Smoked Haddock - How does this work?

Caught in the NE Atlantic, Frozen, Shipped to china for filleting/portion control & "smoking", reimported in bulk then repackaged in Manchester?

Local food at its best.

on 27/12/2018, Chris B supposed :

So - frozen at sea, transported all the way to China, defrosted, 'smoked', then refrozen for transport back.

As a youngster, I used to walk 3 miles there and three back, to collect some fresh smoked haddock for my father's tea. I would usually get a taste of it. It was sublime and retained its yellow colour through the cooking process and the colour penetrated the flesh deep.

I have not had the 'proper' smoked haddock since those far off days.

Very probably. China appears to have a big fish reprocessing and export business. See the map on page 2 of this PDF

Youngs Seafoods caused a PR disaster when it was found out in 2006 that they were shipping Scottish scampi out to Thailand for processing before bringing it back for sale in the UK. It sounds as if this could be the same sort of thing.

Nick

Not just Youngs though. Pretty sure market forces made it a trend hard for any processor to resist once one gained an advantage by sending fish overseas for processing.

Tim

There is better stuff about than the dyed stuff that looks like a poor copy of Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers. Even supermarkets have eg

I'm sure you are right about the processing but the other companies kept very quiet whilst the spotlight fell on Youngs. The newspapers of the time were very focused on the big, well-known company. Because of my connections at the time I was aware that Youngs hired outside help to assess their reputational damage but my connections were not close enough to learn details of the outcome.

Nick

Sounds a bit like the same as the CE marking on goods. Its about as genuine as many of those are. Somebody on the radio the other day reckons that 1 in four things purchased is either a knock off or just fake. It will I imagine require something really bad to happen before anyone fixes the supply chains. Brian

Brian Gaff presented the following explanation :

My concern in all of this, is that it is caught, frozen on the ship - then has to be thawed to smoke, before being refrozen.

Once thawed, my understanding is that it is not safe to refreeze.

What rather put me off the other (more expensive) offerings from other sources, was bones and skin. This was suggested to be be free and skin free - and so it proved.

Why would you think that? Most "fresh" fish has been frozen, and can be refrozen at home according to the pack instructions.

Umm.. Isn't smoking a way to preserve meat?

It can be, but I think it's mainly for flavour. Smoked haddock doesn't last longer that unsmoked, and the same applies to bacon.

These days haddock (and cod etc) are usually just smoked to give flavour. There's little if any preservative effect. Old style smoking was very different giving a drier result - and involving also a lot more salt.

The colour was just a dye and did nothing for the taste. BFK was what used to be used but its cancerogenic. They use a vegetable dye these days. I buy undyed smoked fish these days.

BFK was Brown for Kippers - not haddock. Smoked haddock was yellow.

Yes - the original reason for it. We had fires before fridges. ;-)

That's not true of something that is smoked, that smoking kills bacteria.

Under controlled conditions (as in a food factory - not your average kitchen), it is perfectly safe (note Safe - it may adversely affect the texture) to freeze/thaw/freeze several times

Understand that there is a huge gap between 'if some numpty does this in a completely stupid way and gets food posioning we have disclaimed any respionsibility' and 'a sensible person with some understanding of bacterial behaviour can do this safely all year'