Speaker A
Go stand in front of the seafood case at Costco and do nothing at all. Do not pick anything up. Do not read a single label. Just stand there and wait the way you would wait at a counter with your
Sal Rizzo reveals 7 seafood items he avoids at Costco's seafood case and shares better alternatives found elsewhere in the store.
Key Takeaways
- Costco's seafood case is a pre-packaged shelf, not a fresh fish counter with custom cuts.
- Buying large pre-portioned items like whole salmon sides can lead to uneven cooking and waste.
- Value-added seafood products often cost more and may include fillers that reduce quality.
- Better seafood choices are found outside the seafood case, often in frozen or deli sections.
- Understanding seafood preparation and packaging helps avoid overpaying and poor quality.
What the video covers
- Costco's seafood case is designed as a shelf, not a traditional fish counter, with pre-packaged, pre-portioned seafood made in bulk.
- Items in the case are uniform, larger than typical household needs, and often have the hard preparation work done in advance.
- Sal explains why buying a whole side of Atlantic salmon from the case is problematic due to uneven thickness and cooking times.
- Stuffed fillets with seafood stuffing are avoided because the stuffing adds weight and cost, and quality is compromised.
- The video emphasizes understanding product preparation, shelf life, and pricing to make smarter seafood purchases.
- Sal shares that none of his preferred seafood purchases come from the seafood case but from other store departments.
- He highlights the importance of knowing what to buy and where in the store to get the best value and quality seafood.
- Sal offers additional resources on his website for deeper knowledge about seafood shopping and preparation.
- The video includes detailed critiques of seven seafood items to avoid and four better alternatives to buy.
- Sal encourages viewers to subscribe for more insights based on his 38 years of experience in the seafood industry.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Costco Seafood Case Reality
- 01:04Why Costco's Seafood Case is a Shelf, Not a Counter
- 02:22Characteristics of Pre-Packaged Seafood Products
- 03:36Overview of Seven Items to Avoid and Four to Buy
- 04:53Problem with Whole Atlantic Salmon Sides
- 06:15Issues with Stuffed Seafood Fillets
- 07:14Value-Added Seafood Products and Pricing
- 09:28Frozen Seafood and Best Value Alternatives
- 12:00Summary and Final Recommendations
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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hands at your sides. Count to 60. Nobody comes. There's a wall behind that case and there's a door in that wall. And behind that door there are people and those people are working hard. I want to be fair about that. Uh, they are just not
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working for you at that moment. And they are not going to be, uh, because the whole thing was finished before you got there.
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There is no bell on that case. There is no scale you can see. There is nobody standing on the other side of that glass holding a knife waiting for you to point at something and say, "That one." And
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about an inch and a half thick and can you take the pin bones out?" That is not a complaint. Let me get that out of the way in the first minute because I am about to spend a long time on that case
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and I do not want you thinking this is a bitter old man with a grudge against the store. That store is the best thing that has happened to the price of protein in this country in my lifetime. I have a
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card. I use it. Later in this video, I'm going to tell you four things I put in my own cart there most months and I mean it about all four. And one of them is the best value in seafood in America and
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it is not close. But that case is not a fish counter. It looks like one. It is lit like one. Same white trays, same crushed ice, same slope, same plastic, same little green frilly nothing tucked in the corner. Somebody designed that to
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look like a counter and they did a good job. It is a shelf. And the second you see it as a shelf instead of a counter everything else falls out of it on its own. So, let me say the whole idea now
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and then we will just walk the case. A shelf can only hold things that were finished somewhere else. One thing while we are still standing here and then I will not interrupt this again. Subscribe to Sal Rizzo. I am not going to dress it
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up as a favor to you. It is for me. 38 years of this, only ever lived inside one building in front of whoever happened to walk in that day, and this is the first time it has been out where
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anybody can hear it. And that button is the only signal I get that anybody is out there. It costs nothing. I will ask one more time at the very end and then it is done. Every single item in that
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case had to be cut, portioned, wrapped, weighed, labeled, priced, and stacked by somebody on a clock that was not yours before it came out on the floor. Nothing in there exists because a customer asked for it. Nothing in there was adjusted
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for anybody. There's no version of it that is thicker or thinner or half that size or skin off or in two pieces instead of one. So, the case fills up with the only kind of product that survives being decided in advance. And
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that is a real category. Things that are pre-decided have things in common. They are bigger than one household needs because a big pack survives the trip and a small one does not pay for the labor.
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They are the same item over and over because sameness is what makes a stack work. And they lean hard toward products where the hard part is already done for you because a product with the hard part already done can sit for a shift and
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still look correct. That last one is the whole business and it is the reason for all seven of these because when the hard part is already done, you are not buying fish anymore. You are buying somebody made it in a room on a Tuesday
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for a thousand customers at once and then you paid for it by the pound. Seven things I will not put in my cart out of that case. Then four I buy there almost every month and I will spoil it right
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now so nobody sits through this waiting for a twist. Not one of the four is in that case. Not one.
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They are in three other parts of that same store and two of them are not even refrigerated. All right. Number seven is the single most purchased item in that entire department. So, let us not be cowards about it. Actually, hold on.
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Before I say it out loud, one thing and I will keep it to under a minute because you did not come here for it. There is a great deal more of this than fits in one video. Seven refusals and four
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replacements is one shopping trip. It is not the job. The job is which department in any store your food should actually be coming from and it is almost never the one with the pretty lights. What every line on a frozen package is really
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telling you including the date codes on the back that nobody reads, what to do with three pounds of one fish so that the third night is better than the first night instead of worse? Every trimming, every frame, every collar, every scrap
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you have been putting in the bin. And what all of it is genuinely worth per pound so that nobody can ever price you again. So, I wrote all of it down. It is in a set of books at sellrizzofish.com.
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The link is sitting in the description under this video and the code on your screen goes to the same place. That is the last you're going to hear about that. Now, number seven, the whole side of fresh Atlantic salmon, the big one. 3
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lb and change, sometimes four. One enormous fillet lying diagonally in a tray, skin on, pin bones usually out, and it looks magnificent. It is the flagship of that entire case, and it is the thing most people put in the cart.
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Here is what is wrong with it, and it is not what the internet tells you is wrong with it. I am not going to stand here and tell you farm salmon is poison. It is not. I sold farmed salmon for most of
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my life, and I've eaten a great deal of it. The problem is that a side of salmon is not one piece of fish. It is three, and they are wearing the same coat. Up at the head end, you have the loin. That
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is thick, inch and a half, sometimes more, dense, and it wants heat and it wants time. Down in the middle, you have the center cut, which is the good, even part, but the part I would have handed you if you had asked me for salmon. And
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down at the tail end, you have a piece that tapers to about as thick as your thumb and then keeps going until it is thinner than that. Those three things do not cook at the same speed. They are not
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close. In the same pan, at the same temperature, the tail's finished and drying out while the loin is still cold in the middle. At a counter, that is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem for a hundred years. You say,
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"Center cut, four pieces, even." And a person cuts it that way and charges you a bit more per pound, and everybody goes home happy. In that case, there's nobody to say it to. You are buying all three at one price, and then in your own
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kitchen, at 6:00 on a Wednesday, you are going to try to cook three different fish in one pan, and you're going to lose, and the person at your table who gets the tail end is going to eat a dry
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piece of salmon and quietly file it away. You did not overpay. That is the thing. Per pound that that fish is often a genuinely good price. You just bought a job, and the job is do it dinner, and
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nobody told you that you had taken it. Number six, the stuffed fillets. The ones with the seafood stuffing piped down the middle. Crab stuffing, shrimp stuffing, the ones with the little breadcrumb topping on them sitting there under the light looking like something
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out of a restaurant. Two problems. And one of them is a money problem, and one of them is not. The money problem is simple arithmetic, and you can do it standing there. Like look at the price per pound on that package. Now look at
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how much of that package is stuffing. On the ones I have picked up, it is a quarter to a third of the total weight, and the stuffing is bread and a binder and some minced whatever and a great
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deal of moisture. You were paying salmon money for bread by weight, and bread is heavy when it is wet.
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But that is the smaller problem. Here is the bigger one. Stuffing is opaque. I mean that literally, not as a figure of speech. When a pi
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color of the flesh. You can see whether the flakes have started to separate. You can see the edge. You can see whether it has been sitting. That is not a skill.
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That is just looking, and I could teach it to you in 10 minutes. The second you put a topping on it, all of that is gone. And I want to be careful and accurate here because I am not accusing
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anybody of anything. Nobody is out back hiding old fish under bread crumbs. That is not what happens, and I have never seen it happen.
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What happens is much more ordinary than that and much harder to argue with. A value-added product exists because it earns more per pound than the plain product, and plain product that is on its last legal day of looking good in
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the case has to become something. Every counter I ever ran, including mine, had that same arithmetic. The stuffed thing is where the arithmetic goes. So it is not a scandal. It is just that you have deliberately purchased the
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one version of that fish where you are not allowed to check. Number five, lobster tails out of the case. Now, this one makes people genuinely angry when I say it. So, let me be precise. Nearly every lobster tail sold in this country
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was frozen, not most, nearly everyone. That is not a scam, it is how the animal is handled and it is completely normal and I have no argument with it whatsoever. So, walk that store and you will find the same tails in two places,
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frozen in a bag in the freezer aisle at the back and thawed in the case on ice under the light in a nice tray. Same animal, same origin, same size grade, usually the same supplier. The difference in what you pay is real and
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it is not small. And I want you to understand exactly what that money bought because it did buy something.
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It bought thawing. Somebody took it out of the freezer for you and let it come up in a controlled cooler on a schedule.
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That is the entire transaction. You paid a person to open a freezer and you did not just pay for it, you also gave something up because the clock on that tail started the moment it came up and you have no idea when that was and the
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sticker only tells you when it was packed and now it has to be cooked essentially now. The one in the bag in the back has no clock running on it at all. It sits in your freezer until you
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decide. You paid extra to be given a deadline. Number four, the cooked shrimp platter and the shrimp ring and every version of that thing, the round tray, the cocktail sauce in the little cup in the middle, pink shrimp arranged in a spiral with
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the tails all pointing out. I understand why it is in every cart in December. It solves a real problem. Somebody is coming over, you need a thing on a table and this is a thing on a table and it
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takes 11 seconds. I am not going to pretend that is worthless. It is not worthless, but look at what you are actually buying. Shrimp has one variable that matters more than everything else put together and it is not size and it
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is not origin and it is not wild versus farmed. It is how long it was cooked. 30 seconds is the whole difference between a shrimp that snaps when you bite it and a shrimp that is a small pink eraser.
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That is the single decision in the entire product. And on that platter, the decision was made months ago in a plant at volume. And then the thing was frozen, and then it was thawed, and then it was arranged. You cannot fix it.
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There is no technique. It is the one seafood product in the store where there is genuinely nothing you can do because the only thing that mattered has already happened. And the second half of it, which I would say to anybody who asked
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me at the counter, cooked shrimp is a race that has already started. Cooked, peeled shellfish sitting on ice is more perishable than the raw one next to it, not less, because everything protective about it is gone. The shell is gone. The
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last cook was somewhere else at some point. And it is going to sit on your counter for a while before people actually start eating it. Number three, the refrigerated tub of crab meat, right? Plastic tub, snap lid, lump or
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claw, sitting right there in the ice with everything else. Pick one up and turn it over and look at the date on the lid, 9 months, sometimes 12, on a product that is sitting on crushed ice next to fish that will be no good in 3
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days. That contradiction is not a mistake, and there is nothing dishonest about it. That crab is pasteurized. It was heated in the sealed container, held there, and cooled, which is why it can carry a date like that. It is completely legitimate, and
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it is a good technology, and I have no complaint about the process at all. My complaint is where it is standing, because that tub does not need ice. It needed a shelf.
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It is on ice because being on ice is what makes it look like the fresh crab I used to sell out of a bowl at the end of my case, and it is priced somewhere in the neighborhood of the fresh crab, too.
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And it is not the same product. It is a different product with a different texture, a slightly different flavor, and about a year of shelf life. And once it is heated like that, the texture does something specific that you will
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recognize at the instant I say it. The fibers go slightly soft, and they let go of each other, so it does not come apart in strands anymore. It comes apart in a kind of paste, perfectly pleasant in a
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crab cake where it is bound up in something anyway. But if you bought it to eat cold in lumps with butter the way you would eat crab, you were going to be disappointed and you're not going to be
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able to say why. For 11 years, my case shared a corner with the club stores advertising in the sense that the week they opened across the highway, my numbers moved and the store I worked for did something I have never forgotten.
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They sent me over there on a Tuesday morning with a clipboard and told me to walk their case and write down what they had and what they were charging. I spent two hours doing it. And I came back and
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I told my manager the truth, which was that on about half of it, we could not compete and should not try. And on the other half, we were selling something they physically could not sell and it had nothing to do with quality. It was
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that a person was standing there. That crab tub was on my list that morning. It has been in that case for a very long time.
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Number two, um the sushi and poke trays out of the deli case, the rectangular plastic box with a hinged lid, rice on the bottom, fish on top, the little packet of soy sauce, sometimes a poke bowl version with sesame and scallion. I
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am not going to say a single word about the safety of that fish because I would be making it up.
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Fish intended for raw service is frozen to a specific standard for exactly this reason. That is the law and the big operators are the ones most likely to be doing it correctly, not least. The problem is the rice and it will sound
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small until you hear it. Sushi rice is a cooked starch that has been seasoned and is meant to be eaten at about room temperature on the day within hours. It is not a durable food. That is the entire reason it is made fresh in front
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of you in a place that takes it seriously. Refrigeration does something to cooked rice that is not reversible on the plate. The starch reorganizes as it cools and gets firm and a little chalky and holds less water and the grains stop
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being soft and separate and start being small hard pieces. It is the same thing that happens to bread in the refrigerator. And it happens fast and it happens at exactly the temperature that box has to be held at for the fish to be
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legal. So, the fish is fine and the rice cannot be and one of them is most of the weight of what you bought. You are buying a product where the two halves need opposite conditions and the fish gets to win because the fish is is one
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that can hurt somebody. Number one. The big pack of cold smoked salmon, the one that comes as a stack of long slices between plastic sheets, a pound of it, sometimes more, in a flat vacuum package. And this one is not
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about the product at all. The product is often genuinely good. I like it. I have eaten a great deal of it. It is about the size, and the size is the thing nobody warns you about. Cold smoked salmon was never cooked, not at any
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point. The salt and the smoke are doing preservation work, which is why it lasts as long as it does sealed, and it is why it is safe. And none of that is a problem. But the day you open that pack,
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all of that stops mattering. And you are standing there with a pound of raw salted sliced fish that is now on a clock measured in days, not weeks, days.
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A pound of sliced smoked salmon is somewhere around a dozen servings. Nobody eats 12 servings of smoked salmon in 3 days. So, what actually happens in the real kitchen of the real person who bought it is that Sunday is wonderful,
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and Tuesday is fine. And by Friday, there's a half-open package in the door of the refrigerator with the plastic folded over it, and the edges of the slices have gone dark and dry and slightly hard, and it smells stronger
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than it did. And eventually, somebody throws out 40% of it and feels bad about it. That is not a fish problem. That is a package size problem. And a package size problem is exactly what a warehouse case is built to give you because the
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pack size is the entire economic model of the building. It works beautifully for paper towels. Paper towels do not have a clock. Every one of these seven is that same shape when you back up far enough. The decision was made before you
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arrived, which piece, is how thick, how long it was cooked, when it was thawed, how much of it you were taking home. And every one of those decisions used to be a thing a person made with you standing
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there in about 11 seconds for free. So, now let me do the other half because I meant what I said at the start. Here is what is in my cart when I leave that store. And I want to point out the
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pattern before I list them rather than after. Three of these four are frozen solid. One of them is in a can on a shelf at room temperature, nowhere near the seafood department. Not one of them is on ice. Not one of them is in that
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case, not because frozen is a compromise I have made peace with. I want to be blunt about this. In seafood, frozen at sea is not the lesser version.
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It is the version where the clock was stopped on the boat in the first hours by a machine instead of being allowed to run for 4 days through three trucks.
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There is fish in that freezer aisle that is closer to the ocean than anything I could have sold you out of a case, and it is cheaper, and it has been true for about 20 years. And the reason nobody
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says it out loud is that it is very hard to make a freezer look romantic. The first one. Vacuum sealed wild cod or halibut loins frozen individually sealed pieces in a bag in the freezer aisle at the back of the store. Look for the
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words that say the fish was frozen once at sea, and look at the shape of the pieces, and here is the part that matters more than either of those. They should be uniform. Same thickness, same weight, cut from the loin, no tails, no
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thin ends, which is exactly what number seven could not give you. That is a portioned even single serving piece of whitefish with no bones and no skin that stays in your freezer indefinitely that you can take out one at a time, and
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that costs a fraction per serving of the thing in the case. You do not thaw it in the refrigerator overnight, and you do not thaw it on the counter. Cold water sealed 30 to 40 minutes, or for a piece
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up to about an inch, straight into the pan from frozen, which works better than people believe. Second, frozen wild sockeye portions uh skin on. This is my direct replacement for the big fresh side, and it is the swap that changes
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the most for the most people. So, if you take one thing out of this video, take this one.
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Sockeye is a different animal from the farmed Atlantic in the case, leaner, denser, much darker, stronger flavored, and it is wild by definition because nobody farms it commercially. It is frozen in portions skin on individually, and they are cut even because a machine
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cut them from a whole fish, and a machine does not get bored. Even portions, every single one the same thickness, which means every piece in your pan finishes at the same moment, which means nobody at the table gets the
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tail. It is leaner, so it wants less time and not more, and that trips people up the first week. Take it off sooner than you think. If you cook sockeye the way you cook farmed Atlantic, you will overcook it and blame the fish, and it
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will be the last time you buy it. And that is a shame because it is one of the honestly great foods. Third, raw shell-on shrimp, frozen, bought by the count, raw, not cooked, shell-on not peeled, frozen not thawed on ice, raw
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because that 30-second decision I talked about at number four stays yours. Shell-on because the shell is armor and insulation, and it is also the flavor.
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And if you throw the shells in a pot with water for 20 minutes, you have made something that will improve every soup and every pot of rice you cook for the next month for free out of something you
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were going to bin. And bought by the count, which is the two numbers on the bag because those numbers are the only completely honest thing on that package. Words describing size are chosen by a marketing department. The two numbers are a fact.
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Fourth, and this is the one that gets the face, canned wild salmon, not the seafood department, the pantry aisle on a shelf with the soup. I am aware of how this sounds after 20 minutes of a man being particular about fish. Hear me out
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on the arithmetic because it is the single best value in that entire building. Wild-caught salmon, one ingredient plus salt, cooked once in the sealed can, and not before it, no color added to it, no trip through a case, no
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clock on it at all, and it costs a small fraction per serving of anything with the word fresh on it. The traditional style with the soft bones and the skin in there has more calcium in it than a
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glass of milk, and the bones are so soft you will not find them. If that is not for you, buy the boneless, skinless, which is the same fish with the work done. I am not telling you it is a
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substitute for a piece of fish on a plate on a Saturday. It is not. And I would not insult you by saying it is. I am telling you that on a Tuesday when the alternative is not cooking fish at
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all, it is real wild salmon and it is sitting there on a shelf and nobody looks at it.
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Now, three times I break every one of my own rules and I want to be honest about all three.
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If you are feeding 12 people on Saturday, that case is exactly the right tool and I would use it myself. 4 lb of one fish in one piece on one day, cooked whole on a sheet pan, is a case purchase
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and it is the correct call. Every problem I described is a problem about time. On a day when everything gets eaten in 1 hour, none of those problems exist. If it is live, buy it there. Mussels and clams and
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oysters in the mesh bag are a completely different product from everything else in that room because they are alive when you buy them and alive is a condition nobody can fake and no schedule can degrade. That is the honest corner of
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that case. And if your store is one of the ones with an actual service window, where an actual person will cut for you, then throw out most of what I said and use it and use it often and tip them
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with your loyalty because that person is the rarest thing in American food retail right now. And when they go, they are not coming back. So, last Saturday, here's my cart at the register and I did walk past that case and I did stop and
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look at it the way I have looked at every case I have ever passed for 38 years out of habit I will die with. Two bags of frozen cod loins, one bag of sockeye portions, a 2-lb bag of raw
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shell-on shrimp, 16/20 count, and I remember thinking the price was better than it had any right to be. Four cans of pink salmon, coffee, a very large bag of onions that I did not need, nothing on ice, nothing in a white tray, nothing
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wrapped in that clear film with a little green frill in the corner, and nothing that somebody in a back room decided the shape of. And I will tell you the honest feeling standing there in that line because it is not triumph and it is not
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smugness, it is a small, specific sadness because I know exactly what is missing from that case and it is not fish. That case has excellent fish in it. What it does not have is 11 seconds of a person who knows what you are
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cooking tonight and how many you are feeding and whether your husband likes it thick. I did that for 38 years. It was free. Nobody ever put it on a sign and no store has ever once managed to put it in a tray. Until somebody figures
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out how to stack that on a pallet, you are going to have to be that person for yourself. That is all this video was. If one thing in the last 20 minutes changes what goes in your cart on Saturday,
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subscribe to Sal Rizzo. That was the second time which is the number I promised you at the beginning and now I am finished asking.
Topics:Costco seafoodseafood shopping tipsSal Rizzofresh fish vs pre-packagedseafood case critiqueAtlantic salmon cookingseafood valueseafood alternativesseafood preparationgrocery shopping advice
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