Wild & Free

Look at this incredible piece of wild, vivacious salmon, drawn from the chilly waters of the Atlantic ocean. She lived a life of freedom and adventure, her flesh taking on a gorgeous explosively saturated orangey-pink hue from the beta-carotene in the shells of the amphipods she ate in life.

I paid extra for this wild & free life of hers, of course. Her farm-raised cousins with their less-exciting lives of corn and beta-carotene supplements are much cheaper.

The salmon is a carnivorous fish. They don't really like corn. It's like trying to raise a lion on grits. It doesn't really work. So the farmed ones get supplements of various types to keep them going. Natural salmon meat, without the effects of the amphipod diet, is gray in color, so farmed fish are fed a supplement of beta-carotene to instill a sort of semblance of wild-pink in their meat.

I kid you not, there is a special color wheel made for salmon. It’s called The SalmoFan®. The farmer decides what shade of salmon he would like his salmon to be, because gray is not going to sell very well, and a corresponding level of color is then added to the feed.

The result is never really the same as a wild salmon, as you can tell by comparing my wild & free sample here with the less saturated pinks of the $4.99 a pound stuff.

And the taste is no comparison either. The fish whose flank-segment lies in my non-stick pan above was fantastic, full of flavor and fun and stories of chasing fish and swimming in three dimensions.

It's well worth the extra price, even if it's only once in a while.