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My name is John Mellor and I own the boat we're on. It's called the High Hopes.
So it's a pretty labor-intensive fishery because on a typical day we'll 6 and 10,000 hooks.
So this is the gear we use, these are the long lines. The hooks are spaced about 3 feet
apart and each line has about 200 hooks on it.
We just make one or two-day trips, the fish come right out of the ice then go to the wholesaler
who distributes them to restaurants.
They go to high-end restaurants. It actually costs more in a restaurant to eat black cod
than salmon, just because its so tightly controlled by the government.
We try to fish sustainably and practice ecological habits in our operation and we always have.
The fish that are really small, we try and release alive because we'd like to see them
reproduce at least a couple of times before we catch them.
The bigger fish are typically for the Japanese market and for the local restaurants. And
they get as big as 35 or 40 pounds, they get massive.
There's such a large Asian population here in the Bay Area, including San Francisco and
San Jose and so forth, so we have good markets for live fish, we can sell all we can catch
here.
Most of the market for the dead fish is Japan.
So this is a really nice fish, it's probably about 20 pounds, see how it has a camouflage
color? It's a sign that it's really, really fresh. We just caught this 24 hours ago. The
meat, the flesh is really firm. It's a really, really nice quality fish, this one. This fish
here is probably worth, in a restaurant, maybe even over $100.
I've been fishing for black cod specifically for about 25 years. And all those years I
never liked Black Cod. Anything I tried, it didn't taste that good to me and I got a recipe
from a friend. And I tried it that way, and it was, I swear, one of the best fish I've
ever tasted. It's just, almost perfect.
You start with a fillet with the skin on, and then you just cut into cubes, but you
cut it sort of at an angle, so you get more meat.
So for the marinade you start off with the miso, then you add the sake and the miran,
and you just drop each one in the marinade. Leave it sitting on the counter for about
a half hour. And then basically you just take it out of the marinade and you put it in the
oven for about 10 minutes, broil it to caramelize it, make it kind of crusty and brown. And
it's just like candy, it's just something about the marinade, the way it sort of mixes
with the flavors of the fish, the oil of the fish, it's just delicious.