From the deck in Sitka to your table — how time, temperature, and care define true seafood quality
When we started Sitka Seafood Market (then known as Sitka Salmon Shares) back in 2012, the first fish we sold were frozen kings and cohos. At the time, selling frozen fish seemed like the only practical way to do it. Here in Sitka, we enjoy the bounty of our summer’s catch all winter long, with the occasional fresh (not frozen) dinner during the fishing season. We do it this way for a ton of reasons, which is why we’ve never seriously considered trying to deliver fresh seafood to your doorstep. Okay, let’s dig into it!
When we're out longlining or trolling for your fish, we bleed and remove the gills and guts immediately after they come out of the water. As soon as that’s complete, we pack them in ice below deck to chill them down quickly and retain quality. Any misstep in this workflow becomes apparent. If we don’t bleed our catch, it results in blood within the fillets, which is especially noticeable on halibut’s white meat. If the catch isn’t chilled quickly, the flesh becomes soft, and what we call “gaping” occurs. Neither outcome is acceptable for your shares. These steps preserve our catch for days with little to no degradation. We then deliver our catch to a processor to be filleted and flash-frozen before the fish degrades, ensuring you get consistent, high-quality seafood.
Spending days at sea means fishermen can stay on the fish even when they are far from town, minimizing time spent running back and forth. Because they do the preservation work right on the boats, there's no need to sell daily. If we were to sell fresh fish and try to get it directly to customers, it's a valuable exercise to walk you through that process.
First, the logistics of getting hook-and-line salmon to a plant in Sitka for filleting and freezing mean most fishermen go out on 3-4 day trips. When they return to town, the fish are weighed, purchased, and iced down again to be boxed and shipped. This takes about a day, so some fish from that trip are now 4.5 days old. Once boxed, they are driven to the airport and flown out on Alaska Air Cargo to Seattle. This process is aided by the industrial coolers in Sitka, as small gel packs aren’t designed to keep fish cold for extended periods. In Seattle, a logistics company picks them up for delivery to local restaurants and markets, or loads them onto another plane bound for other cities.
As we learned when we first flew frozen fish south, it can get hot on the tarmac at Sea-Tac. If the fish boxes aren’t loaded into a cooler quickly, they will warm up and degrade. You often hear the term “time and temperature” in the seafood industry. Because most of the industry isn’t directly connected to what happens on the boats, this is how they control the quality of the fish they receive. A 90-degree tarmac for hours is hard on fish quality if they are allowed to warm up.
moving sablefish into the freezer
For this example, let’s say the fish only warmed up slightly and was loaded onto another flight to O’Hare. The salmon arriving on another hot summer runway is now 6 days old. If everything went perfectly from a temperature standpoint during transit, that fish is probably still decent quality.
Next, it gets picked up by a wholesaler’s truck at O’Hare. The following morning, they break the fish down into fillets, which are then picked up by a distributor for delivery around Chicago. The lucky restaurants that get that salmon onto a chef’s menu that night will probably serve a good piece of fish—but sadly, not all will. Most of those 7-day-old fillets will be delivered to fish markets and grocery stores around the city. Those display cases advertising "fresh fish" will be putting 8-day-old salmon on display—and that's before any is even sold.
Then the fish sits for more days, really starting to degrade in quality. Even an 8-day-old fish might be acceptable, with just a slight fishy smell, but any previous temperature damage will become obvious. It continues to sit on ice until sold, with some eventually going into a marinade or being smoked to mask the fishiness.
Back in 2015, we used a device to test fish quality based on cellular breakdown. We tested fresh wild salmon around the Chicagoland area and found the average age was 14.1 days! It might not sound ancient, but if it warmed up at all in transit, its quality degraded to that of fish that had been out of the sea for a fortnight! All that expensive, carbon-heavy air travel resulted in inconsistent quality—and certainly some waste when fish took too long to sell.
Now let’s return to the frozen fish in your shares. The on-boat process is the same: fishermen deliver 3-4-day-old, bled, and iced fish to a plant in Sitka. There, it’s filleted, vacuum-sealed, and blast-frozen within 24 hours—before any degradation occurs. That fish is shipped south in a freezer container, where it never warms above 0°F. From Seattle, it travels in a freezer truck all the way to our freezers in Galesburg, IL. There, it’s packed in dry ice and shipped right to your doorstep. This allows you the flexibility to thaw our catch whenever you’re ready to eat it.
Another bonus: wild salmon cannot be eaten raw unless it has been frozen. The FDA food code requires fish intended for raw consumption to be frozen at specific, intense temperatures. The blast-freezing process kills any parasites and makes it sushi-grade, so you can safely enjoy it as sushi, crudo, or in your next poke bowl.
There are exceptions, like the Copper River salmon fishery, where wild salmon is flown out the day after it's caught. Their sockeye and king salmon openings early in the season usually last just one day, and fishermen return that evening in high-speed boats. The following day is closed to fishing, so those first salmon of the season are flown out fresh. Those kings and sockeye are the first to market and often command prices north of $50/lb. It’s great fish if you can afford it—but I’ll take my blast-frozen Sitka Seafood Market fish any day.
Marsh Skeele
Marsh is our original fisherman and helped start Sitka Seafood Market over a decade ago. He grew up fishing with his family outside of Sitka and began his own fishing journey captaining the F/V Loon in 2011. Shortly thereafter at a dinner party sharing his catch, he met friends that figured out how to get his fish to the Midwest and Sitka Seafood Market was born. He loves finding the highest quality ingredients and sharing the stories of their harvest over a dinner party. You can find him fishing with his family in Sitka and searching for the next delicious piece of seafood to share with you..
