On Wednesday I took advantage of having stayed over in Vancouver to buy our dinner ingredients at Granville Market. One vendor there almost always has whole fresh arctic char. One whole fish weighs 1.75-2.0 pounds. The pricing's crazy: filets are $26/lb but the whole fish is $13. They look like a trout with a small head and tail, so the waste isn't half the fish: one would be an idiot not to buy whole and invite someone to dinner. So that's what we did. One fish offers about six portions.
Jerry and Alice love seafood but had never eaten arctic char before. Alice had never even heard of it, but Jerry was aware of it in the biological sense because one of his careers had been with the Alaska department of Fish & Game. Char is a very cold-water fish with a spawning habit not unlike salmon, able to live in both salt and fresh water. It's farmed sustainably in B.C.
Every time I buy and cook it I think the same thing: this is the best fish I've ever had. Raw, it's a very light orange-ish yellow color, and cooked it's a very pale creamy coral. In texture and flavor it's kind of halfway between rainbow trout and steelhead, rich without being strong or oily, more substantive than trout but more delicate and refined than any salmon. Alice and Jerry were awestruck by it the way I was the first time, said it was the best fish they've ever had. And of course they weren't talking about my preparation of it, but the fish itself. It's that good.
If you ever have a chance to buy/order it, don't pass it up.
