Gillotinage Tasteland

"Say hey to Billy Bass for me next time you're in the den."

Since in my unsleeping libido for food bargains (first typed "barfains") I've probably come closer than anyone alive to memorizing the whole of the inventory website, in unit prices not least, for my local branches of Hannaford, a regional supermarket chain, it was only a matter of parsley, sage, rosemary and time *

*Among towns with Hannafords a bit further up the Maine coast, I might do well to peruse the Scarborough fare

before I would find for sale, in two of the branches in Dover and Rochester, Atlantic Frozen Salmon Fish Heads @ $ .49/lb, or about one-tenth the price of the cheapest fresh or frozen salmon (for the canned version, you can get 14.75 ounces of water-packed pink salmon at the cheap end for around $3, and jack mackerel and tomato-sauced Pacific sardines for around $1.79).

So my next dolly-loaded trunkful of protein may now be fairly said to be spoken for; for a joyously juicy and Joycean, and anything but prim primer on my parallel lust for all organ meats and abattoir sweepings great and small, see my 2009 post, Bloom in Offal, or, Liffey Ways to Love Your Liver.

Here's PBR Fisher, introducing a recipe for Salmon-head soup:

Salmon heads aren't small. The eyes are big as pennies. The heavy heads feel hard and sleek, like chunks of airplane fuselage. Cleaning them means getting right up close and personal with them, rinsing away blood and cutting out sturdy accordion-folded gill arches. This ain't no anonymous block of protein; this is a chunk of animal, it's staring right at you, and it's got little teeth.

But the head is where the good stuff is: bones, brains, meat and plenty of the silkiest fat I've ever tasted, and seriously, the Asian market nearby sells them for 59 cents a pound. Like most cheap cuts, it takes time and effort to get the best out of them, but the results are magic: The finished soup is buttery. Creamy, almost, which is unusual in a dairy-free soup. The soup itself smells like fish, but tastes salmony instead of fishy, even after two days in the fridge.

Here's northern California food writer Hank Shaw - he and his hunter/journalist ladyfriend Holly had just caught three spring-run king salmon when they

decided to dispense with the fillets (they went straight into the freezer) and wallow for a week in the "nasty bits."

As my friend Josh and other readers have pointed out, there really aren't any truly nasty bits on a salmon, but what I'm talking about are the pieces many anglers toss into the river: heads, collars, bellies and bones.

These parts are quite possibly the best cuts on a salmon, as they are fattier and have a more interesting texture and flavor than straight-up fillets — and those fillets are themselves spectacular. 

... The most surprising dish has been a salmon head soup I made last night. These salmon heads had been in our fridge for six days — long enough for a normal fish head to start stinking. These had no odor at all. None. I am still kind of in shock about this, and I attribute it to our bleeding out the fish immediately after catching them, and then putting them on ice after that.

I made the soup the Japanese way: I brought the three heads to a bare simmer (not a boil) with a slab of kombu seaweed, a three-inch piece of ginger and a little salt. I let this simmer for 20 minutes or so, until the heads started to collapse. I picked out the meat — especially the cheeks, which, unlike the rest of the fish were grayish white, like the dark meat on a chicken. I then strained it it through cheesecloth and serve d the soup with somen noodles and a dollop of white miso. (Here is the recipe.)

So satisfying, even on a hot evening. Holly thought it almost buttery, with pearls of salmon fat dotting the surface of the broth like constellations. The cheek meat was transcendent, and strangely meaty; it tasted uncannily like the "oyster" in a chicken or pheasant.

From a post on Grilling Salmon Heads at bbum's weblog-o-mat:

Earlier, I lamented that Google had failed to find a decent recipe for Salmon heads. And, after yesterday's adventures, I had a pile o' salmon heads that would be sad to waste. Salmon heads are full of all kinds of incredibly tasty meat — little bits of incredibly fatty yummy muscle that isn't used much for swimming. And, as Rama indicated, the cheeks — the heavenly little salmon cheeks. As the oyster of a chicken is to the rest of chicken meat, the salmon cheek is to the rest of the salmon!

So, given 3 fresh salmon heads of the highest quality and an easter dinner party full of relatively adventurous eaters, I decided to wing it.

The results were so delicious that I only have before pictures. The meat was flavorful and incredibly tender. We used forks to pull out the tasty bits and smeared it on bread like butter (it was that tender) and topped it with various cheeses.

From the comments beneath a post devoted to Salmon heads at Chowhound:

My grandmother, who is Japanese as am I, makes a fish stock out of the heads then pops the eyeballs into her mouth and smiles at us as it goes "pop" in her mouth. One day I will try it. Maybe.

By steve on Jul 27, 2002 12:51 AM

UPDATE: 

I just had Hannaford Dover order me two ten-pound boxes, for a Saturday pickup.

I can smell them already.

Vitamin D, Omega-3, nine-eighty*, look at me.

*April meat budget: 20 lbs. frozen salmon heads x $ 0.49/lb. = $ 9.80.