atar thyme mixture. A side dish of organic pasta shells with sardines stood in for bread at breakfast.

Lots of seafood ratings and lots of confusion

A fresh-fish display at Whole Foods Market.

It would be an exaggeration to say there are as many seafood rating agencies as there are fish in the sea.

Still, if you take a look at the ratings of wild-caught and farmed fish and other seafood by a half-dozen groups, you'll come away with a lot of unanswered questions and a fair amount of confusion.

Whole Foods Market has its own seafood ratings, and the organic and natural foods supermarket chain also finishes at or near the top in outside ratings of retail fish counters.

Whole Foods has its own seafood processing plant and the fish sold there is among the freshest, but it also is one of the most expensive places to buy seafood.

However, it's a great place to buy fillets, whole fish and shellfish when they are on sale.

A Cuban sandwich made with smoked wild Alaskan salmon from Costco Wholesale.

There is a great selection of seafood at Costco Wholesale, and my warehouse store in Hackensack is only a couple of miles away from home.

We buy wild-caught fish fillets and farmed Black Tiger shrimp at Costco and whole fish, blue crabs and other seafood at H Mart, a national chain of Korean supermarkets with several stores in North Jersey.

Click on the following links to see seafood rating agencies I came across in a Google search:


Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch 

Fish Choice 

Whole Foods Market/Seafood

Environmental Defense Fund Seafood Selector
  
Greenpeace Supermarket Rankings

Blue Ocean Institute

Fat-free and cream-free pasta sauces, a $2 baguette and much more

You don't have to keep kosher to like these marinara sauces.

Editor's note: Today, I bring you further adventures in food shopping -- from kosher pasta sauces to imported whole-wheat pasta to a great $2 baguette.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

This week, I found two pasta sauces that prove less is more.

Both are from a company named Gefen and both are kosher for Passover, but that's not why I bought them.

One of the marinara sauces contains no olive oil and is fat free. The other is a "Marinara Style Vodka Sauce" with vodka, but no artery clogging cream.

The cream-less sauce helps Jews observe the ban on eating meat and dairy at the same time, but also is perfect for people like me who are lactose intolerant.

Each 26-ounce bottle was $2.39 at ShopRite in Paramus.

Jerry's Gourmet & More in Englewood has a terrific selection of imported pasta, and three or four different brands of whole-wheat pasta from Italy, such as the two above.

Jerry's is on South Dean Street, near Route 4 in Englewood.

Jerry's in Englewood

I stopped at Jerry's Gourmet & More in Englewood on Wednesday for olives, balsamic vinegar, whole-wheat pasta and coffee beans from Italy, and nibbled on free samples of smoked mozzarella and other cheeses.

Jerry's has more varieties of 100% whole-wheat pasta than any other store I know, but prices are higher than the $1.39 I pay for a 16-ounce package of Trader Joe's Organic Whole Wheat Spaghetti, Fusilli or Penne.

Jerry's sells three or four brands of whole-wheat pasta and shapes include spaghetti, fusilli, farfale and pappardelle or wide, mouth-filling ribbons.

I bought a pound of Colavita Fusilli or spirals for $1.49 and a pound of Garofalo Farfalle or bowties for $1.99. 

Whole coffee beans from Italy are being sold at a new, lower price at Jerry's Gourmet & More in Englewood. I save about $5 or more a bag compared to my usual source.

Whole coffee beans

I have been buying Lavazza whole coffee beans from Italy at Amazon.com, but Jerry's often beats Amazon's prices.

On Wednesday, I found new, even lower prices, only $16.99 for a 2.2-pound bag of Lavazza Crema e Aroma beans, which I use in my built-in coffee machine.

That's about $5 less per bag than at Amazon.

Assorted Italian olives with whole garlic cloves were, as usual, $3.99 a pound, a great price.

Ponti Balsamic Vinegar of Modena, a brand served in many restaurants in Milan and Venice, was $1.99 for a 16.9-ounce bottle. 

The bottles are lableled "Primus" and "It matures in precious oak casks," and the vinegar is free of artificial color.

The mirror that helps customers exit the small parking lot at Balthazar Bakery in Englewood. The retail store opened in late November 2002.

 $2 baguette 

Balthazar Bakery in Englewood has repaired the convex mirror that gives customers driving out of the parking lot a view of traffic racing along one-way South Dean Street in Englewood.

In the photo above, the red car is leaving the lot and the black vehicle parked at the curb is blocking the driver's view of oncoming traffic.

So, even with the mirror, the driver has to nose his vehicle into traffic before getting a clear view of what's bearing down on him.

It's hair raising. Imagine what it was like in the years before the mirror was installed.

I stopped at Balthazar for two baguettes -- the best $2 loaf of bread in the metropolitan area. 

You can see the bakers at work through plate-glass windows in the retail store.

The mound of butter waiting to go into croissants was about the size of a Fiat 500.

The circular from Fairway Market in Paramus calls this tilapia "pretty darn perfect."

  

Pass on Chinese fish

Does any other country have a worse food-safety record than China?
  
No. 

So, I was surprised to see that Manhattan-based Fairway Market in Paramus is selling farmed tilapia from China for $3.99 a pound.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch labels tilapia from the United States and Equador as "Best Choice."

Tilapia from China and Taiwan are called a "Good Alternative," but shouldn't Fairway be selling the best, not the second best? 

Fairway also mailed three coupons, each good for $10 off a purchase of $75 at the Paramus store.

That's a 13.3% discount, and I'm not sure it's worth a trip to Paramus, and having to endure all that New York attitude. 

Shrimp, prawns and fish farming

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

A salmon farm in Scotland.

I always look for wild-caught seafood and try to avoid fish fillets from large species that contain a lot of harmful mercury, such as swordfish and Chilean sea bass.


But not all farmed fish is bad.


Whole Foods Market pledges all of the farmed fish it sells is raised on feed that doesn't contain antibiotics, added growth hormones, or "poultry and mammalian by-products."


I buy wild-caught salmon, haddock and flounder fillets at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack, but this merchant doesn't tell you much about how its farmed fish is raised.


Both Whole Foods and Costco sell farmed salmon that is artificially colored by chemicals in the feed, because the confined fish don't eat their wild cousin's natural, colorful diet of shrimp and krill.


The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch usually recommends fish farmed in the United States, but not imports.


Farmed shrimp


Costco sells Black Tiger EZ Peel shrimp imported by the Mazzetta Co. of Highland Park under the trade name SEAMAZZ.


In an exchange of e-mails, Mazzetta's Jeff Goldberg said Costco had mislabeled U-15 prawns sold in a SEAMAZZ bag as having been raised in Bangladesh.


All of the farmed shrimp supplied to Costco are raised in Indonesia and Vietnam without harmful additives, he said.


Large, head-on U-4 prawns I bought at Costco were treated with a preservative to prevent the heads from turning black, Goldberg said, but all others are sold without heads and are not preserved in any way.


"We do not use any preservatives or antibiotics in the production of the shrimp we sell Costco," he said, "[and] the only additive used during production is salt."


Costco often labels SEAMAZZ shrimp as "prawns."


Goldberg said: "The term prawn is very misleading, but is generally used in Europe or by some restaurants in the U.S. to make shrimp sound 'sexier.'


"We stick to the term shrimp, which is very clear."


Seafood Watch recommends consumers avoid imported Black Tiger shrimp, whether farmed in "open systems" or wild-caught.


Although Costco and other food stores are required to tell consumers where seafood comes from and whether it is wild-caught or farmed, restaurants are under no such obligation, and few restaurant reviewers include that information in their appraisals.

Good for the ocean, but not good for you

The Record's Better Living section has the usual food coverage in a Monday paper -- a single vegetarian recipe -- but under Health on F-8, there is more: a Washington Post story about fish that are not only caught sustainably but are also rich "in long-chain omega-3 fatty acids," a key in reducing the risk of heart disease. Pole-caught albacore tuna is listed, but the rankings by the "influential" Monterey Bay Aquarium don't take this tuna's high mercury content into account. So the headline isn't really accurate: "Good for the oceans and good for you." The story probably could have used a subhead: "Oh, but not the albacore tuna."

This is one of the dangers of running a lot of stories supplied by outside sources, including the Washington Post, especially when, like The Record, your food and copy editors know little about what is healthy and what is not.