The last few days I’ve had a look at the seafood chain from beginning
to end. On Thursday of last week I
visited the Oceanic Institute
(OI), a non-profit aquaculture research and development organization, just down
the road on windward Oahu. OI is an impressive place – the white shrimp
they have been raising play such a big role in the seafood supply, odds are any
shrimp you’ve gobbled up in the last decade or two is an OI descendant.

Here are the shrimp tanks (not a bad backdrop)…

And here are the Moi tanks (Moi is a popular Hawaiian fish)…

I also saw a few algae tanks, but since it was microscopic algae
invisible to the naked eye, I’ll skip the photo.

My next stop along the seafood
supply chain was Tamashiro’s
Market on Saturday morning. I’ve
never been before, and I’m going to have to steal an adjective from the Frommer’s
review to describe it – dizzying. The
extra long fresh seafood counter isn’t full of neat and tidy fillet after neat
and tidy fillet like you might be used to.
The “fillet” section is more like the meat counter – the amount you want
is cut to order off of a big beautiful portion.
And many species are whole; piled up, still wet from the ocean. After a few visits, we’ll venture out, but
for the first trip we chose a pound of Ahi (yellow fin) tuna.

There were several informative
signs describing the species and the best ways to prepare them, but my favorite
was this news clipping, “Women who eat fish found to have smart kids.” Love it!

Finally, the last stop on the
seafood chain, the plate. We seared our
Ahi for dinner last night using this
simple, simple recipe and it was scrumptious. Amazing tuna like the piece we had doesn’t
need much done to it. In fact, the
middle was raw and our favorite part. I
have a little leftover for lunch today, and I can’t wait for noon to roll
around.