Why You Should Try Monkfish

0:00:00.8 John Sheehan: Monkfish is a great-tasting, sustainable seafood choice, often compared to lobster. And there are two US Monkfish fisheries on the East Coast.

0:00:09.1 Amanda Dauman: Monkfish is caught all throughout the Northeast from Maine to North Carolina, but the bulk of it is caught from Maine to New Jersey.

0:00:17.1 JS: But demand for monkfish is surprisingly low, for reasons more to do with international market forces than with scarcity.

0:00:25.4 AD: It's much more popular overseas in Korea and France and other places. It doesn't really have a domestic market.

0:00:33.0 JS: This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries. I'm John Sheehan. And today we'll hear about efforts to increase domestic consumption, demand, and even awareness of the humble monkfish.

0:00:42.6 AD: The idea is to promote monkfish in the Northeast where it's caught so that locals will be more aware of it as a local species.

0:00:52.3 JS: This is my guest, Amanda Dalman, a fisheries specialist with the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County, New York. They're a NOAA fisheries partner and recipient of the Salt and Stall Kennedy Grant, awarded to groups that support US seafood. Their marketing and expansion program promoting monkfish has involved market analysis and local partnerships in and around Long Island.

0:01:14.5 AD: We've gotten so many partners, not just fishermen, though they're a very big part of it, but also processors, dealers, retailers, some restaurants we got to partner with that did cooking demos with us. If they were into monkfish, if they were dealing with monkfish, if they were harvesting it, then we were hoping to get them into the program.

0:01:37.8 JS: And why isn't it popular? It's delicious. Let's get that out on the table. It's a really delicious fish, but there's not that much demand locally.

0:01:47.0 AD: No, there's not. We did surveys as part of our project. And what we found is that basically, an older demographic remembers monkfish. Older people know about monkfish. They know how to cook with it. They enjoy it. They love it. And young people have no idea that it's a thing. These days, there's just so much foreign imports coming in all the time, and that's competing with our local species, especially when it comes to supply. So monkfish is pretty readily available, and it holds up to being frozen also, so it can be available all year round. But when it's compared to things like salmon, which is grown all over the world, it can't compete.

0:02:34.4 JS: And I want to talk about market forces and sort of external things a little bit more in a minute. But is a big hurdle just the fact that it's not salmon, that consumers aren't immediately aware of the name?

0:02:47.7 AD: Yeah, I think that that's a big problem. They really, especially the younger demographic, has never heard of monkfish before, and then they see a picture of the fish, and they're like, oh, that looks scary, I don't want to eat that, and it can be a hard sell. The best way that we found of selling monkfish is to tell people what it tastes like before they put it in their mouth, and that's like lobster. So we tell people it has the same consistency as lobster. We've heard from the industry that they can replace lobster with monkfish in their dishes, and it's pretty much the same thing. It's really forgiving, especially for newer cooks, people who like to cook at home. It's not a hard seafood, but seafood in general also freaks people out.

0:03:33.1 JS: Yeah, it's not like it's any more or less attractive than a lobster.

0:03:38.7 AD: I know, a lobster is a big bug, right?

0:03:42.6 JS: Right. As kind of an experiment before this, I was looking around my local restaurants to see if anyone had monkfish on the menu, even as a special, and I was really surprised that there weren't that many, kind of proving your point.

0:03:56.4 AD: Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate. I've been really hyper-aware of local fish and how they're just not in restaurants. It's always the same couple of fish. It's salmon, tuna, Branzino, wherever that came from out of nowhere, things like that. It's never whiting, it's never monkfish, it's never Scup. It's nothing that's around Long Island.

0:04:19.8 JS: And so let's talk about some of your strategies and your goals and some of the things that you're trying to accomplish here. First, you mentioned a market analysis. What were some of the results from that?

0:04:35.2 AD: It's about a hundred pages. So we did a lot of different things to try and really nail down this analysis. We did surveys to all of the industry, so one for fishermen, one for the shoreside operations, one for the retailers. And so we can get basically a sense of the nuance as monkfish moves through the supply channel to see how the price increases as you go through, where the fishermen are getting less than $2 a pound, which is way less than they used to get. And then you see that the processors are then charging retailers or restaurants $5 to $6 to $8 a pound. And then for retailers, then they then mark it up to about $13 per pound for tails or for fillets. Unfortunately, monkfish also needs a little bit more processing than other fish, but it's still cheaper than a lot of other more popular fish. It's still going to be cheaper than when you go for cod. It's going to definitely be cheaper than lobster, depending on where you go.

0:05:41.1 JS: So this sounds like kind of a familiar story with US seafood anyway, which is a lot of domestic catch stopped being... There was less demand for it. That demand was picked up internationally. Now local consumers are just not as interested.

0:06:01.7 AD: They're not. People are, they don't want to buy something and then not know how to cook it and then have to throw it away. Like nobody wants to throw their money away. So it's really important, at least for us as like a grassroots kind of organization to get out there to the farmers markets to get out there and have people try it, do cooking demos with them, show them how easy it can be, share recipes. We have so many monkfish recipes now that we've been sharing and just show people that they don't have to be scared of it. Unfortunately, on the flip side, we did have another partner come to us. They're another kind of processor. They make seafood products for like grocery stores and things like that. And they said that species like monkfish that are unknown are seen by big companies as a big risk. Even the kind of spices or sauces that they will use to make a ready-made meal also needs to be like so safe to the consumer, like lemon and butter, which is really unfortunate because when we did our survey of consumers, the majority of them are into trying a new seafood. So there's some kind of disconnect there. There's all of this fear, I feel like, in the supply chain also, which is unfortunate.

0:07:23.5 JS: Sure, and I suppose when you put it like that, people's tastes being so subjective, you can sort of understand why a big company wouldn't want to take a risk. At the same time, it seems to me that that could also present an opportunity. Something like seafood, which can really be boom or bust, if you've got a product that is tasty and just around and abundant, why wouldn't you take a stab at it?

0:07:48.0 AD: Yeah, it is kind of a mystery. One fishermen described it as a chicken and the egg kind of paradox for monkfish. There's no demand, so the price is down, so the fishermen aren't really going out for it or they're not caring too much about it and it just goes around and around and around until you get to this point where the fishermen are still fishing for it because, of course, there are still gill netters out there who are catching monkfish and they're hoping that the price comes up again. So right now, going individually, trying to reach out to the people who are already into seafood, people who are already into local, seems to be the best route, as well as restaurants. And then once you have that momentum then doing the billboards and expensive marketing like that is going to work.

0:08:42.5 JS: And let's talk a little bit about preparation because I frequently get it at restaurants and admittedly, I am intimidated by that fish. It is kind of scary-looking. What do you do with it?

0:08:56.8 AD: It is a very forgiving fish once you know about that gray membrane that's on the tail because a lot of people don't know that you need to take it off. A lot of retailers or processors and fish dealers, they're selling monkfish as the whole tail, which is not exactly the way that consumers need it. They need it as a filet and they need that gray membrane off. And if you don't take it off, it's not good. It's not tasty anymore. That's a problem for sure.

0:09:29.0 JS: And so Amanda, lastly, what are some of these recipes you've been getting?

0:09:32.3 AD: One that sticks out to me is the recipe for the livers. Before I was in this job, I was actually a fishery observer with NOAA and I was on a couple of gill netters and draggers that harvested livers from the monkfish specifically. So I always wondered, like, who's eating that? Like, where is that going? And apparently, it's for a delicacy called ankimo, which is, it's Japanese, and it's basically like, I believe it's with vinegar or you cure it and you kind of make a chopped liver out of it almost, or like a paste. And then that paste can be cut into squares or you can put it on like sushi. That really piqued my interest. I kind of want to know what that tastes like, but I haven't had the opportunity 'cause you barely see monkfish out anywhere. You're not going to see the livers. The livers usually was export also. That's one that really stuck out to me.

0:10:30.9 JS: Yeah, no, I got to know about this now. Is it similar to how you would sort of serve caviar as like something on like an accoutrement to a piece of other fish or like as a seasoning or like, can you eat it straight?

0:10:45.4 AD: Mostly from what I've heard, you put it on, you put it like on sushi or like with your sashimi, kind of like you would do with like spicy mayo or eel sauce, kind of like that.

0:10:56.0 JS: And I imagine it's really pungent. I don't know, like monkfish liver has got to be super...

0:11:01.1 AD: Yes, it's very pungent.

0:11:04.1 JS: Yeah, no, sign me up. That sounds amazing. Amanda Dalman, thanks so much.

0:11:09.9 AD: Oh, thank you for inviting me. This was really great.

0:11:14.1 JS: Amanda Dalman is a fisheries specialist with the marine program with the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County. CCE is a nonprofit community education agency affiliated with Cornell University with offices across New York State. To find out more about their program to increase monkfish demand through product development and audience expansion, look for them at ccesuffolk.org. We'll have a link at our website too. If anyone is listening to this in the greater mid-Atlantic region and has a tip on where I can find Ankimo... Do you know how it's spelled?

0:11:45.8 AD: A-N-K-I-M-O.

0:11:49.2 JS: Thank you. Reach out to us on social media. We're at NOAA Fisheries on most major platforms. As always, you can learn more at fisheries.noaa.gov. I am John Sheehan, and this has been Dive In with NOAA Fisheries.