Veteran Fishmonger: Stop Buying Chilean Sea Bass at Costco (Get This $8 Fish Instead)

Every week somebody sets a vacuum-packed portion from the warehouse club on my counter and asks if it's worth it. Four to six ounces, sealed tight, thirty dollars a pound. Chilean sea bass. It is not a bass. A wholesaler named Lee Lantz renamed the toothfish in nineteen seventy-seven because nobody was going to order toothfish off a menu. You are paying for a name somebody made up. I have been selling fish in Seattle for forty years, the last twenty running my own counter on the water. Here is what that price hides: a fish that can live fifty years, and the mercury it stacks up the whole time. Find the real species in the fine print, toothfish. Find the blue Marine Stewardship Council oval, because the illegal catch once ran two to three times the legal one. Respect the mercury, about a third of a part per million, and one serving a week if you are pregnant. Know that a plain fillet sold as sea bass was mislabeled more than half the time in Oceana's testing. Buy barramundi instead, about eight dollars a pound. Buy it skin-on, thaw it slow, dry it hard, and pull it at one hundred forty-five degrees. Also in this one: the Take A Pass campaign, the giant perch surprise in the Oceana study, a miso glaze, a coconut curry, the cold water thaw, and the one night I would still pay thirty dollars a pound. New video every day. Subscribe to Gus Lindqvist Fish. #fishmonger #seafood #costco #chileanseabass #barramundi #seafoodtips #savemoney