ASK OU/YU Seminar - 05. Nothing Fishy About This

we like to welcome our next presenter is rabbi Stein Goldberg or behind Goldberg is one of our senior rabbinic coordinators here or you kosher seen you in terms of hello Junior okay I'll give me those look ah is one of our rabbinic coordinators here also a group leader in charge of a group of Robottom here at the oh you a specialty among all the things are potatoes and fish not necessarily together in that order or cook together and he is a Muslim Oh Holly she was very noble simply she may be in a kind Berlin and at one point in time found himself in Stuyvesant High School as well and with that I will let rabbi Goldberg take it away and tell us what issues must not fishy we're here to talk about fish we're here to talk about fish I'll tell you that the problem that we often find when people deal with fish questions and that is that people consider themselves experts in what is and isn't acceptable in kosher by virtue of the fact that they learn a plastic homage what do I mean by that you know if I would tell you that a fella wants to pass skin a year Adia Shila based on an English translation on plastic Coleman's right he wants to figure out what's called a crush or a mikvah or he wants to figure out whether this is a considered a mic sex Eva and I'm mezuzah you would say that reading a Fawcett comics with an English translation it's not the way to go about beside anything like that and suddenly when it comes to kosher fish that's the normal way the person patskans of Shila and I love telling the story about fellow many years ago now that's right I'll mention I'm senior now many years ago a fellow called me up and was asking about an article I had written I don't remember where and it had mentioned that shark isn't kosher and after proving that he's a nemesis I was awesome in a million different ways he questioned it what on what veracity I I would claim the shark isn't kosher he had looked it up and seen in the encyclopedia because we used to use those way back when that sharks have fins and scales so if it has fins and scales Who am I to say that it's not kosher obviously I mean it's it's a bad question if it's not obvious let me tell you why it's not obvious don't say what should be obvious my mom the Torah doesn't use the word finding scale subscribe pushes fish uses the words snapping the cat's castle and it doesn't exactly mean things it's careless I'll tell you what I mean by this that's well the camera and Hulan da mclovin eBay's tells us that all kosher fish which have Cask SS have snapping and that practically speaking we're not gonna be interested in whether a fish has a snapper or not because all we need to know is if it has classic SS and I'll tell you what it cost cassis is we'll look at how to figure it out for yourself whatever you need to know you'll figure it out but the bottom line is that the fact that a fish has fins and scales does not make it have snap to the Cask SS why well the remaining finish on the pasta convey across the yard I love classic tests their own ban tells us that a cast cassis is not just a scale but a specific type of scale a scale that can be removed from the fish without ripping skin okay in the case of shark they do have scales many of them do have scales they have a type of scale that cannot be removed from the fish without ripping the skin because that type of scale is the skin effectively makes up the skin it's texture is much more similar to that of a fingernail and it's attached to the body of the fish much the same way that your finger nails a test to the end of your finger and much the same way that it would cause serious damage if you attempted to remove a fingernail from a finger but that's not the definition of a kosher fish the definition were kosher fish is a fish which has a scale that can be removed with the hand or with a knife without ripping the skin and that's we're gonna be focusing on so anytime somebody called me up they asked me of a certain fish has fins and scales I'm already a little bit nervous why I fell is he asking me about fins that means he's not too familiar with what practically we're looking for and didn't have any kind of training and what he's looking for what a must yeah that's a question like that it really makes me nervous but we're going to show you how to do it it's really not hard at all well in some questions we'll talk about some of your policies hopefully we'll have a good time okay so let start in the beginning I have some beautiful samples here this is a very realistic branzino which came from a factory that the oh you has just begun certifying and the reason we're certifying it is because they want to make a smoked Bronzino in the same factory as this raw branzino but this is a Rob runs you know and I wanted to talk about it because this is a great fish to handle it to deal with first of all what exactly is a snap of a cast cast okay so snappier is not so much worse and they were showing what of the spins that the fish is dealing with is the one that's referred to as snapper what fastest this snapper that we're referring to is the pectoral fins that would be the fins over here okay think of it like the wings on a fish we're actually describes the Mishnah and in neither I can get some known test and NIDA Rashi says that it's a shot for him somewhat immune to that fact that he uses it for for swimming with so that would seem to describe pectoral and a lot of times you'll see pictures of fish being kosher they'll point to the dorsal fin over the back I don't think that's correct this vicious dorsal fin was removed because practically speaking when you buy fish in the fish store they usually cut off this fin because it's pointy and it'll poke through the plastic which makes it less desirable as a consumer to be purchasing a fish that know it's drying out or otherwise this doesn't look good so they are usually going to cut these off of no consequence to us anyways because in addition to the dorsal fin the pectoral fin the tail fin is definitely not that was called a zone up there's an anterior that the anal fin there's some interior dorsal fins so there's plenty of finns on this fish it doesn't really matter as I mentioned before the garage says culture issue a kiss yes for snap now where's the cast kisses on this fish okay so the kisses are the scales anywhere on the fish anytime during its life cycle so practically speaking what we're gonna do is we're gonna first try to figure out if this fish is cleaned or not meaning did the fellow who sold it to me try to remove the scales in this case he did he removed a lot of them there's a loose one I'm not sure if you're gonna be able to see that so well on the web cam but there's a couple of loose ones those don't count loose scales on the fish don't count because you can't know that it came from this fish it might have come from another fish that was next door close by and they rubbed off that actually happened it was very fun thing that happened during a presentation in another school I was handling a shark and up here's a scale I put it on the side and they keep talking about it and somebody who was paying attention said I thought you said sharks don't have skills very good they don't and yet this one did why is that because it's not from the shark it was in the bag Lewis together with other fish that were kosher and therefore the scale just rubbed off and that's what happened any up so first thing we're gonna do is just try to see if there's any loose scales on there and rub that off okay yeah when scales are going to be attached to a fish they're gonna be attached on the side closer to the head and they're going to be loose on the side closer to the tail so if you can imagine the doors on a car yeah so the door is gonna open on the driver's side with your left hand and swing out this way and on the passenger side you're gonna open with your right hand it's go swing out that way and the reason for it is of course that you need to keep your aerodynamics right the cars gonna be driving forward in the process of driving forward the winds going to be blowing up the front of the car and if the doors would open the opposite way the wind would kind of cut into the car into the gasket and yank the door off the hinges as it was driving a similar force would act on the fish if nothing same extent but the same idea if it was swimming and the water the aqua dynamics would you know cut into the scales and kind of yank them well fish need their scales for protection both from large predators and small microscopic sized ones things that would try to leech on to it and suck blood through the sides so if it has significant damage and scales it usually won't survive so the skills that we have to remain intact so what you're gonna do to check it to have scales is you're gonna scratch the fish gently against the grain yeah so if you could imagine you know when you pet a cat and you go from the head towards the tail dog right the hair is always run that way if you go the other way you ever knows the cat or the dog and gets annoyed at you it doesn't feel good it's like when you take some big hair and you wear anyway so the same thing you're gonna do on your fish the scales are going to line up like this you're gonna scratch this way you're going to try to pull some scales off now this would clean pretty well let's see if I can get a little closer can you see that let's see I'm gonna try and guess this is the camera you're looking at so I'm gonna scratch it like this I've pulled up a couple of small ones right there now I'm gonna catch some more here by the head and that's a probably better example can you see that yeah I'm gonna flick them off I put a plastic tablecloth over my laptop kind of keep it safe but yeah so I just scratched a couple scales off the head there's some discussion where the scales have to be found Pasha's we hold one scale anywhere on the fish is good enough there's some discussion and say stuff stuff that maybe you have to find it Thomas left eov or tuck us a snappier which may be over here as well I don't remember if it's another shed remember by the tail it seems like it's going on the outskirts of the fish as opposed to across the middle which would make sense because the most likely place to prove that came from this fish would be in places where it's not going to rub up against somebody else in this case the scales are all clearly attached to the fish right along the head so again we're gonna try to put them down you can see that a little bit better and there's lots of scales around in the head they're definitely attached to the fish they definitely came from this fish therefore this is a duck tar and that's why we are certifying the branzino coming out of this factory and maybe we'll talk about how we get the hats my products website as well so that is it Branson you know also known as minute Tyrrhenian sea bass I've got a lot of other names as well it wasn't really matter delicious fish or on the expensive side but you know you're a rich guy and you only need to be a little bit fancier go forth so that's an easy fish to tell because the scales are large and quite easy to see if they're if they're attached or not a lot of times we get phone calls about a fish called trout particularly in the summertime when people are fishing trout can be found in local Brooks especially you can get lake lake trout other places especially in the mountains where people tend to go for summer vacations I'm going to try and hold this up and different angles try and figuring out which which camera angle you can see it better run so try these very small scales and usually when you buy trout in the store they're not clean by not cleaning I mean that the scales are still intact so you're usually gonna find that the gut is open got this just like your favorite politician they clean out the guts they wash it out nicely and then yeah they will cook the dorsal fin again and a lot of times they will scale it but not necessarily the first mistake people make and trying to check with kosher status of a trout is that it's covered with slime a healthy fish it's covered with slime kind of a mucus similar to when you have a cold covered with the mucus in order to check the scale you got to get through the mucus so what you'd want to do is you want to try to get in there and pull the slime off like that in order to get it off the fish so just slide your fingers down the body of the fish do like that and now you're down to the actual body of the fish in this case the trout was clean but not terribly well but you can still tell and it's pretty easy to do so what you're gonna do again you're gonna scratch from the back towards the front I got a bunch by the head over here so I'm just gonna hold that up a little bit and hopefully you can see a even better how's that can you see those I'm my fingernail yeah and you should be able to see at least some of them but yeah definitely scales right there on the top of the head and the whole body of the fish actually had scales as well Belski was not comfortable with relying on what they call the base Malaysia of cos Kassim if you look at the fish trying to see where the scales used to be there's some question about if you can rely on that because not everyone is is careful enough to know when the scales are embedded underneath the skin and when they would be on top of the skin and just have been scraped off somebody could accidentally think that this is the type of fish that had scales and that they were removed when in fact they were subcutaneous underneath skin subcutaneous scales obviously you're not trans cotton because there's subcutaneous the only way to get to them would be to damage the skin ripping through the skin in order to be able to scrape them off okay so that is Bronzino that's a trail I had some other interesting examples for you one thing I got today was a nice find this see that this is a fantastic example this is a Greenland turbot Greenland turbot is a Greek dish to play with for a few reasons first of all turbot has lots of politics involved with it many many years ago the London bez Ben had a fundraising dinner and they served turbot somebody and it was under Oshkosh obviously it was a London business dinner somebody had questioned the purpose that they were serving and whether it was kosher enough and everyone assumed that turbot was kosher because everyone eats turbot now here's a problem when everyone does something and people aren't careful about the specifics where ever it was whoever the caterer was that was bringing in this turbot the muskie I never bothered to check the sample fish that they were bringing in wit skin on never bothered to check it to confirm that it wasn't turbot that in fact was kosher and it wasn't there's a species that is referred to now as European turbot that does not have semana mind at all not a Doug talk and it's also called turbot so the caterer had what they now call European turbot I was told that the London best in fish list we don't hold the fish list maybe we'll talk about that later the London dozen fishless does not list turbot as a kosher fish at all but I assure you that turbot is most certainly kosher assuming you get the kind that actually has some anima so this turbot despite my request enough to clean it by Mogul this door was clean makes a little comfortable to check it out so here's what happened so turbot but most of the meat is right behind the head this is a general rule by fish by the way usually you take the head off and most of the meat is going to be this area right behind the head yield on a fish is about 40 percent give or take so if you buy a whole fish and let's say it's a pound of fish I or maybe let's make it easy don't think of ten pounds so if you get a 40% yield that means four pound of a ten pound fish are actually flesh that you could eat the rest is going to be head got bones skin parts that you can't eat the fish you always want to think about that when trying to figure out how much fish you need for example to feed a crowd we want to figure out what the yield is relative to the round price to figure out how much fish you actually going to get often what's interesting about flat fishes like this is they're they're fold flat for reason this is pre narrow less than a fingers breadth half but half a finger across very now fish but it's a this is 3 pounds of turbot they didn't cut the gut out what they did is they take the head off and when they take that off see the gut cavity right there they just pull the guts out this way the very narrow of God many flatfishes most of our fish maybe those who the cofactors really grow like this I really was hoping they would leave their head on but they didn't in in black dishes you'll notice that there's one eye that looks a little bit funny and there's a socket on one side with no eye in it what happens is when when flatfishes are young they swim like this actually like normal fishes as they get older they mature and they flip to a side it's hard to tell about the head on I can't remember and I'm pretty sure it went over the nose this way I'm pretty sure but if I'm wrong I apologize and what you'll see is that the eye one will migrate over the bridge of the nose onto this side so there'll be a blind side that faces down and the sighted sided faces up with something like a halibut you can see it very easily because the blind side is going to be white and the top side is going to be a green or brown or something else why because that's a natural defense to put in it for predators if it's white so you're not going to be able to see it if you're underneath the fish looking up cause it's gonna look like the Sun and if it's green on the top you're not going to be able to see looking down if you're predator from above because it's gonna match the camouflage of the ground below it's just the interesting thing interesting about flatfishes is that they typically have two different types of scales they have steroid scales which are kind of shaped like comb that's why it's called steno aid from the latin word stena which refers to comb like home like fishes comb like stan a little raised in the scale and if great we're able to get one from a perciform fish for example perch like fishes have those kind of scales maybe it's something like a tilapia would even have scales like that those kind of square kind of scaled and if you look very closely it looks like it has like uh one of those old black Chinese fans you remember having those the kid you kind of opened it up and weave yourself anyhow to that shape going a crust on the scale on one side and the other side they have cycloid scale cycloid cyc meaning round and that's very rare you don't find that normally on a fish you would have the same paper scale on both sides of the fish in this case it's just the interesting quirk be able to put into it so in this case the guy did actually a much better job of cleaning and then I hoped he did I've got some some very vague feeling on it but um he actually cleaned it way too well that's a point thing okay well I bought it from a push up fish store so you'll take my word on it but anyhow if you look carefully you oh here we go yeah see if I can get from these guys out and I'll hold it up to the camera can you see that my thumb yeah that should work anyhow yeah so right here at the tip of the fish the the skin looked a little bit darker and I realized that means that he didn't scrape it so well with his scale or knife and that's where the scales going to be found if you're careful and you give it the time you can usually find scales somewhere on the fish and again what we need is one scale anywhere on the fish now when I say once kill anyone on the fish I mentioned earlier it means any time during its life cycle if you would have a scale it's really a dog toy does it true of approve that because Gemara talks about a fish that's off sea legato Casca says it's going to grow cask assets it's already tar so the question is all right well before we get there so if it's going to grow cows cows I mean it doesn't have scales on it right now but it will have scales on it later in life it's a mint our meaning you don't need to see the scales to be mastered you just need to know it's the type of fish that has scales that this specific example of fish will eventually have scales on so the question is if it doesn't have scales on it right now how do i how do I eat from it how do I know that it's a dog car that's the biskits chuhwa at the beginning of paid gimel talks about that and he says well it's totally Machias I am if a person was able to look at the fish and recognize what species of fish it was you could eat it based on that a lot of times people ask oh come on rabbi who has PSI n on fish okay I'll tell you a nice story I was gonna bring a piece of herring because in the good old days they used to sell old-fashioned herring the jarred herring with the skin still on it and I would hold up a piece of herring and I'm saying well what is this and people say well that's herring how do you know it's herring and the phone would say well because I know what herring looks like and that's clearly herring I see very good that was to be assigned but nowadays everybody wants the Schwartz's stuff that's all sauce and very little fish so they don't sell the old-fashioned herring with skins the line I tried two different stores actually three stores in two stores for sure did not have any brand of old-fashioned herring so to look too bad on that one time I was giving this presentation in Cincinnati Ohio and I was showing them how they could buy fish at the local non-certified fish store and what would be involved I had to deal with it and there were some people who came this is something we don't find in New York too much there was some people who came from or not shomer Shabbos they weren't they weren't religious at all and they you know they're part of the Jewish community they're trying whatever the holder they are holding by they wanted to hear this year so they king so there was one woman who came and I was presenting and I picked up a bag of whiting which is another fish that's very cheap and it's typically not scaled because scaling would add cost to the whole product and nobody's interested in that so I pulled out a piece of waiting and make sure I talked about it and the woman said oh that's whiting I said how do you know she said well you mean my mother made white all the time I know what writing it is who doesn't know what writing it so I know turn to everybody it said you know you all saw that right that wasn't the plant in the crowd she knows what it is and she called out she has it to be a sign on itself somebody else in this room wasn't sure if this was a dog car and that you would theoretically be allowed to ask this woman assuming that she was shown Rishabha so we came from Chavez later in life then you could ask her is this kosher wedding and she would be able to answer you whether it is or not so that would be a Tia Sian if it didn't yet grow scales or the scales fell Elle scales falling out is very common so herring is an example of a fish whose scales fall out when it comes out of the may have remembered hearing the Gemara talk about that there's a there is a I want to say the fiscally chuhwa at the beginning of pig in wall talks about that beginning of pig mo not the biscuit she was retrouver quotes whether she was seeing I had a question about that there was a quote big Mara that had the MYSA where somebody had a certain fish and they said that it was dog tar and but it loses its scales coming out and they took it out of the young they had some fishermen catch it and hold it under water and they lined the net with a brand new clean plaque schmatta put the fish in the net with the schemata when they pulled it up it was full of customers every say okay so now we know it's a dog dog because the skills clearly showed off there's lots of fish that happens to herrings are one of them anything in the koopa form family mackerels also typically lose their scales coming out which makes it hard to know if macros kosher there are some macros that are purported to never have scales difficult to know because even the kosher mackerels very rarely can be found with scales on them so you need to have to be a science somebody would need to have tradition they would be able to recognize it and say hey I know what that fish is we've always used to eat in my family and my community whatever it is somebody would have to be sure motor mitzvos and familiar with this specific fish to be able to say I know for a fact this fish is taught it's not the kind of massara that we have on animals or birds so much as well either's of sorts that this person knows and that this fish is a dog toy okay so there's a question about a fish let's say I would have I wasn't able to get any good ones in the store all the tilapia in my store where we're skin I didn't want that even with our stuff though because I don't deal with that but let's say I would have a piece of a white fish plain white fish a lot of times I get phone calls about somebody asking about tilapia with no skin I want to know is this kosher Fisher net to which my question is how you know it's clap yo and the hata might say like that then he also many years ago getting less fish close knew he had just realized many years ago a fellow from out of town called me up and wanted to know if tilapia was a kosher fish and I asked him why I wants to know and he said that he is Manning the kosher fish Department at his local supermarket and he wants to know if he can accept the tilapia into the kosher fish department yes mmm has you know floppier and he said what do you mean the Box clearly says slappy on it so boxes flavius on it must be flopping I said to him is there any skin on it could you check it for scales she said rabbi I wouldn't bother calling you've had skin on it I'd just check it myself the question is that it doesn't ask you know okay so that's a problem because once you take the skin off of the fish its Curie doggin it's effectively that because I'll assert the guts of fish with no punch got on it we can't assume that it came from a dog tar because once it's got all someone removed on it it's blank it could be anything and we have to be concerned it's at least a fish after abundant Suffolk Theresa that it came from a dog tummy there's no way to know what Fisher came from and you can't claim and Oommen Lamar I'm not late on it at all especially since the FDA themselves back in 1993 had an article warning people that they're kind of trying to enforce it but it's not going all that great and species substitution is a major issue that if you watch the right news agencies is happening regularly and rampantly in some places ah DeYoung meaning that somebody takes a low value fish and they bless it with a new name and the Shanaya shem comes with sheen a Mazel and now it's an expensive fish so they take a certain kind of catfish which comes from Southeast Asia for example called basa bas a not a Doug - I know catfish is kosher and they take the basa and they renamed it grouper and they sell it in Florida where groupers an expensive fish comes from the Gulf of Mexico and very very popular fish doesn't look anything like grouper doesn't look anything like Hooper but it's a lot cheaper okay make a lot of money off it so they sell it as grouper and amazingly that the grouper that comes from Southeast Asia sells a lot better than the local stuff so the local grouper fishermen one-time sponsor somebody to check DNA and lots of different restaurants in Florida and they found that 9 out of 10 that they sampled we're not selling grouper at all they were selling fake catfish that was just labeled as grouper when FDA knows about it they go after it when they can but they haven't got old manpower to do it and they don't feel that there's a major emergency when it comes to an economic fraud issue which is how they view specie substitutions economic fraud no one's gonna die in the physical world at least from eating the wrong species it's only in the spiritual world whenever those stories come to be oh you I always answer to me it's not a question anyways because you never had a head there to eat skinless fish you can't read the box you can't to play the woman like mom and also game because there's no woman here the fellow who gets caught doing it didn't even necessarily do anything wrong himself he bought a box marked grouper from a guy who told him it was grouper that guy may have believed that it was grouper because he got it from a distributor who got it from somebody else who got it from somebody who put the name on the box and maybe that guy doesn't even speak English so he doesn't know what the black box says or does he care so it's not there's no woman along the way that was responsible for that his reputation is on the line that he sold the wrong thing everybody this is hey this is what I got it for I got ripped off nobody loses even in the local fish store where you got some fellow being paid minimum wage to cut fish if the sign on the counter has the wrong thing on it so it's got the wrong thing on it it's a mistake I'm sorry you want your money back me give your money back let me go there's no my mom I'm not saying government support that completely there is no womanly monocyte they don't get into any fresh frozen clean fish that you can say if it has this name on it's gotta be that thing salmonella we are concerned with the the concern that the fellow who took the skin off is now substituting for something else it's possible that it's not a doctor anymore and the mela you can't buy fish with no skin on it fish with no skin on it anything can be done that is all your policy and as far as I know every major organization accepts that the exception of course would be if you bought a piece of fish with a tag of skin on it that you would be able to identify based on that tag of skin so I have some examples of that this is one of my favorites this is a tuna fillet okay you can see that this is a tuna flank this tuna fillet it's really called tuna steak so the way that Oona grows imagine like a log on a tree not that far off so a very large fish especially in this time tuna would be a large fish the way it's cut is called a quarter loin so if Majan if you had a trunk of a tree and you cut it once up the long way then you rotated it 90 degrees and cut it up the long way again and you pulled off the four quadrants that's called a quarter yet you poured it supporter loin the reason you do that is because the bones of the tuna along with the guts pretty much run like a chassis the area of access along the fish so if you quarter line it you're cutting around the bones right the same way that when you would deal with a fish like branzino you would fillet it a long length of fish half and half you would just pull the meat you cut it in a way that takes the maximum amount of meat off the bones in one shot so in a tuna that's a quarter woman so when you poured oil in the fish you're gonna have skin all around the outside of the fish of course if you would cut it all the way to the middle there isn't necessarily going to be skin because you have to have all the way to the end of the fish what they've done in this factory this Vic tuna came from my certified fish store without Ornish Casa because it still has the skin on it now can you see so here's the meat that's what the meat looks like and here is the skin now the skin in addition to just being skin also still has scales in fact here's some of the scales and pull that off now see that nice big fat scale sometimes you get lucky sometimes you don't get so lucky this one is full of scales and yeah it's another one doesn't matter what color they are what shape they are what size they are so long as it is visible to the naked eye okay so by buying tuna steaks with the skin still on you're able to use a TS I am to know that it's tuna and even if you didn't have a TS eye on all you have to do is open it up pull some scales off and now you know that it's a duck tar saves a lot of money it saves a lot of time and see a lot of convenience too because you don't have to send a mass email to the manufacturing facility in orchids because you could buy it from the open market and now there's actually a lot more market for it companies with no oshkosh are selling kosher tilapia especially because they realized that Jewish people will buy tilapia as long as a piece of skin on the fish they'll rely on that without a chakra so why should they pay yo you or anyone else to get much guts on a fish that with the skin on it and I have no problem with that and there may be milder than that as well because now you know as a consumer that it's a dog toy the downside potentially would be if you don't think about that no one has actually checked this fish first ammonium that it's your obligation to check it and depending on who the harsh kapha is they may be assuming that you know that you're supposed to check it many years ago there was a big scandal about this a certain fellow was selling in retail bags of tilapia and there was a patch of skin on each piece of tilapia and the reason he did that was because they didn't want to spend the money on sending a muskie after China where the fish was being processed and they left the patch of skin on it and somebody quoted up and asked him about this this raw masher and he said yeah well there's a piece of skin on it so just check it when you get it home now people didn't realize that they were expected to check it so I would say to you whenever you're buying fish with a patch of skin on it you should assume that the Rafah master did not check it unless he tells you explicitly where his mascara tells you supposedly they did jacket by checking out that patch of skin just your own media and we inform Alma she come in food service that when they buy fish with skin on it they must check it themselves either for salmon and mort's via sign on it because you can't just assume that if it came from so-and-so distributor and he you told him it needs to be kosher that it has Oscar on it there's no Chicago printed on steel packaging then it's nothing you need to check the semana monde that fish itself okay so I said if it's a plain white fish you have to assume that it is not a doctor unless it came with Ostrava the exception to that of course is salmon yeah salmon or oh you policy says is acceptable without skin why is that because there is no non kosher fish that looks like this now I want to be clear what it is I am saying what I'm not saying people have misquoted me in saying that the öyou holds there is no fish that is red except for salmon of course that's not accurate and I'll give you some examples in addition to salmon there's something called baby salmon those of you who are not aware baby salmon is not juvenile salmon it's actually trout and if you look at them closely sometimes you can see a difference in the color and even if you can it's gonna be harder to see from far away the skin if you would flip it over this one still has the skin on it if you would flip it over and compare the skin one to the other they don't match at all salmon is going to be a silvery bluer kind of with a larger-scale baby salmon is going to be more pink and much smaller scales because it's really a trout it's not a salmon at all there are many members of the salmon aid family that will have red flesh another is salmon trout again salmon trout not the same thing as salmon not the same thing as baby salmon in addition to that there is arctic char which is red there is rainbow trout sometimes can be red there's steelhead trout which could be red there's lots of different members of the salmon family all of which are kosher nothing looks like a salmon and is not kosher it hasn't been found we're not most we need to be assured that it exists therefore who you policy has always been and it was based on a situation that happened that was not the Greenblatt a stir of Misha it's the red color of a salmon could be a synonym of luck we know the simin move like is appointed welcome Simon and erm I said if we know that all the fish that are red are kosher then yes it'll be a synonym over consume and look like is only one welcome salmon I want to ask hrabowski who says that we fulfil that condition maybe we didn't check all the fish in the world or Belsky said we're familiar with all the fish by now and we don't have to be worried that there's something out there until we are found otherwise we know all the fish that are available and there is nothing than its red flash that doesn't look there isn't there is nothing that looks like Sam who's red flash there's not crucial why do I say like that because people ask well what about tuna tunas also got red flash doesn't it and tuna we don't necessarily say is automatically close you're even without skin the reason for that is we don't have the same level of guarantee on a tuna it's possible that it's true I have yet to find something which was non kosher that really looked like a tuna there are some bill fishes the members of the bill fish family that you could argue are not kosher and look similar ish to tuna but we're not comfortable making the statement that we're sure the egg that looks like a tunas kosher but we are comfortable making the statement than anything that looks like a salmon is gonna be a dog tart and therefore we're not concerned that you're going to get something that looks like a salmon and it's really natural some years ago someone noticed that when you buy farmed fish there is a declaration on the label that it says contains color or color a day or food coloring or some some other Russian that sounds like food coloring it's not food coloring it's actually carotenoids which are like beta-carotene it's a vitamin found naturally in red fleshed fruits and vegetables particularly like squashes and sweet potatoes and well your brief beautifully colored fruits and vegetables it's also found in the exoskeletons of shrimp and lobster for example salmon in nature developed their red color from their diet of eating things like shrimp and lobster which pain carotenoids and when these fish processes if it will turn the flesh of the salmon a red color when they make farms Amman that color doesn't naturally develop because they don't feed it the same feed that natural salmon would have so they add an artificial carotenoid to the feed in order for it to develop the red color some had asked well if you could feed salmon red color and make their flesh red maybe you could feed catfish red color and turn them red that isn't really sensical for lots of reasons first of all we had researched this and spoke to some experts in industry wanted to point it out that you realize that fish in nature eating the same foods give or take everyone's eating the same thing and no one besides salmon eat fish has red flesh at least that color red flesh that type of red flesh that salmon have so it's not magic that eating carotenoids automatically turns your flesh red it turns the flesh of salmon red it turns the skin of humans Orange which was why there are other carotenoids that are sold as artificial tanning pills because it kind of makes your skin no orange some people want that I don't know why but okay when I was researching it I found references to that cannas Anthon and astaxanthin and XANA xanthine different carotenoids that were used in artificial tanning pills in wild birds they're not wild bird expensive Birds that they're often used to add to the feed in order to turn the feathers prettier plume in decorative koi they turn the skin colors that are much brighter carotenoids have different effect on different things one of the facts the carotenoids have on humans is that it affects the retinal function and the EU put some limits on how much carotenoids you can add to salmon without causing damage because they were worried about that but in any event we researched it and we're pretty convinced that there's no way to add carotenoids to any other fish other than naturally absorbing crude salmon a fish that were kosher anyways in order to turn its flesh red somebody sent me a study that he had done trying to turn catfish redder it was not peer-reviewed fell and they were sent of a peer review as far as we know he spoke in relative terms that it was five times redder except if you've never looked at catfish which are not kosher their flesh is perfectly white clear white greyish white whatever the finished product he would not send pictures of it and he didn't include any in his study because it didn't get anything close to being red or reddish or on the red scale of any sense even if relatively five times almost zero as though zero so we didn't see much concern about that so oh you policy remains that we're not concerned that if you find a red flesh fish and you know what salmon spokes look like that it's a non kosher fish it may not be salmon it may be baby salmon it may be arctic char maybe some other fish but it's not going to be true so the rule is if it's a white-fleshed fish and it doesn't have skin you should assume it's not kosher unless that's wash crossed obviously and if it's a salmon looking fish even without skin walther afternoon your policy would assume that it is kosher okay so that's some of those products I want to talk about two other things and then I'll take some of your questions what a package of lacks smoked salmon the biggest question we get about Lots is if it's visually thrill or not not a good question and I'll explain why you have to know how smoked salmon is need and know a little bit something about raw fish versus cooked fish the way you smoked salmon is as follows you take raw fish any fish not to salmon any fish we've smoked if you take a raw fish you apply salt you can either dry rub it with salt and let it sit there for hours or you can put it in an immersion you know put it in a bathtub full of salt salt sugar whatever you want and let it sit there for a few hours after sitting in that salt a few hours the salt content in the fish will you know get to the level you want it you then take it and put it on a rack and slide that into a smoke oven the smoke oven will blow with fans around it at a temperature no higher than 90 degrees Fahrenheit by law once a fish has hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit you can't leave it as a cold smoked fish which is what lacks is you have to now bring it that's broken 90 degrees it now has to meet a protocol for a hot smoked fish which requires a minimum internal temperature of 145 degrees for 30 minutes there's like a range that you could sit for a lower temperature for a longer time or items for last time you understand it's in order to kill bacteria but the sweet spot to avoid is between 90 degrees and 180 or growth so in the case of last cold smoked salmon it always remains below 90 degree is usually below 85 because you want to take a chance of getting too too hot so you have this salty fish sitting in an oven with ambient temperature smoke blowing around it with a fan sits there for a few hours you take it out you chill it sometimes you can freeze it and then you can slice it so when somebody asked me about LOC being vicious Tyrell I say well you just heard the process I've had to stay by law below 90 degrees 90 degrees might make you feel like you're cooking in a classroom in the summer but of course it's 100% raw since the time 2% rule it's of no concern to being fish Lisa I said yeah but I heard you say that there's a thing called hot smokings maybe it's hot smoked salmon which would be a my submission in which case it would require mystery Israel so a few things first of all you have to know the difference in texture between cold smoked meaning raw fish and cooked fish so this is how we explain it to five-year-olds and it's a great way to remember it even if you're a lot older five years old when your fish is raw it wiggles and if you've ever had lots and I hope you have hot cold smoked salmon and you put it on your bagel you picked it up and you could wiggle it and then lay it over the top of your bagel right now if you ever had salmon for dinner and you stuck a fork in it you may have noticed that it crumbles because cooked fish has a pellicle the protein you know shriveled together and when you stick a fork in it we'll crack off you'll pieces of it but it won't wiggle anymore if you try and wiggle or cook fish it just pulls apart crumbles and makes a crumbly mess so that's your proof that LOX is cold smoke you can't make a hot smoke lots not Lots anymore it's not a cold smoked fish now a hot smoked fish a texture will be that of cooked salmon similar to what you've eaten for dinner and when you again stick a fork in it it will crumble so there is no betrayal on this and companies cleaning bitterly Israel on their locks it's a full swing I mean obviously it's a whole thing do with it whatever you want to do with that last thing I want to talk about before I kick your questions is sushi sometimes we get the question can we buy sushi without a husk off okay so there's some problems blanks - sure - go first of all how do you know what fish is being used in the sushi right because once you took the skin off it we don't know what fish it is the guy said at the yellowtail no way to know if it really is yellowtail or if it's something else I don't know what it could be but the bottom line is it's a dog and it's at least a message or a bond and stuff I guess if you're I seek any package in addition to that there's some rice that goes around this which is not edible raw and passed as it is oil also from walking which means it's giant fish wacom in which case you can't eat it anyways because you can't eat fish O'Laughlin unless it's food that thing cooked by a jewel which of course without ochco so that's not happy the vegetables that go inside are regularly pickled in wine vinegar so that's Tom haenam Shila and the nori sheet that you know roundish Lena Sh liar that swirls around on the outside is a layer of seaweed that if it hasn't been prepared with ochco saw could potentially have one little shrimps and seahorses that are visible in it and I've heard from ask Ethan who checked and did see small shrimps and seahorses in it which is the problem you got to make sure that that isn't happening in addition when it's toasted toasted nori is often toasted on the same equipment as flavored Nori's which would include shrimp flavored and chicken flavored nori that's an industry standard so theoretically if you would have bought this sushi from a non-kosher so she's thought you didn't have to be throwing away the fish the rice the vegetables the nori and all you would be left with Christmas the plastic container which if you really wanted to eat it you would have to wash it because it just touched non-kosher sushi okay I will take some questions somebody wants to know Alicia pearl wants to know what about the non kosher knife that I've been used to cut the fish maybe it was used to cut onions last catfish myth okay I'm not worried about it cutting onion or catfish because that cutting an onion would be a problem to the onion not a problem to my fish let's say I know for a fact that this fellow who cut the fish at a non-kosher store cut a hot pastrami sandwich the second before he cut like this so now what do I do okay so I go into a non kosher fish store and this fellow is cutting up fish so non-question fish store I mean I I know myself had been to the ones in Chinatown where they cut up things that you otherwise only know from makkah Smith Ryan and they sell them by the pound if you ever want to buy frogs for example that's a much better place to buy them in the pet store because they're much more leba dick in the Chinese Fish Department than they ever are in the pet shop the pet shop they don't really care if they're alive or dead in the fish store they're very much waited to get good quality frogs so I would personally recommend that would be the place I would go shopping if I was in the market for frog not reading for a pet so the guy just chopped a frog and right before he did my piece of fish and I was completely grossed out and when they wash this is how they wash they take like the guard nose and they just spritz a bunch and then they go but it was still covered with all kinds of mess and whenever carrion from whatever he is killed with earlier in the day so what you're gonna have to do is you're going to wash it with not hot water you're gonna scrape it with a non serrated knife and then you're gonna rinse it off again if you can you still think oh you kicked my phone that's fine so if you want to see where it is I just looked it up it's the it's the piss que tuvo at the end of table above and your idea talks about this procedure pastas you should just be able to rinse it but well nicely he tells you that you should be garb a Pasque kind of like you would for cucumbers just wash it scrape it wash it off what happens and you have to be worried about it why is there only one salmon that's prepackaged and frozen for example Cosco the same reason that there's a use on bottled water and salt and sugar and lots of other things that we hope don't require a scuffle somebody pay for it and the guy who paid for it is selling to customers who asked for it the customer who asked for it wants to know that the oh you hold that this salmon is good the way it is no hush - no whirring no rinsing scraping washing if you heard how many nervous people called our office on a daily basis you would find people that I would tell them it's not a problem you could buy from a trade store I'll tell you how to do it the bean I don't know get me with our offer which is fine that's what you want that's we provide as far as the cost is concerned it's so minimal Costco's producer spends more money on tissues for their workers every every year than they do on their hash goofy so that's that's really we're it's holding it's a phenomenal thing for them and when they add on additional factories these guys come running to us that in order to get the Costco contract they gotta prove they have öyou and they're ready to pay because they need it in order to get the Costco contract and they're very happy to greet the rabbi and we don't have any issues with that if there's any other questions Thank You rabbi Goldberg have a good day everyone