A relative gave my wife some cut fresh fish, they seemed eager to play gotcha. Looked like shark-ish, tasted like shark if a little grainy like it was not so fresh.
Then they sprung their gotcha saying it was dolphin meat, they got it off a fisherman they know. Their gross out worked on my wife, but I couldn’t help thinking a mammal would never have flesh mistaken for shark. Sure enough googling packaged dolphin meat in Japan is so red it resembles beef liver! The fish we had was bloodless.
Came in to post something similar - Dorado, as I learned them. Frequently referred to as “dolphin” for that double-fake out.
No way you mistook mammalian dolphin flesh for fish - they’re red meat. Extremely dark, almost black, livery-tasting red meat by all accounts. With a layer of fatty blubber present if the skin was attached.
Yes, if that slab of protein on your plate looks like fish, tastes like fish, and is in flaky layers like fish,
it’s fish.
Mahi-mahi (yum!) is Coryphaena, a type of game fish. It somewhat resembles halibut, but is more tender, juicier, and a little sweeter tasting. Definitely very good eats! I have no idea what shark is like. But I would not describe mahi-mahi as “grainy” at all.
The red color in mammal flesh is myoglobin. Similar to hemoglobin in the blood, it scarfs up and stores oxygen in the muscle tissue.
Marine mammals, adapted to spending lengthy times underwater without surfacing to breathe, have vastly more of it in their muscles than land-dwelling critters. That’s what enables them to be able to function for relatively long times between breaths. (I’ve read that sperm whales can stay submerged for an hour or more at a time. Dolphins routinely hold their breath for at least several minutes at a time.) So I would expect marine mammal meat to be very dark.
The fish dolphin is really good, and while I’m not a fan of harvesting them, mammal dolphin is heaven, but then again I prefer horse over beef most of the time (but they never give you that choice on the airplane)