The aroma is reminiscent of roasted nuts, mushy peas and starchy vegetables, while the complex flavors include “sweet ocean,” “egg white” and “buttery.”
If you think these are the tasting notes for a glass of chardonnay or sauvignon blanc, you'd be wrong. It's actually the description for a fillet of pan-fried King George whiting.
The Australian seafood industry is following the lead of wine labels by developing a language to describe the appearance and flavor of fish, prawns, oysters and other ocean catch.
In what they claim is a world first, the fishermen and oyster growers from South Australia's Eyre Peninsula will today launch a Seafood Flavor Wheel and detailed sensory descriptions of 12 species including mussels, tuna, oysters, rock lobster and snapper.
It’s a program the industry hopes will be rolled out to cover all types of seafood caught or farmed around Australia.
The executive director of the Fisheries, Research and Development Corporation, Patrick Hone, said it was an important step in giving consumers a better understanding of the huge variety of species consumed in Australia and would help take the pressure off species such as King George whiting.
“Australians love their seafood,” he said. “It comes from so many varied places and has so many flavors. We wanted to encapsulate this in words.
“You go to a great winemaker and he has a magnificent bottle of wine and he starts describing it as having soft overtones of blackberries. And then he goes to chef and says lets match food to that wine. At the moment we have no language of seafood. Once you have that language you can have a much more in-depth conversation about food and wine.”
Hone said it was the first time in the world that the characteristic flavors of seafood had been analyzed and described in such detail.
