Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan, a Rockefeller Center, New York City, New Stand Studios, joined behind me with uh Joe Hazen rocking the panels. How are you doing? I'm doing well, man. Full house.
Yeah, yeah. On the other side of the studio, we got John, how you doing? Doing great, thanks. Yeah? Yeah.
Yeah? Uh over there in Los Angeles, I think both in Los Angeles, we have uh Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? I'm good. How are you?
Good. Good. Jackie Molecules. I'm in Austin. Oh.
Austin, Texas. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Just for the just for the breakfast burritos?
Or is there another reason you're there? I'm at the Line Hotel doing some interviews and stuff for them. And uh very quick, very quickly before we start, I want to shout out uh a fan of the show that I met last night. Okay. Uh he runs he runs a hot dog uh pop-up called Z's Wiener System.
Um it was very, very good. Yeah, so what's the theory of operation of Z's Wiener system? What do you mean the theory? I mean, what kind of hot dog? I mean, John, right?
You can't just bring them out. You can't just say like that they're doing a hot dog thing. I need I need deets. Like what like hot dog can mean many things. Yeah.
Well, the one last night that he was saw uh serving had olive salad on it, gouda whiz, red wine, vinegar, and oil, oregano. That was the special. Um it's really good. What's the base hot dog? Uh I mean.
Don't fail me, Kat. I'm not a big hot dog guy. I so rarely have them, but what technique of cooking did they use? Are they on a griddle? Griddling, okay.
Like uh what colored outside or not colored outside? Blonde or like, you know, close to like Ripper? What are we looking at here? Well, Ripper should be fried. But you know what I'm saying?
Like, what what what does it look like? What does it feel like? Snap or no snap? It's snap. Good snap.
Okay. I love snap. Yeah. Good snap. I do not appreciate an snapless dog.
Seven and a half inches, all beef. Yeah, look good. I'm looking them up. Yeah, all right. Sounds about right.
Sounds about great. Do they uh John, do they call out the uh do they call out the dog of choice? They do not. They do not, no. Yeah.
Uh we can get into it later. I did a uh I did a Connecticut cross tasting of different uh Connecticut Hummels versus others. Yeah. Different but good. I couldn't decide.
I thought I'd have a favorite. Anyway, wait, wait. Sorry. Uh upper, upper left-hand corner, Quinn. How you doing?
I am around. You're yeah, yeah, still still with us. Yeah, yeah. Quinn had the COVID this last week. Yeah, that sucks.
You bet uh you're you're uh you sound okay, so your lungs are your lungs are not uh overly affected, I hope. Yeah, I got the I got the all the good drugs and uh they're working for you. Yeah, what's that? The Paxlovid? You're rocking the Paxlovid?
Yep. Yeah. Rocking the Pax Lovid. Nice, nice. Wait, is it is it Paxlovid or Paxlovid?
Or can you say anything you want? I don't think it matters as long as you can inhale and say the words. Yeah, all right. Fair enough. Uh that's funny.
Yeah, yeah, it's good. Uh and today we uh, as uh Joe intimated, we have a full house. We have not one, but two special guests. Uh first, of course, you know him from back in the days when he was uh, you know, America's representative of the Orican Salmon Corporation, but no more. He's got his own salmon corporation now.
He's gonna talk about Michael Fabro. Good to have you back. Uh great to be back. Yeah, yeah. Good to see you.
No longer King Salmon. Now we're talking Coho. That's right. It's still a Pacific species, but a different one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay. Well, we'll get into it. We'll get into it. But uh I'm also super psyched and we've never met before. Uh Save Kawaja, who is the engineer that you have teamed with to do some really funky, funky, funky stuff at the at the new place.
Uh first of its kind in this country anyway. First of its kind anywhere with exactly what you're doing, but first of its kind in this country, even I I believe in a farm situation. I'll a little spoiler alert, they're doing uh Ikajime on their uh farm-raised uh salmon. And we're gonna talk a lot about it in a minute. But first, uh we're on the section of the show where we just shoot the breeze over what happened last week.
So uh Safe, I don't know you, but I noticed uh as you walked in that you just flew in from somewhere because you lost your iPad. So says uh, you know, the airline corporation gave you a little tag instead of your iPad. I'm assuming you would prefer to have the iPad. Yeah, very much so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So uh where where were you? What was going on? Did you eat anything good while you were there? Uh I've been a back and forth. We just opened up our second office in LA.
And so by, you know, I'm kind of in between LA and New York right now. So really just enjoying the sunshine, the ocean. Uh I just missed the rain. There's some pretty crazy flooding. Yeah, I would have liked to.
Well, there the you know, that the other half of the team is all on that coast, like enjoying that rain. Apparently, even though Nastasia lives on a slope, is this correct, Nastasia? It still somehow floods in your house. They went under the house and up under and up. So like so, like there's like a rock or something under your house that like the stream is hitting and then it just shoots up, but it's not like in a pretty way, right?
It's like in a trash can way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was an earthquake on Friday. Oh man. Oh, yeah.
I was in uh on the 18th floor of a building when the earthquake happened. And that was my second earthquake I've ever experienced. So which one did you enjoy more? Um, I didn't remember the first one. I didn't know I I had experienced one before.
The last serious earthquake I was in, I didn't feel because we were in an office tower in in Tokyo, Nastasi and I, and my wife and Dax. And I was running a vacuum machine, and somehow, you know how if you orient yourself just right with the waves, you can't feel it as much. And I was just so angry, I think, that I didn't feel it. Whereas everyone else in the building was like, Did you feel that earthquake? I was like, nah.
Did you feel it, Sas? I don't remember. We were together, so you probably also didn't feel it. I remember feeling other ones in our there was a bunch that happened, like in our room. We were so high that the building would like swing.
Oh, it was awful. Yeah, I never forget. One of the people we were working with had been there for a huge earthquake, like a couple years prior. And you know, they're all on the 40 and change floor up at the park Hyatt, you know, up at the New York bar. And uh he was like, Yeah, when the earthquake happened, like our job was to physically take the guests and walk them down the stairs.
I was like, oh yeah. So you, you know, you weren't frightened. He's like, oh no, I assumed I was dead. Yeah, yeah. But he was like real mellow, almost like flight attendant mellow.
You know what I mean? Just doing your job. Just doing your job. It's why you can't trust professionals because they're gonna give you the same demeanor regardless of what's about to happen. You know what I mean?
It's like when you see uh when you see like uh, you know, a contract killer on a on a movie and they're all calm right before they kill you because they don't want you to get excited because that causes more problems for them. Right. You know what I mean? Anywho. Uh all right.
So uh so that was good. You but do you eat anything over there? Or you just did you miss the floods? Honestly, I have like a big stack of pizzas that are in our office. Don't have much time to do it.
I wish it was uh more exciting than that. Yeah, I'm going to Phoenix tomorrow, but I don't think I'm gonna be I don't think I'm gonna make it into the uh famed uh Bianco Pizza. I don't think that I I couldn't get a reservation. I think I'm gonna make it in. Do you need a reservation?
Do they have reservations? I think they do. I don't remember it being that difficult, but I was there a number of times today, though. It's Valentine's Day. Oh, that's okay.
That's a different story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway. Uh who else? Who else? What do you got? Quim, you always have something.
What do you got? Uh actually I do have quite a bit. We made a sort of chicken and onion regou in the style of regurjay vive, but with chicken because we just felt like it. And I also used a mixture of white wine and a little bit of uh Chinese style cooking wine. It's pretty good.
Yeah. All right. So like not really Italian at all. So wait, Tommy. I'm just messing with Queen.
Well, that doesn't matter. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Uh I wonder whether I did anything.
I've been cooking a lot. I just can't remember whether I can't. Actually, it's so weird. Usually I think before I come about what I what I've been doing, and I can't think of it. I've been making a lot of oleo sacrums.
You guys like oleo sacrums? Anyone? Anyone? Don't know what that is. So you take uh peel, like citrus peel, and you smash it with sugar, right?
And then that that abrasive power like uh breaks up the oil vesicles, right? And then you you let it sit, and then the the moisture in the peel is managed by the sugar that's there and it makes its own syrup. Right? So it's kind of like a candied peel? No, no, no, no, you don't eat the peel.
What happens is it makes like a syrup and then you drain the syrup off. But all the recipes online sittily siddly, siddily suck. They're all terrible. Uh, because uh, let me ask you a question. Uh why would you write a recipe that gives an amount of sugar per unit fruit?
Right? Right? A grapefruit can be the size of a large orange. A grapefruit can be the size of a football, right? Like, what is a grapefruit?
You know what I mean? What is a lemon? You know what I'm saying? It'll be different if they're like, you get your number 50 lemons and it takes this much. No, they don't do that.
They're just like, two this many lemons. Well, what lemon do you use, you jerk? You moron? Idiot. You know what I mean?
It's like, what the hell is this? And so uh, you know, I've been doing some research, and uh, it looks like peels are roughly 70 70 to 77% moisture, right? But you can't get all of that back, and then some of the sugar is lost in the in the um in the process, right? Because it stays, you know, it gets mashed into the peel, and then there's some talk cross back and forth, so you can't get all the sugar in the yield back. So the maximum, assuming that you can get a you use like a super fine sugar, let's say, and assuming that you can get a fully saturated 66% uh syrup out of it, about the most that you can really get water wise out.
It's about 60% weight of the peel in water. So really 1.2 times the weight of the peel is the maximum you can do and still get, you know, uh without having to add extra liquid and get a uh, you know, a syrup out of it. But people are like, and really one-to-one's better. That's what I do. But like, because I don't want a 66 brisks.
What the hell am I? What am I? Anyway, but the point being uh that nobody writes that. Put this many ounces to this many lemons. Um God, come on, grow up.
Grow up. Anyway. Calling your questions to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. If you're listening on Patreon, and John, why don't you tell them how they can listen on Patreon if they so desire?
Patreon.com/slash cooking issues. You guys should check out the website. There's um three different levels of membership. You got awesome perks at all the levels, uh discounts with partners that we work with, um, access to Discord and just a whole bunch of other awesome things. So check it out.
Patreon.com slash cooking issues. Wait, so none of you folks did any Super Bowl crap? Food, nothing, no one? Uh a little bit. Yeah.
Oh. We actually made boneless wings. Like a literal boneless wings. Yeah. It's a pain in the butt.
Sucks. Done it. Yeah. Yeah. Name.
Yeah. You get that, you know, the pleasure of eating them quickly and the displeasure of having to fabricate them all. Blows. Yeah, I mean. Did you at least pre-cook, pull, and then and then do the fry off?
Or did you actually try to bone those suckers out when they're raw? God God bless you if you did. No, we did. Yeah, my dad. We bone them out raw.
Flash right. What a pain in the butt. You know what's a lot easier, Quinn? Going forward in your life? A lot easier is to make uh is to make uh drumstick balls.
Cut the drumstick balls in half. And then if you just a little like light, light gluing on the drumstick balls, and uh they they just look like bet they're better wings. It's just a better wing. So the the way you make a drumstick ball is you uh you take uh poultry shears and you go in on the uh I don't know, what do you call this, the elbow side of the of the drumstick, uh, and then you just you you go around the cartilage against the bone with your shears. You go snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, like three or four times.
Like like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like you're cutting around like like but but I can't speak it visually, but you can see it, right? You just you're going in along the bone and then rotating around, like a lacka lacka. Now the now the bone is free. Then you flip it around and you pull on that thing, you pull it on so that you're pulling it tight over the, you know, the part of the drumstick that you hold, and then snap, you cut off that that part of the bone, the you know, the the part that the people leave on the street to kill my dog.
You know what I'm talking about? You cut off that thing, and then you just rip the whole bone out from the knuckle end, and all a lot of the tendons and stuff come out. And when that thing cooks, if you're not gonna do wing style, when that thing cooks, it shrinks into a ball. Hence we call them leg balls. And they're delicious.
You low temp those suckers through and you fry them, and you get these like they're almost like Aroncini looking balls that are just drumstick without all that tendon. You know how much meat is wasted on the average drumstick? When you give a drumstick to the average idiot, no offense, people, you're idiots, at restaurants, and they take two bites and they leave all that meat on the drumstick and then it's sitting there on the plate. I hate that. I understand it when it happens with turkey because the turkey is in invariably like the meat just doesn't come off the bone, and nobody just wants to work that hard.
It's like, why do they sell those dang turkey things at at Disney Disney X, Y, and Z, and they never don't take the tendons out. And you see a little kid with getting poked in the eye by a tendon, and of course they're not eating the whole turkey lake. You familiar with what I'm talking about? Yeah, Jacques Papin uses his needle-nosed pliers to pull them out. Turkey tendons.
I've said this before on the show. I don't know, maybe, uh, but they used to have so like if you when you're butchering the turkey, right? They used to have a machine where what it would do is it held the the drumstick end of the turkey real tight, real tight. Then did a like a score around it, and then broke it off over a table and you pulled the all of the tendons out through this tiny hole. But it only works if you do it when the feet are still attached, because they leave all the tendons attached to the feet, and then they just grab the feet real because it's real strong, and then all the tendons, and then they extrude it through a little hole that the meat can't get extruded through along with the bone.
Genius. That's what the processors used to do. They don't anymore. No. Maybe it costs an extra one cent and nobody cares.
People stopped caring about turkey meat. It's just a visual thing for a lot of people. So, you know, people are bad. People really, this they're terrible. Uh Michael, you said you had something interesting you cooked uh this week.
Uh not particularly interesting, just a little Super Bowl pre-game meal. So I'm from San Francisco originally, so I had a you know a rooting interest in the game. Wanted to have a sit-down proper meal before the game started. So just did uh just my girlfriend and I, a little pan seared steak, uh, some uh some nice hot pretzels, place that we get them from in Brooklyn. Uh some Tony Paco's pickles.
Um, a girlfriend's from Toledo. Ohio? Yeah. You know Tony. No.
You don't know Tony Paco's? Oh my God. Uh let's give me some Tony Paco's. Tony Paco's is the most famous restaurant in Toledo. Oh well, I've never been to Toledo.
Have you seen Mash? The television industry. That one? Yeah. Suicide's painless.
Yeah, yeah. Uh so Klinger? Yeah. Character. Colonel Klinger.
Colonel? No. Um, no, uh Corporal, Corporal Klinger. Corporal Klinger. Corporal Klinger.
Um, he was from Toledo. And I think he might have actually in the show, he was from Toledo. I think he actually is from Toledo. No, what's that guy? What's that guy's name?
Uh, what's his name? Uh he hated radar the person. The person who played Klinger hated. Jamie Farr. Jamie Farr.
He hated whoever it was that played. Apparently, radar is a real pain in the patoot as a person. Okay, I could see that. Yeah. You know, I don't know.
I don't know any of these people in the real life. You know what I mean? Gary Berg Burgoff. Ah, you're a real mash of finato. I actually didn't like the show.
What the hell is all that? What are you? Just an encyclopedic knowledge of like 60s and 70s televisions? Maybe it's just all goes back to Toledo. I don't know.
Maybe. It's an iconic show, though. I don't think people watching it. It is. But nobody cares.
They're like, they're like, there was a Korean war. What? They don't even know. People don't even know how and the people have no memory. At least my kids don't.
Uh it's my fault there. My kids don't know, therefore it's my fault. Right? Right. Uh and then so steak, and then Tony Paco's is the restaurant is also a pickle uh they're famous for their pickle.
So I believe it. Well, first of all, what kind of pickle? Like a real pickle or like a bread and butter pickle? No offense. See you're gonna put me uh on the phone.
I actually like bread and butter pickles. So it was a it's uh it's sour, but also has heat. Uh-huh. Uh not much sweetness to it. All right.
But maybe just in the back, somewhere there's a little sweetness. All right. Uh might have been a little bit of clove in there. Uh clove. Yeah.
We're gonna talk about clove later. Uh yeah. Um and I believe Tony Paco was a Hungarian immigrant or had Hungarian heritage, so it's kind of a Hungarian American restaurant. They they do they're famous for like chili and hot dogs and their pickles. Yeah.
I don't know what that has to do with Hungary, but I don't know. Uh but their pickles are good. So for Christmas, cooking things people want to eat. That's what people do. That's right.
They come to this country and they cook things that people will buy. Right. It's genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh all right, awesome.
All right. Um, I know what I wanted to talk about. Get this. This makes no sense. You ready for this?
I'm gonna put Nastasia on blast here. Nastasia is in California. California, theoretically a progressive state, can't gamble online in California. Did you know this? Oh good.
Did not be. Cannot gamble online in California. So I had to set up this like online thing for Nastasia where I had to pretend to be Nastasia because my physical human flesh sack was in New York State. And like, you know, like they'll sell you anything. You could buy anything.
You could buy like some sort of WMD, it's fine, but like they, if you want to bet, then like all creation has to make sure that you're actually in this locale or the all hell breaks loose, right, Stas? Yes. Yes. So Nastasia correctly. What?
What did you say? We do we use DraftKings. It sounds shady when you talk about it. Like we're, you know. It's uh we use draft.
It's my it's my Uncle Ralph Figuerito down the street doing the bookmaking. No, actually, my Uncle Ralph was a bookmaker, but uh but the but the point is is that uh he passed actually died recently, Uncle Ralph. I am almost completely out of crazy uncles. Now I'm the only crazy uncle left. How messed up is that?
I mean, literally, I used to when I was a kid, I had so many crazy uncles. You know, a couple normal ones. You know what I mean? And now gone. Ralph, Uncle Ralph was one of the last.
I feel bad. Pit boss, Reno, many years. Oh, yeah. Reno Reno. Yeah.
Yeah. Then started making uh their company made the equipment that wrapped cigarette packages. Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. Jersey.
Brilliant. Yeah, yeah. Uh his dad, when he got out of the bookmaking business, had to get a special dispensation to come back to New Jersey to go to Uncle Ralph and my Aunt Sandy's wedding from the locals and be like, it's okay to come back even though you're retired. So they had, you know, had to go through the proper channels. Yeah.
Yeah. Good times. What are we talking about? I don't even remember. Oh, betting.
So what happened was Nastasia. So I I actually like appreciate this because you know, for years Nastasia like talks a big game about what she predicted and what she doesn't. But in the past couple of years, she's gotten in the habit, correct me if I'm wrong, Staz, of like overtly predicting things so that you can be like, oh yeah, you actually did say that, right? Right. So she correctly bets that San Francisco's gonna be up at halftime, but the Kansas City's gonna win, right?
But she gets completely hosed. Tell them what happened, Staz. Because they went into overtime. And apparently that's not part of my bet. Yeah.
So this is like it's a parlay, basically. Well, she did she bet halftime full time, not halftime finish. Ah, uh, sucks. It sucks because she would have made like a good chunk of change. It was $25 to be clear.
It wasn't like it's more an honor bet. But you were gonna make $170 if you won. And it's bull crap. It's like it's like it's like the double zero on a roulette wheel. What the hell is this?
You know what I mean? I I heard they added another uh another zero to the roulette wheels. Really? Just called F U. Uh yeah.
It's like there's like a third zero. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Which, you know, this is why I don't gamble. I just does it's I can't I can't do it.
I can't do it. I mean, I gamble a lot, but just not on games of chance. You know? Has anyone been to Vegas recently? Is it true?
Is there a third zero now? I've never been to Vegas ever my whole life. I was just in Vegas, and some of them, yes. It's kind of how, like, now in Vegas, all the cheap tables on the strip pay like six to five on blackjack instead of three to two. Um, which is ridiculous.
Huh. I haven't heard that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man.
This making it hard on the on the regular guy. I here's I'll tell you the closest I get to casinos, uh, I mean, they have good mall in the casinos up in uh in Connecticut. I've been to those. But uh I used to get you used to be able to get free ticket to Atlantic City on a bus. So you would like pay like $10 for the bus, right?
And they would give you like $15 worth of tokens of uh chips to go into the casino. So the casino would pay for these buses of people to go down to Atlantic City from the port authority. So we had a friend who lived in Ventner, which is just south of Atlantic City. They live right on the beach. And so to get down to their house before we had a car, basically the casinos would pay us to go down there, and we would immediately just cash the chips in and make five dollars off the deal.
You know, go get go get some taffy or a funnel cake and call it call it a day. And it's a great deal, you know. I don't know if they still do that kind of stuff. Probably. Probably.
Anyway. All right, let's talk about fish. Now we have a lot to talk about because uh, you know, Michael, your company rebranded what, two years ago? When you moved a year ago you as uh local coho. When did the rebrand happen?
Uh when you went on? No, so um local coho uh as a company started probably about uh five or six years ago now. Um and uh um this has gone through some twists and turns along that way. I joined about two years ago, but they had already established local coho as as the brand that that they wanted to have. And in your your Megilla is inland recirculating aquaculture in upstate New York, right?
That's absolutely right. So that's one piece of growing uh I always mentioned freshwater also. Just no, we're gonna get into it. So that's like that's one big technology thing. Okay, we'll get into it.
But and then but the second big thing, and the what I'm super excited to have safe here is that uh you also are practicing the only, well, first of all, the only farmed uh product that I know of that in the United States that is uh has Ikijime techno techniques. And for those of you who don't know, Iki GMA writ large or the is the panoply of fish killing techniques uh pioneered in Japan to increase the quality of fish flesh uh as it's consumed uh by by people. Uh not only that, but maybe the first AI uh ikojima machine ever, the first machine learning brain spike. That's what we like to think. Yeah.
Well, wait, are there are there other people? Do you have like cage matches with people? No, no. I mean, maybe put the robots, you know, and get them head to head, but we're I mean, I like to think we're the for only one uh as far as I know in the indu the industrial farms in Japan are sitting there with people doing it by hand, you know, there's some gamut. Yeah.
Had to be someone not there, I think. What do you think? Yeah, well, I think, you know, uh it's interesting when you compare the food systems, right? Like, you know, the US is I, you know, I'm immigrant to the US, right? And so I get to also kind of look at things a little bit from outside.
And I've been both to the US and to Japan when I was younger. And when I'm here in the US, the way that I almost see the philosophy around how we grow our food is very top down, where it's like X number of people, Y number of calories per person equals Z volume production. Whereas in Japan, there's a little bit of a different relationship. I think that is changing in the modern times, but if you go to small pockets like Pokkaido, um, they think of it very bottoms up, where, you know, you take these artisanal systems that feed people on individual basis really effectively, and then how do you scale those, right? And so that's why, you know, Japan, like Wagyu has the branding it does, right?
When the genetics are mixed and, you know, all these other uh factors around it, really it comes down to the certain philosophy that, you know, um our food becomes us, that there's just tradition and culture passed down that I think, you know, um brings these really special um methods like ikiji May to the re really to the forefront. Um there are some other alternatives that people are using to try and replicate some of um that are not like just automation, carbon monoxide, um, electrical stunning, things like that. I've tried some of those. What do you think? Uh I had real bad luck with electrostunning, like real bad luck.
I spoke to the people who were doing electrostunning on crustaceans. I've tried it some with, I mean, obviously it's a little bit dicey to do it on your own on a safety standpoint, electro stunning. Uh pretty dangerous, yeah. Uh and also this was, you know, 10, 12 years ago, there weren't a lot. I mean, a lot of the research as far as I can remember on electrostunning was um with waveform, um, you know, particular pulse trains, where to hit them, but they always cause like super damage.
Like so much. Yeah. So like let's I mean, okay, so let's I don't know where to start here. I really don't. So uh I was gonna say, how'd you get into like ikojime?
Like you must have come from engineering first, ikijime second, or did you grow up like a fish freak? What like where did you come where how did you come to want to apply engineering uh to ikijime? But then I think for a lot of our listeners, I mean a lot of our listeners know about ikijime, but like some of them probably don't, right? What the kind of benefits are. Because I think, you know, um 10, 12 years ago when I first heard about it from Dave Chang, I thought it was honestly mystical bull crap until I ran a bunch of tests and you know, read read a lot of papers on it.
So I don't know what what what should we tackle first in this? How you got into it or what the hell it is? Yeah, we can start from there and then uh the uh uh origin story. Okay, your origin story. All right, go for it.
Yeah, sure. So uh I grew up on the coast my entire life, so uh not related to fishing, but you know, I like to say uh seafaring family. Uh um born in Canada, but then raised in Saudi Arabia and Jeddah, and then um the UAE in Dubai, uh, which are you know, actually most people think of Dubai as you know, the oil uh, you know, well, actually technically Sabdhabi, but I think of the UAE as very much like oil driven, but Dubai actually was started as uh a fishing port. And um, so it's on the coast. What's the main fish there?
Um it depends on which area, you know. Actually, if you go and fish off of Fajera, which is on the other side, you can go and get tuna. In Dubai, there's like sherry, which is kind of like a porky, you know. Um, and then what do they eat it panned like a sardine? What do they do?
Yeah, it's almost it's always cooked um and cooked the same day, uh, you know, or at least a few days after very rapidly. Like grill, but more grill or more like a whole pan, like yeah, yeah. So they'll normally gut it and then put things inside and then just you know, um, serve the entire thing. Um and then yeah, you know, my uh my granddad w uh was uh my family's Kashmiri, uh my granddad's a navy, so we actually have matching sato tattoos. Um yeah, he's the only granddad I ever met, but it was kind of symbolic for that.
And then uh my sister loves a scuba dive. So very much like I grew up around water. And the first time I went fishing was with my dad. And so we're sitting in the Red Sea, beautiful idyllic environment, pull a fish out of the water. And so these uh the natural thing for a fisherman to do, throw it in a bucket of ice, clothes off the top, and don't think about it, right?
But you know, when you go back to the dock and you land two hours later and you open the bucket, the fish is normally still alive, right? And you'll see some blood around the edges and you know, but you'll see it breathing, really, trying to because the ice will melt, or there'll still be some made of water. You know, they're built very different. And so I I was, you know, pretty young at the time, didn't really think too hard about it. But fast forward 20 years, immigrate here to the US by myself.
Uh, went to college uh where I studied business and physics, and then uh I went to graduate school for computer science. One of my early mornings there, there was this uh essay in the newspaper on uh if fish could scream. It was all about how because fish don't have vocal cords, we give them less empathy than land mammals, like cattle, poultry, whatever have you. And most pertinent was really like the end of life experience. So the essay by Peter Singer was really about how most fish today suffocate to death when you walk into most mass market retailers, and um that suffocation process, you know, people think it happens right away for the fish lose consciousness, but in the reality can take many hours.
And so talking about that and basically some uh around that, some of the issues around waste, um, specifically in the wild cotton industry, um, but also around like phenomenology of pain, what does it mean to be feel pain, experience, things like that? And so I was just thinking about the problem space on YouTube. Uh, I searched up how to kill fish. I found Andrew Troi from the EK Jimmy Federation, who has done a lot of work around EKG May awareness here in the US. I sent him a cold email on if anyone had automated E.K.
May and the rest is history. Uh, I think it's hilarious. You're the one of the only people I have met who is like uh read singers's work and been like, how can I kill these things more effectively? Thing. Uh we uh uh so I I started the Museum of Food and Drink.
Uh and we once did a um uh ethics of meat, and he was we had him on as one of the panelists. It's so funny. It was him and um I was the moderator and it was Patrick Martins from Heritage Food. I forget who the third person was, but oh my God, what a what an odd crew that was. Uh yeah.
Um, all right. So for Iki Jime, right? I think what is clear is that the end of life experience for fish anyway, it hasn't been as proven in other animals. I was really interested, by the way. If you want to get really gruesome about it, I w have been for a long time interested in um in uh nitrogen uh hypoxia for mammal slaughter.
Uh I know they do it for tuna. Uh well, and they they just did the first human uh execution in Alabama with uh nitrogen gas. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and uh uh to not to get horribly gruesome, but I guess we're gonna get horribly gruesome on it.
The problem with it is that I mean, like anyone who's done their research knows that in mammals, in mammals, right, uh uh excess night like reducing oxygen below uh life threshold and increasing nitrogen is a painless way to go, except that that's only if you don't know what's happening. So the person that they and by the way, my personal, you know, whatever, neither here nor there. I just I don't believe that the state should be in the business of killing people. I'm anti whatever. I just don't believe it's effective.
Whatever. That's me. Uh it's not a political show, so I'm just talking about the mechanics of it, right? But uh yeah, so the the prisoner, you know, attempted to hold his breath. And if you attempt to hold your breath, it's just as horrifying as any other being asphyxiated situation.
Anyway, uh Yeah, we tried uh we tried nitrous oxide, actually, and CO2. CO2 is the worst fish killing technique I tried. They hated it. Oh yeah, they're jumping out of the water. Yeah, yeah.
They hate it. So, like, you know, I tried, I tried that, but uh consistently uh brain spike followed in some fish cases by spinal ablation. Now, is that so your your robot locates and spikes the brain, right? It uses a computer like it uses a computer machine learning. Yep.
It looks at it, it's like brain, no. In fact, your company is called Shinkei systems, like nervous systems, you're hitting the nerve, taking it out, boom, right? Brain, no. Yep. So like how fast can you how fast can you spike these things?
Uh we can probably cycle time per fish is around 10 to 15 seconds. And what's normal kill cycle for a fish? If you're gonna actually like do it by hand this way rather than just asphyxiate them or do some sort of horrible, it's probably equivalent, like around 10 seconds. Okay. But it works all the time.
Not how like uh how many miss hits do you get on a machine versus a human? So the way that we angled it, um, and again, it'll depend on mishit. This is this is really getting to the weeds, right? But so there's like the prefrontal cortex for awareness, and then there's a motor cortex, right? Which the motor cortex because of the seizures and tightening the muscles, that's where it affects the quality.
So the way that we've angled um the way that we spike the brain with the fish is uh we prioritize hitting the motor cortex. And ideally we hit the prefrontal cortex as well. But when you hit the motor cortex, at least the fish is the limited. So there's never really a mishit from an industrial standpoint. But then if you go to a lot of the NGOs, like there's a question around like, hey, is this you know really more humane?
The fish do die much quicker, right? You know, open philanthropy gave us a uh a large grant to study side by side around, you know, doing um EEG scans, fish um, and understanding this. And that's actually how we came to this conclusion around motor versus prefrontal right. And um so we prioritize the motor, but then again, if we want to be pushing for the best standard for more humane um and like phenomenological experience for the fish, then you know, probably they need like a you know, a very big spike. You know, they're the fish brains are pretty small, but you know, between the cortexes, there's like you know, a good amount of distance that if you have a very thin spike, it can often be difficult to hit both.
So you don't use it. Because you use two spikes? You don't use one of those curved, you don't use one of those curved like uh ones where they go in and just yeah, like you know, those little mini scimitars that they've not seen those now. Yeah, yeah, the hand, well, some of the hand brain spike ones because they just go in and around like this, because they don't want to think about it, I guess. I used to work on a on a pot fishing boat very briefly, and we used to take a bat and then put a nail at the end of the bat.
Oof. And then we just you ever seen the Simpsons episode where uh Bart and the whole family is trapped in Japan for some reason. They do something terrible and they can't get back to the United States, and so they end up working as fish killing people in a f in a in a in a large fish plant and like just like like saying that style, like just dumps on them, and then Bart Simpson just goes, knife goes in, guts come out. Knife goes in, guts come out. You ever seen this?
Knife goes in, guts come out. And then he picks up a fish and it goes, I will grant you three wishes. Knife goes in, guts come out. He just keeps going. It's the best.
You gotta watch it. If you're a professional fish killer, you gotta get it. I know this is like the first time I'm hearing about it. I gotta see that. Yeah.
Um, so uh I think uh, you know, it's I don't know if the science has progressed a lot since uh I looked at it all, but um it's pretty clear that um in fish especially, uh, they go through a much harder rigor mortise if uh there's a lot of stress uh towards the end of their well, when they're being slaughtered and immediately pre-slaughter if they're freaked out. Uh uh, the faster they deplete the ATP and go into rigor, the harder the rigor mortises, and the harder the rigor mortises, the more gaping. So if you people have ever bought a salmon and there's like big gaping holes in the fillet, that sucker went through hard rigor, right? Or it was just butchered incredibly poorly, but most likely it went through hard rigor. And so like these ekajeme processes are about reducing muscle movement and loss of ATP around uh peri-slaughter time and post-slaughter.
And so uh they dramatically increase the flesh quality of meat. So uh we'll go through the salmon one that's the salmon side by salmon. Most people won't be able to see it. So you're gonna have to tell people what they're seeing. Sure.
So well, uh I'll flip this around for you so you can see as well. But this is like a normal side-by-side EKG Ma versus uh association. This is on wild porgy. And you'll see here uh relative to that, if you zoom in on the left, uh what we're looking at right now, this big red filet meat gaping in the meat. And then on the right, you have the really like um rigid meat texture.
So it's days later, right? And so you can really see a pretty big difference, especially as the time compounds. Um do you want to go through the salmon or should we uh well there yeah, so like only a few people are gonna be able to see the image. So you're gonna have to talk through it quick. But if you notice in this thing, I'm assuming the one that was asphyxiated when I was doing it, and I'm assuming this is here, it's like a lot redder because they get almost uh left blood vessel bursts and a a lot of things.
I mean, it's not, you know, it's not uh physiologically okay to die that way. Uh and there's a gen there's a a definite, I would say almost 100% across the board, every test I've ever run, there's a definite difference between zero intervention, i.e. asphyxiation, and uh proper EKGMA, but even between head bludgeoning and EKG May, there's a big difference. Right. Um have you done any tests of of uh brain spike versus just I know that you haven't automated it yet, but uh versus spinal ablation.
I don't know uh all the spinal ablation studies that I know are in larger fish like tuna, although all of my personal tests on spinal ablation are with things like fluke and um and bass. So we what we've already seen is there's such a huge difference with doing the brain spike and the gill cut and the tail cut to really get you know stop the experience of stress as well as like bleeding the meat. The spinal ablation really compounds all those benefits. So for example, with the fluke fish you mentioned, um I think we have a photo for the those um again, I know it's a podcast. But um, people can look on so people like we're gonna put the slides up and people can look at them.
But go on. I don't know where you go on, actually, John. Where do they go on to look at things uh for our podcast? Well, patreon.com slash cooking issues. There you go.
All right, yeah. Yeah. So for this we'll uh you know, it's beyond the videos, but maybe we can get Quinn to post it on the socials. Yeah. Yeah, okay, okay.
Yeah, so I mean, long and short of it, um, this is a photo, but basically you can see this is just EKG main, and then the other one is with chinkage main. And so what you'll see is basically your compound the time for rigor. So with fluke, for example, if you suffocate it, it'll go into rigor almost the same day or 24 hours. With if you EK G May. So spike the brain, cut the gills, often cut open the tail as well, you know, the heart pumps up both ends.
You can hit into go into peak rigor around three days later. And then if you do the spinal ablation, that'll be a full week later. So again, it's just compounding the benefits. But we already see in relative to suffocation, electrocution, um, we're able to really get uh pretty substantial difference for industry. And obviously the spinal ablation is probably the hardest problem around you know, EKGMA.
So EKG is like a four-part technique, right? They're collectively known as EKG May, but we actually, you know, at Shinkei, we think of um the spinal ablation as like almost, you know, you know, the four-step, uh almost a separate technique. So the first three are spike the brain, cut the gills, cut the tail, right? Spike the brain to stop any experience of stress, release cortisol, things like that. You cut the gills, cut the tail to open the both both ends of the major artery around the fish.
The heart, which is still active after brain death, will pump the blood out naturally. And so in turn, you know, when you remove the blood, so there's uh, well, if you spike the brain, so there's no experience of stress, there's no release in like cortisol and adrenaline like analogs, right? And so you have a less acidic environment, you know, lactic acid also production goes down. So you have a less acidic environment. When you have a less acidic environment, um bacteria that uh fewer bacteria grow or they grow slowly.
And then when you remove the blood, you know, oftentimes the bacteria will use that blood as nutrition. And so you, you know, by removing the blood, you starve them out. And so what happens is, you know, um, instead of suffocating, the meat actually or uh rotting and spoiling, the meat actually begins to dry age. I think dry aging is not quite though like one-to-one. I actually almost uh put it again to like fruit ripening.
Yeah, you know I don't know really know I know it's a huge thing now, but I I've never been to one of these places that actually age the fish in the humidity controlled fridges. Those are great. You know, actually for the folk that are in LA, there's a great spot called the joint where you can just go in and you know, retail some dry fish, and it's really phenomenal. Yeah. Um but those are where they hang the fish in a humidity controlled fish uh in the a fridge for a few days.
In this context, it's a little more like ripening where you're extending the time to peak ripeness, and then you know, obviously the quality after it hits right ripen, uh the full ripening capacity is so I think it's another thing that I mean probably our listeners know about, but a lot of people don't. People think of a fish, fresh, fresh. No, no, right, correct. You know, not not uh not the freshest fish, the correct time fish. You know what I mean?
The one that's you know gone through rigor and there's a definite, there's a definite, like if you know, if you eat a fish that's I mean, some cultures love fish that was killed right away. We don't, I don't, you know what I mean? Like, I don't like do you like crunchy, super fresh fish? Like, I mean, it's a thing. I I have enjoyed it, but it's not the choice I would typically make for most of the fish species that that I would eat.
So um, yeah, so this peak period. I now again, I don't know anything about this dry, I don't know about this like super extended stuff that that people are doing now. Although I did run a test once on um, you know, you know I heard of uh Randall FX fridges, unified brands. So they were one of the first people to come out with a uh a very low airflow, uh like almost like cooler style fridge that you opened up. And we we just would put uh crush ice down and fish and they kept for phenomenal lengths of time because it just wasn't a lot of drying out.
Um it's kind of mimicking like what uh you know, some of the old school you ever dealt with like the sushi chefs who'll unplug all of the fridges and just put blocks of ice in it and like put their fish in it? Oh no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that makes sense to me. Yeah.
Um I do think my POV is oftentimes for for fish, ice can be a good crux for uh or poor uh core uh poor poor crutch for for fish. The ideal environment is you have a humidity controlled low temperature, like 28 to 36 Fahrenheit fridge if you want to keep them fresh. Um the problem with if you have very aggressive um icing is you can start to get some like iced burns on the meat, the ice melts, that water in between the scales will sit, and then you know, still water becomes a cesspool, the battery will grow. And so that's oftentimes where you get a lot of that, you know, off flavors and smells around uh very fishy environments. So, what's the ideal number of days for an EKGMA salmon?
What's the what's the best day to eat one post slaughter? What do you think, Michael? Uh that's a good question. Um those are the tests we used to run. We would just do a bunch and then we would eat a little every day.
You know what I mean? Yeah. I have not uh we've done uh certainly visual and and texture trials, uh easier to quantify day by day, but um like palatability. Do you have like do you have a I would I can only guess? But it's not day one, that's for sure.
Yeah. I think when it's like probably I don't know, I'd say like day four, probably. Do you do the test? Do you do the two the two push tests? Do the push, put your finger down and bring it up.
Oh, well, with a machine, do you have the machine to do that? Oh, we have the machine, no, yeah. Oh, yeah. Uh machine that can measure the impedance, you know, and that's like supposed to be a good proxy for it. Um when we were doing the studies, I think we were looking at, you know, with suffocation uh um, which is not what Michael Virginia was doing, and they're doing like a kind of like a gill pole, which is very common and standard.
Um, when we looked at suffocation, you know, that'd be three to four days is like kind of the right amount of time to eat it. Um when you ekg me it, that time can be around like eight to nine days. Um, but really when when you pull up to one of the distributors that are carrying local coho fish that's serving many, many mission star restaurants, uh, as I've done, trying to get feedback on how the robot's working, they'll say they have a full extra day with a full extra week with the fish, uh, which for them can be very substantial given that they're taking so much logistics and distribution risk, uh given the fish is so perishable. So you get it to them right before the peak of the hump and they get to ride that little zone. And the the distribution curve of peak ripeness is a is a wider, flat flatter curve, right?
Whereas so rather than having a narrow window, like oh, you gotta eat it now if you really want to experience it the best, it's you know, it's it's uh delayed. So you have a you have a bigger window in which to enjoy peak ripeness. All right, so let's talk coho for one second. So what's another thing I think is interesting is that a lot of like, for instance, where you used to work at Ora King back when they used to do uh uh anesthesia, which by the way also makes easy, you gotta guys got it. I'm telling you, what if you just used uh clove oil but didn't call it anesthesia?
Could you do it? I think uh I I'm not sure. I you mentioned that before, and I I think I started to poke around. It's super it's super easy to make the emulsion. You don't need to buy Aque S.
You know what I mean? You can just, you know, do they even still sell Aquis out of New Zealand? Uh in Australia? Uh they might. They might.
I'm not sure. Stuff works great. Yeah. You know what I mean? And you can make your own.
I used to do it all the time. I'll go to Whole Foods, buy clove oil, you know, uh, you know, do my little marathon man speech, and then uh, you know, anesthetize uh the fish. Works great. Yeah, I think you and I talked about this. Like if you listed it as just listed as an ingredient, you know, clove oil.
It's it's grass as an ingredient, yeah, just not as a medicine. It's bizarre. We have the weirdest rules. I'm telling you, man. And you also, I know you like the flavor.
There is, by the way, people, slight flavor of clove. But it's good. Yeah. Tastes good. Yeah, yeah.
People like it. It is very appealing. And yeah, and distinctive. Yeah. Yeah.
Just a little in the little background. I you need to have your lawyers look at whether you can do it as long as you don't call it anesthesia. Don't make any claims. If you don't claim that it's anesthesia, if you don't make a benefit claim that you're performing anesthesia, then, and it's not that expensive, right? I mean, I don't know how how it would fit into the um, you'd have to, I don't know what your pre-slaughter tanks are like.
But you know what I mean? It's like uh, I don't know. Yeah, it's the rules you'd have to, but it definitely makes a difference. You know? Yeah, yeah.
Interesting. And you could be the only people doing that too. And it does actually increase welfare for sure. I mean, I can't prove it because you can't prove what a fish thinks, but they're, you know, they act much more mellow. They're like visually, it's like they're just everything's okay, dude.
Like, we're all good here. You you so when you pick up a fish and you're gonna do the spike on it, right? You're gonna do the kill on the spike, like you you have to be like pretty like you have to be calm and assertive, otherwise the fish is gonna freak out, right? Right? Say if you're telling me, yeah, yeah, right.
So you need to have a certain sort of mindset as the fish killer, and still you're gonna have some times when you mess up, especially like the worst we did uh we did uh tautog, black, black. Oh my God. Like, oh my God. Like fish, though. Yeah, yeah, but not fun to try to yeah.
Anyway, if you're a worthless person like myself and don't do it every day, you know what I mean? That takes a lot of skill. Yeah. Anywho, uh, but when they're on, when they're on that clove oil, man, they're just like, all right. Okay.
You never lose a clove oil fish off the table. Does not happen. You know what I mean? Maybe make it easier for a computer to hit. Although it sounds like your computer can hit it pretty good.
Like what you never say, what's your miss rate? What is it? Like compared to a person. Much better, I'm sure. Well, well, so the the premise I was uh talking about is where if we miss, it would go a little too far back.
Then it would hit the motor cortex. Uh and then because of that, basically you still kind of get the b the the quality benefits. So we don't really experience um any misses. However, I will say uh the robot does break when uh particularly in startup when it's like calibrating. Um that uh especially earlier on when we first deployed it.
Now we we kind of have things rocking rolling or you know, we can do hundreds of fish an hour. But do you have a two hands free so that your hand doesn't get spiked? Well, as long as actually it's it's like a it's almost almost like a like a big box. And then it's uh the important thing right now is you put the fish in head first um any orientation, and then the fixed string system we designed is kind of like you know, size agnostic and space agnostic, so it kind of wraps around the animal. The um But it like it closes in almost like like a custom sluice.
Sorry. No one can see my hands, but you can't we're kind of like suctioning around the fish. All right. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And uh it's great, it's gravity fed. Gravity fed as well. Yeah, yeah. It's gravity fed from uh a funnel, basically.
And then it reaches its um IKG made point. Right. And yeah, there's a nose plate that stops it. Now your original one was on a was actually on a boat, which seems like a bigger pain in the butt, but they probably don't require you to have as fast a throughput as you would on land, right? Yeah.
Very, very different robot that. That was like uh, you know, six by six feet um tall, kind of like a 3D printer, which was the original idea I mocked up in my dorm room, but with a water jet. And so the theory why we want to use a water jet was you know, you can use salt water, which really, you know, you can't because you know metals corrode and the piping and things like that. Yeah, you used aluminum. Yeah.
Salt water really rough on that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we could have we could have made it with stainless steel, which would have been f better, but even that has a shelf light to it too. So um uh and then the fixturing system was much more manual than it was today. So we reverted back to um uh a mechanical-based system, which I we've had much more success with.
You know, shoot, shoot, shoot how how often do you have to replace the? I mean, is a spike pretty much a a lifetime Megillah. I uh probably about a month of operations. Then you but we we leave um you know all the items for Michael's team. We've got replacement spikes.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Uh so uh another uh thing I thought was interesting about this is that, you know, for those of you that don't know, Koho is a relatively small salmon, right? And so usually like um these techniques in when they're done industrially or or commercially, are done on larger high value fish where there's less uh you know, uh a single operation is over a larger quantity of fish meat.
Uh and so it's you know, I mean, obviously, uh, you know, at whatever they call it Sakiji now, like they're doing, you know, these techniques on smaller fish constantly, but not on a commercial/slash industrial scale. So it's interesting that you're bringing it using the uh the automation allows you to bring it to a smaller fish species than let's say tuna or one of the larger salmon. Well, the end goal for the robot is we're about three something seconds uh per fish in uh in one lane, and then of course multi-lane system. So the intention is that we have many lanes, each one running about a thousand fish an hour. So then you can just stack them all together if they're modular, and in turn you can reach those industrial throughputs.
Because 250 is, you know, I think okay, uh manageable for you know, medium-sized, maybe smaller farm, but when you're going to like, you know, these guys are doing like hundreds of millions of fish, you know, every year. It's um for that you do need like faster throughput. This is one reason we've been Shinke and Local Coho has been a good partnership is we're both the right size for each other. Yeah, we're both right size, yeah, right. Exactly.
You know, young, small uh startup companies. Uh we're not harvesting, you know, millions or even thousands of fish every week. It's pretty small number. Um uh we deployed their 2.0 uh Shinke system and they're working on their 4.0. So it's like we're kind of what happened to three kind of growing and deploy three.
Yeah. Spike goes in, brain comes out. Spike goes in, brain comes out. All right. Uh Michael, I think most of these questions are are for you.
So Jacob P writes in um I think uh RAS, which is recirculating uh aquaculture system. Uh systems are an important piece of fixing the largely unsustainable seafood industry. Here are my questions uh for Michael and Safe. Why focus on Coho over other species such as uh Chinook slash king, sake, or rainbow trout? One.
Uh and since you are focusing on uh recirculation, have you looked at integrating this with hydroponics to create an aquaponic system to take advantage of the full nitrogen cycle? And I guess the answer is what do you do with all your extra nitrogen? I'm assuming you have biofilters coming out of your your ears. And uh are you able, and I'm curious about this, to share your feed conversion ratio uh off uh off of what you like, you know, for for those of you who don't know, like classic like people think people want to know is inputs versus outputs. One of the main inputs is food.
Obviously, there's other inputs in a recirculating system like uh electricity and all these other things, but you want to take a take some brain stabs at these? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um so the first one was species choice, I think, right? Yeah. So uh we chose Coho for a few different reasons.
Uh one, uh it's a salmon that does well in fresh water. So that is important. We wanted a species that thrived or you know, could live a healthy full life cycle in fresh water. Kings also do well in freshwater, by the way. Um, some of the old auras were all fresh, right?
And some of them. Yeah, like you've heard you've heard of the Tai, or King Tai, which is like their um big old super luxury, you know, uh 30 pound plus salmon. Those are all grown in fresh water. Uh so uh so certain salmon do well in freshwater. Cohos do well.
Uh cohes also have a relatively um compared to some other salmon, quicker life cycle. How old is how old's a harvested? Uh it should be about 18 months versus, you know, up to say 36 for an Atlantic salmon and I kind of forget what the aura kangs. I think they were about 30 months. So 18, you know, that's a shorter life cycle.
So there's some like kind of commercial and economic benefits to that. Um they taste good. Like cohos are well respected salmon. There's basically three, I consider three premium Pacific species that people really seem to like. Kings, sockeyes, and cohos.
Uhos. We definitely wanted to avoid the Atlantic salmon as a species because that's really the commodity player in the salmon market. It's not really the fish's fault, though. It's not the fish's fault. You're right.
But we know we're trying to be a little more of a um about chums. It's such a bad name. No one's gonna want to eat chum. Yeah, they got a name problem. You know, the old CEO at uh New Zealand King Salmon, he used to like, he'd be like, thank God it's called King.
Yeah, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like my marketing is done for me. Yeah. And what do you eat in chum?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all right. Um so that okay, so that was species, and then uh what was the next one? Uh it was uh have you looked into integrating hydroponics, growing other things like plants and whatnot to fix the nitrogen and use it for a separate source of income. Yeah, uh we have not.
It it does exist. It's it's really two separate businesses, and and it's hard to align scales. Um, because you need like, you know, um uh you have a huge huge uh say lettuce production for a small salmon production. It's hard to align scales. You need the right amount of lettuce for the right amount of salmon.
What are you gonna do? That's that's right. Yeah. What are you gonna do? Yeah, so it's a much needs to serve a salad and salmon.
Really, oh sorry, no salad today. That's right. You know, everyone has to eat 10 pounds of uh lettuce for two ounces of salmon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that what it is?
Is that is that I I uh don't I don't know if that's the exact ratio, but it's Michael Favreau said. Didn't a farm in Brooklyn try this out? There's there's a there's a successful one small, again, small, because this is a young, nascent industry, this ras industry. But there's one in Wisconsin. How do they call it in the biz?
RAS? Yeah, Ras. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. There's one in Wisconsin. Uh they're called Superior Fresh. Yeah. Are they?
Uh fresh or superior? Either. I don't know. I don't know. These two.
I've actually their salmon yet, actually. All right. All right. Try the competitors. Don't be like these pizza people that don't eat other people's pizza.
I love trying. I love doing side by sides. I love it. But they're doing pretty well. And they've been around a while.
But it's a it's a very, it's a much more complicated business, a lot much more capital intensive. It's already a capital-intensive business to start with. Right. Requires a lot of, you know, a lot of money up front. Um so we just, you know, we wanted to focus on this the salmon or the fish side of it.
Um as far as capturing effluent or fish waste, we're not quite at this stage yet. When we build our larger farm, uh there's gonna be some more bells and whistles, and one thing we will do is build in the capacity to capture the fish waste. Um, and then that becomes it's it's a ready-to-go organic fertilizer. Yeah, I mean, it's just nitrogen up nitrogen, nitrogen, nitrogen stuff. Yeah.
And like we're in we're in the farm country up in central New York. Like there's a home for all this. Yeah. Yeah, I think most of those uh double systems of plants like are most successful on cottage scale kind of situations, like someone doing it for them, like for small communities and for themselves, right? Not on an industrial level, or I i it seems to be at least so far.
You know, maybe 20 years from now be a different story. I don't know if someone will figure it out. Now, your feed conversion ratio, are you willing to talk about it? Yeah, uh I will, but I I'm gonna And what percentage of the food is fish-based food, like fish meal, fish oil? Well, that's what I want to talk more about fish in, fish out.
Fish in, fish out, I love it. It's five, it's the new FIFO people. It's the new FIFO. For you accountants, this is the the more fun version of FIFO. Yeah.
Um so yeah, feed conversion ratio is just how many pounds of feed do you feed a salmon over its lifetime to get uh a pound uh of harvested fish? And it doesn't ever consider like, well, what's in the feed? It's it's just pounds of feed. Um so it's it's an interesting, it's an important metric for the producer, particularly because it has commercial implications, like you know, and a lot of sustainability people are worried about growing one plant to feed if if it's not fish-based, if it's plant-based, right? They're interested in like, you know, why are you growing a billion pounds of whatever to make a cow, right?
So they do care about non-fish-based foods, but I think in your business, fish inputs are the big whooping. That's the big one, right? So, like, you know, if you're gonna farm fish, you you know, gotta kill fish to grow fish. It seems kind of counterintuitive if you're gonna grow 10 pounds of fish to go use a hundred pounds of wild fish. Right, right.
So what's the number? Because I only have two minutes left. I gonna write. Our number is zero. You zero fish?
Zero. So where are you getting the oils from? Because they don't make their own. Algae oil. Algae oil, algae oil, and who's growing the algae oil?
Uh Vera Maris. Nice. So zero. And then so how many pounds of stuff does it take? Just so people know.
Is it like is it like I know like chickens like under two? Is it like 20 or is it? Oh, FCR? Yeah. Uh, you know, we haven't hit we haven't hit our target growth curve yet.
So we're supposed to grow them in 18 months. It's been taking longer. So our FCRs are kind of out of whack. Right. We want to.
What should it be? What's too good target? Uh geez. I think it's like 1.5. Oh, good.
Yeah. Good. Uh and uh a lot of people are worried about the one of the things people worry about is uh inputs of things like electricity and whatnot. Um you're you're re-circulating the water. But uh I'm I'm assuming there's ways to ameliorate that, but before we go, I want to talk about Jasmin and uh other taint stuff.
How do you prevent that stuff from getting into your systems and putting taint in? And also, because we're gonna rip me off the air here, is that fresh water versus salt water with the free amino acids in the fish getting the flavor profile. Have you ever considered going brackish, or is it just technologically too difficult to do recirculating inland brackish uh system? Yeah, a lot of questions. Uh off-flavors like Josmin, um, it exists in recirculating freshwater systems.
You need to have a finishing stage. So we have a finishing pool or finishing tank where the fish will live for a week. They'll go off bead, and then we have some technology that basically um uh through oxidation is killing. I think you can ozone the hell out of the the water as it goes through, right? Yeah, yeah.
And so that's removing the geosmond and the two MIB. Yeah. Uh what is it, methyl iso I had to write it down. Something uh methyl iso, I forget. Something, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Um so that and that and that works. Like uh the fish quality is really good. You don't get any off flavors if you do this well. You and you get it, you know uh clean, mild, uh, but also savory.
Yeah, what about what about uh what about brackish? Is no one do no one's gonna do brackish too complicated? I I think it would be difficult. It yeah, it sounds like it's complicated from uh water filtration and and maintaining fish appetite. Um because we find that the more clean and pure and less particles are in the water, the fish eat better.
Um and again, you want them to eat because you want them to grow. Do you hand feed or do you have some sort of computer to make sure that they're eating all the crap? Uh it's we have a little, there's a little like uh I thought a picture of someone going and throwing some food inside. That's like for a show and say, hey, look at look at the fish. Uh it's pretty automated, right?
They'll come to the surface and they'll eat. But yeah, it's automated. There's um feeders above each uh tank and it's on a uh timer, and you kind of adjust your period always adjusting, you know, um, to try to get the right feed and match their appetite levels. Uh seasonality, it's another thing that impacts feed. All right.
Well, listen, we're gonna put some of these things up on our socials. Uh Michael Fabro and uh Safe Kawaja, thanks for coming on talking about killing fish and growing fish uh and the new movement towards ras aquaculture, which uh we appreciate. Obviously, there's more to talk about. Maybe we'll have you back sometime. Uh on the way out, do I have two seconds, uh Joe?
Quick. All right. Kevin McHugh wants to know is there a way to de acidulate a juice so as to make a lemon thing with no acid. You can get very, very mild uh sodium hydroxide lye solutions. You can pre-buy them to known molarities.
And maybe Quinn can put a I'll put a calculator for you of how much to add to X amount of lemon juice to neutralize it. But let me tell you in advance, it tastes bad. When you neutralize wines, they taste terrible. When you neutralize juice, they taste real bad. Thanks for coming on, guys.
Thank you for having us. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Yeah.
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