Once discarded, swordfish belly is now being smoked, cured, and served as pastrami and bacon in place of beef and pork at top restaurants across the country.
At GW Fins in New Orleans, executive chef Michael Nelson and his team are turning swordfish into pastrami, bacon, Bolognese, and even mortadella (“Swordella”) for the Crescent City’s signature sandwich, the muffuletta. They call it “the pork of the sea.”
From trim to treasure
If the “seacuterie” program at GW Fins had a genesis story, it would go something like this: In the beginning, there was the decision to buy whole fish and butcher it in-house instead of buying filets from the fishmongers.
The whole-fish program begat a massive amount of fish waste, which begat the need for four new trash cans, which begat the realization that something had to be done with all those discarded fish parts. That begat the idea of making fish charcuterie, much in the way that a meat butcher might make sausage out of the odds, ends, and leftovers of a cow or pig.
All of that begetting was about 14 years ago; since then, Nelson has added to the menu fish Bolognese and fish bacon, fish cracklings, and fish pastrami, all crafted from less marketable parts of various fish, especially swordfish.
“A lot of these fish only have like a 23% or 28% yield,” Nelson says. “So two-thirds of everything we were buying was ending up in the trash. Out of respect for the ingredients and respect for what it takes to get this fish to the restaurant, we couldn’t stand to let all this stuff go to waste.”…