So has the raw salmon at the grocery store. You’d have a hard time buying fish that hasn’t been previously frozen, you just don’t know it because grocery stores thaw it before it goes into the display case.

Nope. Raw salmon is fresh when sold (unless sold smoked and spiced yet in a package).

You can't re-freeze a frozen fish. Sushi bars store the products in a special refrigerator, ultrafrozen. They are obliged by law to do this.

Farmed salmon can be sold never frozen for sushi. Wild can’t. It is one of the few fish that can be purchased that way because it has very low incidence of parasites.

But still her own graph showed it was well above 140C (the temperature at which parasites are all dead) and she was talking entirely about microbes.

So even if you purchased Never frozen farmed salmon and cooked it this way, you’d be very safe. Even if you didn’t cook it at all you’d be very safe, as evidenced by the fact that the government allows it.

Say what you want about our government’s food regulations, they are not at all risk tolerant.

I wouldn’t want to cook salmon in a dishwasher, but I wouldn’t hesitate to eat it for food safety reasons, and her video made me less concerned, not more.

Also I don’t think sushi restaurants typically have any special freezers for this. You can reach the required level in a regular commercial freezer. -4F for one week. Any commercial freezer gets that cold, and that step is taken by the wholesalers anyway for any sushi that requires it.

> Most of this fishes are domestic.

Completely wrong, Spain relies on imports from Norway and Sweden for farmed salmon and the US for wild pacific salmon. Domestic production is negligible: https://www.tridge.com/data-insights/market-price-atlantic-s...

> Sushi bars store the products in a special ultrafreeze storage,for some time. They are obliged by law to do this.

Maybe in Spain, this is not required by the restaurant in the US, some jurisdictions require recordkeeping to prove their suppliers froze this for them (NYC) and most source from a parasite-free supplier but the restaurant itself only needs to maintain safe storage temperature. The FDA guidelines are enforced by local health jurisdictions in the US and may not be in complete alignment. More on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/sushi-fresh-from...

> Spain relies on imports from Norway and Sweden

With domestic I mean a domestic animal, one breed in captivity, not one from Spain. I should probably used "domesticated" instead.

Sushi freezers are colder than regular freezers. This is real galaxy brain stuff.

Ha. I don’t think it’s even true. I mean it wouldn’t surprise me if some sushi restaurant somewhere had such things, but restaurant supply companies don’t sell extra cold freezers. Seafood wholesalers might have such things but I’d wager the vast majority of sushi restaurants are using regular freezers.

Correct, however they do exist and some higher-end restaurants use them. Places usually advertise them as 'super freezers' that operate at -60C, some of the michelin star type restaurants go deeper with medical cryocoolers. It's becoming more common now that places like NYC have a regulation requiring freezing (where before a restaurant could just source from a parasite-free supplier).

* * *

Sushi in the us has to be held at -20C for 7 days, or -35C for 15 hours. They absolutely sell extra cold freezers that go to that temperature. Your home freezer won't.

> I’d wager the vast majority of sushi restaurants are using regular freezers.

After the 7 days at -20 the fish can just be transferred to a regular freezer. So you're right, most places probably don't have the special freezer in house.

No, it’s -4 for 7 days. Any commercial freezer gets that cold. Mine is a cheapo Avantco and goes to -8.

-4F is -20C.

Ha oh yeah. Missed the units.

Well yeah every freezer does that.

I looked into this awhile back. While you're correct about previous freezing this is about mitigating microbe risk, not parasite destruction. The FDA has a specification that the fish must be frozen down to in order to ensure destruction of parasites. (I couldn't find a direct link to the FDA's guideline, here's one from MN that's the same: https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/food/... )

Ahi Tuna and most farmed Atlantic salmon (Norway is especially safe: https://web.archive.org/web/20200426100625/https://nifes.hi.... ) have low to no parasite risk. However, I would not buy and eat wild salmon sashimi without at least freezing for a week first. Even retailers as big as Costco don't have freezers meeting the guideline.

I think any fish requiring such freezing likely would have been frozen to spec before it got to Costco or any restaurants. I’ve never asked any of the seafood purveyors I know about it, but I do know you can buy the stuff from them and use it immediately. I don’t trust the government for much but when it comes to being overly regulatory on food safety they’re pretty tough to beat. If it’s being sold ready to use I’m sure it was processed before, and there’s a HACCP plan in place to ensure it.