I love Skate. And I agree that it tastes like scallops - my favorite food.

I wish it was more readily available here is Minnesota.

Teresa
Minnetonka, Minnesota

DC: - Teresa:

Hope you two are happy !!!

Now, I will have to find Skate Wings.

I have never seen them in the Markets but then I never looked for them.

I use Scallops often, even just pan fried with Garlic and Old Bay.

LOU

PS: Do not advertise this too much, the price will go up.

I first had skate in Singapore, barbecued - wrapped in banana leaves. It was so good, I had it two more times during a five day stay. I agree, marvelously delicious.

I've only seen it once in an Asian market in Denver. I recalled reading something about a vein, I think, that could cause an ammonia taste. Not being able to remember what I read I didn't buy it. Now I'll have to Google the ammonia issue and then look again for it. Is that something you've heard about? Your skate looks delicious.

I do know that what I saw here was not as inexpensive as what you purchased.

Lee

I read this info on the website thinkquest.org : Skates, like sharks, excrete excess urea through their skin and if not handled carefully after capture will smell of ammonia.
I find the smell a little off-putting but it is a fine fish. Here, it's often fried and served with black butter and capers.

Growing up on the East Coast, skate was considered a trash fish i.e. not for human consumption. In the early 1970's, it started catching on as an inexpensive alternative to sea scallops. Coming from a frugal family that loved to fish, we ate a lot of skate wings. I prefer sea scallops and can easily tell when restaurants substitute skate wings for scallops. DH grew up on the ocean and was fed so much fish in his youth that he's even reluctant to eat Maine lobster now. Skate is way down on his list. I've been able to sneak in a few Skate meals over the years but one taste and he knows it's Skate. He's not a big fan. :-)I still like Skate. I shake it in a little seasoned rice flour and pan fry it in clarified butter or olive oil. then I degalze the pan with a little white wine and maybe a little garlic. Yum.

The way to avoid the ammonia smell is to cut out the wing meat immediately after removing the hook. Then immediately skin the meat and rinse. You have to work very quickly. Sadly the fish must be alive when you do this. Once the fish dies the meat is contaminated with the ammonia smell and taste. The longer it's stored, the worse it will get. You can remove most of the ammonia by soaking the meat in a lemon juice and water brine for at least 4 hours but this alters the final product.

Ooooh, skate! Beloved of both the French and the Chinese, here in the SF Bay Area.

The Chinese steam it the classic style, with ginger and douchi, the fermented black beans. Yum!

Never seen it for $1.85/lb though. Great bargain.

The wings are removed when the fish is alive?

Teresa,
That's the way the fisherman here do it. I'm not a big fan of the idea but I'm a firm believer in having folks understand where their food comes from. If you like skate wings and don't want the ammonia smell and taste, then live is probably how the wings were harvested.

Thanks for the education, Moosemac. I'm sorry to say a google search actually corroborated your claims. So, what does one serve as a first course, shark fin soup?

Thank you all for commenting. Experimenting with different foods and recipes is fascinating, fun, delicious, healthy and educational.

The skate wings I got from the store were already skinned and prepared and were free of any odd taste.

Regarding how skates are prepared, I think it is not that much different than how most other fresh seafood is prepared.

All animals, including human, are part of the food chain. Death is an eventuality and is never pleasant. That is the grand scheme of things. You can be suffering for many years while you are on the menu of some nasty buggies and being chewed up slowly.

A fisherman hooks a fish, the fish will be suffocating for many hours out of water. Cutting up the fish may be a better way for the fish to go to the fish heaven.

Back to skate. The reason why skate is not that popular (thank goodness) is like many other fish, it needs an image make-over.

For instance, the following had gone from junk fish to highly priced delicacies.

Mahi Mahi (a.k.a. Dolphinfish)

Chilean Sea Bass (a.k.a. Patagonian Toothfish)

Orange Roughy (a.k.a. Slimehead)

Channa (a.k.a. snakehead)

Goliath Grouper (a.k.a. Jew fish)

Summer trout (a.k.a. Weakfish )

Crawfish (a.k.a. mud bugs)

Not exactly a seafood, Rocky Mountain oysters (a.k.a. ?)

Perhaps:

Angel Wings (a.k.a. skate?)

dcarch

In the 17th and 18th centuries, lobster was "the poor man's food."

From Helium.com: According to the Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink (John F. Mariani, 1999), "...when the first Europeans came to America, the lobster was one of the most commonly found crustaceans. They sometimes washed up on the beaches of Plymouth, Massachusetts, in piles of two feet high..."

Because they weren't commercially fished, lobsters in those days often grew to sizes between 20 and 40 lbs.!

Of course, things changed quickly and by the 19th century, they were again the delicacy we now consider them.

dcarch - The part I object to most, which wasn't mentioned, is the (apparently) common practice of throwing the live, mutilated fish back into the water to suffer further. Hence my shark fin comment.

I eat veal even though I don't love where it comes from. But I assure you if they just cut a leg off of a live calf and put it back in its box every time they wanted to harvest some cutlets, I'd not be eating it.

Furthermore, from what I've read skate is overfished to the point of critically endangering the species. This has put made it a concern of several environmental groups including the Monterey Bay Aquarium who has awarded it an "avoid" status.

This alone is reason enough for me to avoid it. Everyone can make their own choices of course, but considering all this I see no need for an image makeover to increase popularity and demand.

Here is a link that might be useful: Seafood Watch

FOAS, you have some valid and thought-provoking points.

Shark's fin issue is a very simple issue.

Shark's fin has no taste, and it is becoming known that it also has little nutritional value, and as a matter of fact eaten in large quantities, may even cause sterility in men.

Shark's fin is popular in China only as a status item to the older, and now very wealthy but still not very educated generation. The next generation will have not much interest in shark's fin at all.

Overall, endangered species is a complex issue.

Land animals can be hunted to extinction very easily, but not sea animals ( excluding ocean mammals). Keeping in mind that I am not advocating eating endangered species at all. At some point, the law of supply and demand will take over. The remaining few sharks, skates, or any other sea life, will be $5,000 a lb.

What endangers skates is a combination of over-harvesting and bad fishing methods from fishing other species (Bottom dredging fishing). At the end, over population and pollution will be more of a problem to skates and sea life than anything else.

Eating skate wings is not a popular thing here in the USA to worry about. The eating habits of fish here is very wasteful of natural resources. Filleting a fish throws away a great deal of the fish. There are many fish we consider trash fish. We really need to learn from other cultures to conserve food supply. We basically waste 1/3 to 1/2 of our food supply because of bad eating habits. It is a crime considering the global food supply situation.

"----- Overfished and overfishing thresholds are set using a unique system based on three-year averages of skate take in annual fisheries-independent surveys. In 2005, the barndoor skate was downgraded from "threatened" to "endangered" on the IUCN Red List. This might lead Seafood Watch to rank the status of the barndoor skate as of "critical conservation concern"; however, its latest biomass index shows a rapid and significant rebuilding trend which started about 1999 and lasted through 2006, and biomass is currently at 62% of MSY. The species is no longer considered to be overfished and overfishing is not occurring. The stock status of the barndoor skate therefore ranks as a moderate conservation concern. The latest biomass index for the winter skate shows that the stock has rebuilt to 93% of MSY. Given the recent increase in stock biomass, winter skate is not overfished and overfishing is not occuring. Seafood Watch ranks the winter skate stock status as a moderate conservation concern.-----"

dcarch

I ran across this old thread and thought I would add something.

A couple of months ago we took our friends to the Fifth Floor restaurant in San Francisco for our annual get-together - we used to work together but they retired a dozen years ago to Old Lyme CT and only come back once a year now.

Chef David Bazirgan had skate on the menu, so Bob ordered it. It came with a delicious and unusual wasabi crust: lightly floured with some real (not fake) wasabi powder added. It was absolutely superb, an unusual and inspired pairing!

Beautiful, as always. But I need more details! What is that gorgeous yellow sauce?

jkom51, I have had skate a few more times since. Wasabi crust sounds like a delicious idea. Of cource it is very difficult to find real wasabi. I will have to try that the next time.

Thanks ynnej. The yellow sauce is store bought hony mustard sauce. I use it on many tihngs.

dcarch

What the heck IS a Skate "wing"? Do they fly or what?
Joann

When we used to fish in Baja, the eels were filleted alive. Finfish are left to slowly suffocate. In restaurants, live lobsters have their tails cut in half without a prior coup de grace, and then the cook goes off to answer a phone call . . . Fishing is not a pretty business if you anthropomorphize the fish. If you consider them more like bugs and slugs - fairly accurate in the case of lobsters - then it doesn't bother you much more than harvesting a vegetable.

I don't have a strong view, personally. In most situations I don't get too worked up about fish suffering. But when I used to flyfish, it was catch and release all the way. Barbless hooks, no extended playing, minimal handling, send the trout off unharmed. I definitely anthropomorphize trout.

Joann,

Skate is one of the cartilagenous fish that live in the ocean (not sharklike, but very ray like (manta ray, sting ray)) and propel themselves like rays do by moving their large appendages up and down like wings, but not really wings. Just pretty, like a beautiful angel. They are shaped more like a diamond, or kite-shaped, than a ray though.

Here is a link that might be useful:

And the appendages are dorsal fins. Whew. Finally remembered. That, and cartilaginous was misspelled. How one can call them dorsal (back), when they are clearly on the sides? Well, it's because rays/skates are "flat" fish.

rob333, thanks for the picture. They are really neat-looking

Thanks Rob! I get it now!!!
Joann