Ok, folks, there are some very smart folks on these boards, so I have an odd question:
I love seafood, but for most of my life I have not cared for shrimp. Everyone else would be chowing down and loving every bite, and everytime I’d try a shrimp it would taste like a mouthful of Clorox bleach. Blech. I’m not talking about a mild or faint taste here: I’m talking tasting just like bleach smells.
I have since discovered that sometimes I luck out and don’t get bleachy-tasting shrimp. Sometimes they taste wonderful, like little sweet lobsters. And even sometimes some shrimp on the same plate are good and others taste like bleach.
Also the odd thing is until recently I believed no one else could taste the bleach.
I happened to mention this to my sister when she was visiting my mom last year, and she commented “I can’t stand the taste of shrimp–they taste just like bleach to me!”
Can anyone explain this?
Better yet, can anyone tell me: is there any way to consistently pick shrimp that won’t taste like they’ve soaked in Clorox all day?
I know just what you mean. Shrimp doesn’t bother me as much as scallops do though. I had scallops once from a roadside stand in Cape Cod and they tasted tender and sweet almost like candy. But normally that sweet is masked behind a wall of some weird chemical taste and I can’t stand them. Its bizarre to me that most people I dine with won’t know what I’m talking about if I complain. Lobster and other seafoods usually have the same problem so I avoid seafood.
Maybe you are over-sensitive to some chemical in the shrimp, so it seems to you there’s more than what is actually there. I know for myself I have to hold my breath with eggs and chicken - reeks of sulfer to me, but others don’t seem to notice. Same with lemon juice on some foods - like strong vinegar to me, catches my breath, it seems so strong. Others don’t seem to notice. Just a chemical sensitivity, as far as I can guess.
I know what you mean, they DO usually taste like bleach.
And for anyone who thinks you have to literally ingest bleach to taste it-
you obviously don’t go overboard cleaning with bleach, or you’d know the taste exactly. Breathe much of it, and you really can taste it. (and you’ll feel like crap for a good long while afterward too.)
hmmm… they’re salt water critters and salt is sodium and chlorine. Chlorine is also a major part of Chlorox, so maybe there’s some connection there although I don’t have any idea why some shrimp would taste more chloriney than others.
What if it’s just leftover bleach they use to clean the storage containers?
Possible.. yes? the large ones have bottom or side drains and there is always some liquid in the bottom.
Shrimp do taste strongly of 'iodine" at times, particularly if the dark vein down the back isn’t removed. Even if they are fresh, they’ll taste of salt water, which has an “ocean” salty flavor, with a tinge of iodine. Like iodinated salt, only stronger.
Shrimp, and all seafood, deteriorate rapidly after death, and the decomposing proteins have a distinctive and very nasty chemical taste. This is detectable even in small amounts if you are in-the-know. To me, this taste is reminiscent of dish detergent. You think some soapy water has splashed on the fish. It’s often only on a couple of shrimp in a batch, but might be on all.
One of the more scandalous practices of seafood markets, particularly low-volume ones in grocery stores, is that of . . . bleaching the seafood. Yup, that’s correct. Most of the seafood they sell is not fresh, but has been previously frozen. Nobody will buy frozen from a market, so they thaw it. Then, it goes bad. So, they rinse the seafood in a solution of bleach to slow down decomposition and knock down the smell so that you can’t tell it is going bad.
So, you’re not imagining it. You are tasting Clorox.
Chicken eggs do taste of sulfur because the sulfur content in them is very high. Duck eggs do NOT taste that way, because they contain little in the way of sulfur compounds.
Chicken that has been fed on fish-meal and feed made from waste chicken from processing plants has a clearly fishy and/or rotten-chicken taste. You won’t notice this if you have been eating this kind of chicken all along, but if you are sensitive to the taste of the rotten-fish chemicals in fish, you’ll be able to detect it in chicken, as the chicken feed is made from waste, rotting fish.
All-natural chicken that is really all-natural won’t taste like that.
That is why most of the meat that people eat (with a large exception of fish) comes from vegetarian animals. It is only the perverse farming practices of today that we feed these animals other animals (man I am sounding like a vegan). We do not eat crow, cat, or other carnivores. In fact, toxins are accumulated in every step of the food chain after plants (which is the reason some Hare Krishna’s will not eat mushrooms, or so I was told)
Vegetarians taste better!
PS as far as the bleachy-tasting shrimp thing, man, I thought that I had good taste buds, but I never noticed a difference in taste with the nerves down the back or bleach like flavor. Most of the shrimp that I have had were prepared at home from known sources and were not let to “age” like steak. Maybe it was luck, or maybe it was that the bad shrimp were wrapped with bacon
LC, you are scaring me. I love shrimp, but only eat it at restaurants. I love steamed shrimp (actually, most seafood is better steamed). I hope restaurants don’t follow the preservation methods you outlined.
ID10T, I’m with you. I’m off to the Hare Krishna centre to rustle me up some vegetarians to BBQ (Tyler is invited, of course ).
I have a friend who once worked in a large commercial butchershop in L.A. When the chickens would start to sour, they would immerse them in bleach. He claims that only Chinese restauranteurs would buy them. He won’t each restaraunt Chinese food ever for that reason. Seems harsh, but you can’t argue with experience.
For the record, I have never noticed a bleachy taste on shrimp…We buy em fresh sometimes, or frozen from Costco. I hate deveining and shelling shrimp and I don’t relish the esthetic experience of tryna suck 'em out of the shell in my cioppino. Some gourmands do, tho, I reckon.
Depends on the restaurant. If they have a good reputation and want to stay that way, they will stay on the straight and narrow.
Chains are fairly safe, as they use frozen, shipped-in, quality-controlled stuff. Many restaurants simply purchase pre-made, frozen entrees and such, and that’s usually quite safe. Might not be gourmet, but it’s safe.
In grad school one summer, I worked at a very famous French Quarter restaurant. The experience totally changed my notions about restaurant dining. This place made everything from scratch–nothing came pre-made.
They had turtle soup, which was delicious the day it was made. That’s when the staff ate it–the day it was made. It wasn’t made EVERY day, because it was a pain to make. It sat out in a vat all night, was left to cool toward the end, and then went into the fridge. Next day, and next, a load of lemon juice got dumped in to cut the not-quite-fresh taste. Eventually, they’d have only a little left, at which point they would often make some fresh and mix it with the leftovers, which tasted so bad at that point that it couldn’t be served straight up.
There were several famous dishes made with lobster. A giant load of lobster would be steamed early in the day and tossed into a giant gray dishpan thing, covered with salted water. Unrefrigerated. (And, mind you, the kitchen was HOT.) Upon getting an order for a lobster dish, a cook would haul out a lobster, brush it with butter, and stick it under the broiler a bit. Instant broiled lobster. Or, for dishes requiring sauces and such, cut the meat out of the shell, mix it with the sauce and stuffing crumbs or whatever, then stuff it back into the shell and toss it under the broiler.
Everybody knew not to eat anything containing lobster–and you could tell which new employees had been sneaking lobster, because they’d be deathly ill the next day. The dishpan of lobster was, I figured, a seething soup of Staphylococcus from the kitchen staff’s ungloved hands fishing in there for lobsters.
Fish which had to be freshly cooked was ok, because it was actually kept on ice in the refrigerator until cooking. Beef was safe because it was aged and kept in the cooler until needed. The lobster, on the other hand, had to be cooked in advance and was then too hot to go back in the fridge, and so much of it was used that it was inconvenient to chill and reheat, so it was left out.
The sanitation in this place was unspeakable. There were exposed wooden beams crossing the ceiling–it was, after all, a famous old building–and rats scampered along them all night. The inspectors came in and saw all of it, and it didn’t bother them a bit. We knew about people getting sick, because they’d often report it to the health department, but the health department just called to let us know. There were no sanctions and nobody forced them to improve their methods.
Reminds me of when I worked in a theater at the snack bar. The popcorn was bought already popped and kept in big sacks the size of lawn leaf bags in a storeroom under the stairs. Before the theater opened we would pour the popcorn into the dispenser and let it warm up, then we would take the metal bowl of “butter” from under the counter and put it in to melt. At night the “butter” would be put into a clean bowl and put under the counter - uncovered. Then the other bowl was washed and put away. There were mice in the storeroom and I’m sure they enjoyed the “butter” at night.
Back to the main topic - I don’t like seafood, and maybe the way it’s treated is the reason.
I’ll second that, and add omnivors to the ‘might-not-wanna-eat-that’ list. When I lived in Williams Lake, packages of ‘mystery meat’ would end up on my doorstep (-30c is an effective freezer!) and I had the misfortune to eat a fair amount of bear. Throwing out a gift (from hunter and bear) seemed horribly wasteful, so I became a creative cook.
The worst was porkchops. Sweet, tender, perfect, slightly odd-looking porkchops.
They were from a cougar that had been lurking around the elementary school in Horsefly.
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