Welcome to the SDMB, but… that’s not proof.
If you think that you’re getting what you order, you’re about 50% mistaken, according to a NY Times article based on DNA studies. Usually, it’s not the restaurant that’s lying, but further up the supply chain. The more expensive the fish and the longer the supply chain, the higher the likelihood of mislabeling.
I’ve often heard the rumor about scallops, but could never figure out how anyone could make any other kind of meat have the very obvious radial configuration of scallops. If I ever ordered scallops (my favorite bivalve!) and it looked like it was cut using a cookie cutter (which would be obvious), the restaurant would hear from me pretty damn fast. No competent chef could cook it without noticing that it was fake.
The real shame is that here in the US, they always leave the orange stuff out. What a pity.
Meanwhile, I have seen plenty of substitute crabmeat. It tastes good to me and as mentioned above, is a suitable substitute for many purposes. I could probably be fooled by that. I could easily be fooled by a lot of other fish substitutions, but if there’s a cheap and convincing substitute for North Sea Salmon, I wanna know what it is!
I dunno, when I was a kid my mom went on a diet that required a certain amount of fish. In search of a little more variety, she brought home some imitation crab legs and imitation lobster tails. They tasted so vile that nobody in the house could stand to eat them, and that included the three cats. Maybe they’ve improved since then, but I’ve never been inclined to find out.
Moving to Cafe Society.
Note that this thread was started in 2001.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’ve never eaten skate wings…I’m told they contain lots of tiny bones…is this true? Also…there is a persistent rumor here that monkfish tastes like lobster tails-is this correct? There are lots of “underutilized” fish species-most of the time, they are not marketed in fish markets-I suspect most end up as animal feed. Ever had tilefish? I have, but its almost never on the menu.
While I have heard of people using skate as fake scallops, I have eaten skate and scallops before and know there is a difference to the taste and texture.
Yes, but monkfish are mostly found in the Northeast Atlantic so it’s not much cheaper than lobster in the US.
I have to disagree. Monkfish in general costs much less per pound of meat than lobster. It’s always possible to get a deal on lobsters or monkfish, but typical market prices are much better for monkfish because you’re not buying inedible shell which comprises half the weight of whole lobsters.
Also, monkfish is a tasty fish with texture and flavor similar to lobster, but still easy to tell apart.
As for the zombie OP, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone cut scallops out of skate wings sometime, somewhere, but skate wings, shark fin, etc., will not taste like scallops, won’t look that much like scallops, and will have a very different texture, cooked or uncooked. Never-the-less, there are many cases where one type of fish is substituted for another, intentionally and unintentionally.
Apparently this was something that really did happen but it is easy to tell the difference by the grain. In scallops, the grain is up and down; in phony scallops the grain is horizontal.
Taken literally, it can’t be true-- Skates don’t have any bones at all, as (like sharks) their skeleton is made entirely of cartilage. I don’t know, though, if they might have many tiny bits of cartilage in their wings.
I’ve never eaten skate (that I know of) but I do know that they don’t have any bones. They are cartilaginous, like sharks.
The issue of counterfeit fish is a real one, but according to the FDA, they have never found an actual case of skate substituted for scallops.
The fish caught while fishing for something else are called bycatch or trash fish. Gulf Coast fishmongers & restaurateurs have begun offering these off-the-wall species as they are available. The practice is ethical & sustainable–& also offers new delicious possibilities…
Flounder served as scallops is silly because (1) the fish/shellfish are nothing alike and (2) flounder is hardly considered “trash” here.
Wow, I saw this thread and thought it seemed familiar somehow. I think the question asked in the OP has been pretty thoroughly answered by now.
They don’t contain bones, since skates are cartilaginous fish. They do contain many small cartilage rays radiating out from the fish, which stiffen the entire ‘wing’ and which are a royal pain to remove if you’ve bought a whole skate wing from the store to cook.
Hey, anecdotal sightings are always welcome, as long as they’re identified as such. Half this thread is them. And he’s got street cred.
Monkfish is pretty common in restaurants in the UK and Europe - is that the case in America? It’s a very “meaty” fish but I wouldn’t say it tastes all that much like lobster. It’s very nice in its own right though, and a lot less hassle than picking meat out of a lobster.
They are seriously ugly beasts, so you don’t tend to see them whole…
Which reminds me, more related to the OP, “scampi” is a common pub food and is supposed to be langoustines, but it is mostly known as fairly tasteless nuggets of white fish covered in breadcrumbs. Supposedly quite a lot of it is actually just generic white fish cut into chunks. Sorry, “goujons”.
Scampi is usually refer to a style of dish, I assume based on the original lobster dish. Here in the US you’ll find shrimp scampi so common that most people would just assume scampi means shrimp. And the wide variety of ways it’s prepared would lead people to assume scampi as a style of cooking is meaningless also.
In Britain it’s just called “scampi”, e.g. “scampi and chips” which is ubiquitious in pubs.
“Whitefish” is just a generic name for any of a number of types of fish that are white flesh and generally bland. That wiki doesn’t mention ratfish as being sold as whitefish, but does mention two other chimaerae species. (Ratfish is a chimaerae, a kind of shark.)
Wow, I was unaware that “scampi” is really supposed to be a specific type of lobster. My encountering of it is via seafood places referring to it as a method of cooking, typically shrimp.
Disagree. The dish is typically shrimp scampi, i.e. shrimp prepared in the scampi manner. Occassionally other things cooked scampi, i.e. sauteed in garlic butter. Thus the correlation of scampi to cooking method. Shrimp can be prepared any number of ways, but I have never heard of boiled scampi, fried scampi, popcorn scampi, etc. Never seen scampi substituted for shrimp, only seen it used as a descriptor of sauteed in garlic butter. YMMV.
Sorry, poor wording on my part. I didn’t mean that people believe ‘scampi’ is a synomym for ‘shrimp’, rather that ‘scampi’ means ‘shrimp scampi’ by default.