Is aging fish as you do with good wine a crazy idea? Not for Christian Genest, who immediately admits that hearing the words “fish” and “aging” in the same sentence “is really counter-intuitive”.
The owner of Fish, a private take-out sushi club – a concept where customers order online in advance and then stop by to collect their box – still tried the experiment. Instead of freezing his fish, he hung them in an aging cellar so that he could keep them longer and bring out their flavor. According to him, he is among the few to use this technology in Quebec since his fish is delivered fresh to his kitchen. He claims that a large majority of sushi counters would use frozen fish.
The way of doing things he adopted was actually inspired by the Japanese. For a long time, they have preserved fish by sanitizing it with kombu leaves, a kind of algae found in abundance in the land of the Rising Sun. To reproduce this process, at Fish, the fish is hung in a cellar resembling a glass refrigerator, a technology developed by a German company worth $12,000. The product can remain there for 14 to 48 days at a temperature varying between 1.2 and 2.4 degrees Celsius, especially in the case of tuna. “It’s a cellar where we control the temperature, humidity, lighting…” A quantity of just under 230 kilos of fish can be stored there.
“There is definitely a difference in taste and color, perceptible to someone doing a tasting. A fish is fresher if it spends a month in the cellar than if it spends a month in the freezer,” assures someone who is not new to sushi. He founded the company Sushi Taxi in 2000 and sold it in 2017.
By founding his company Fish, in Quebec, in December 2022, Mr. Genest made a business promise to his clients: to create sushi with a minimum of rice and a maximum of fresh fish.
“For sushi, fresh fish versus frozen fish are two completely different worlds. But when it comes to business volume, when you start a new business, it’s hard to plan,” he admits.
“When you promise your customers to use fresh fish, either you deal with disappointments (because your stocks are limited) so as not to have losses, or you end up with losses if you want to serve everyone correctly so as not to disappoint anyone. »
He therefore had to find a way to preserve the fresh tuna, salmon or even arctic char that he had delivered and ideally… avoid freezing them. “The tuna that I put in the freezer will blacken, it will become flabby, it will be filled with water and it will lose 50% of its taste,” summarizes Mr. Genest.
“This week we received 140 pounds of tuna,” he said. It’s extraordinary. In two days, we use 40 pounds. The rest is placed in the cellar. We are capable of rolling. We know that tuna, between 14 and 28 days, is where the magic happens. We are able to manage stocks. Rather than going through the frozen, we go through the cellar. »
After a stay in the aging “chamber”, the salmon, for its part, will have “a little buttery side, a little nutty side in the aftertaste”, describes Christian Genest.
“Initially, I thought about conserving the fish, not necessarily improving them,” he admits, while not hiding the joy this discovery gave him.
And how do customers react when we sell them the idea of eating sushi prepared… with aged fish?
From the start, Mr. Genest and his team made them taste the product that had spent time in the cellar. They were able to compare it with fish that had not been aged. This way they were able to taste the difference between the two. “In this way, we managed to convince them,” he maintains.
“I’m pleasantly surprised [by their reaction]. We serve customers who know sushi. They are willing to pay for quality. »
