The story of how wild salmon came onto my radar coincides with my appreciation for chocolate. I can just hear you asking, how?
Well, for most of my life, the only encounter I ever had with salmon was, unfortunately, of the farmed Atlantic variety. Pale in color, streaked with stripes of fat (that I now know come from the fish sitting idle for its lifetime in a feedlot, where it is deprived of its natural necessity to migrate), and with only enough flavor to warrant the description “fish dinner.” It was, at best, a semblance of a seafood experience. Never a wow.
But it wasn’t until I took a bite of perfectly cooked wild Alaskan sockeye that I understood the essence of salmon, with its moist flakes and robustness of flavor, and that unmistakable scarlet-colored flesh. It was what I like to call a flava-lation — a revelation of flavors that brought me to elation. A jolt to the taste buds that showed up like an awakening. Like my brain instantly indexed the experience as a new definition of absolute glory, this time in the form of wild salmon.
Not unlike the moment when — after a lifetime of regarding milk chocolate movie theater candy bars as chocolate — my father handed me a piece of Belgian dark chocolate. I took a bite and allowed it to melt in my mouth, its depth of flavor in that moment making me feel like a bonafide adult. In both cases, the new experience became cataloged in my mind as a full-throttle wow, and I’ve never turned back on either.
But exceptional flavor is one thing when it comes to the wild salmon difference — the health factor is also key, which I know is something I want to focus on in the new year. Like dark chocolate, wild salmon boasts antioxidants that may support healthy hearts. Both dark chocolate and wild salmon have been touted as foods that may help reduce inflammation that can lead to chronic illness. And, for me, there’s also the feel-good factor of being able to savor something so rich in flavor. Eating food of this intensity, whether sweet or savory, revealed to me that much of what I’d eaten until then had been a mere facsimile of real food.
May the enjoyment that you receive from consuming wild salmon and quality chocolate match the inherent wellness that you’re sure to receive from both. Wild salmon and dark chocolate forever.
Live Wild,
Monica
Pictured above: A plate of sockeye salmon in all of its rich, red, robustly flavored glory.
