Just goes to prove how rarely I purchase supermarket fish!!
The Frozen Seafood Notice link that you supplied is a year old…
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There are very specific requirements for how seafood products should be weighed.
There are exceptions. EG Ousters are not sold by weight.
Fresh seafood also has a very limited storage period.
6 days at 4C
12 days at 0C
For some further advice.
Supplies of most fresh seafoods are weather dependant. Farmed product is the one exception. It pays to ask at the counter or seafood supplier.
If one is after fresh, it will be limited to what has been brought to market in the previous 24 hours. Many products are frozen on board, while others are frozen on sale to make the product suitable for future sale or transport to not so local customers.
We should not expect (premium airfreight excepted) Coral trout or Barramundi sold in Melbourne to be other than frozen product. Similarly Ling or other cold water fish are unlikely to be today’s catch in Cairns or Darwin.
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I prefer (commercially) frozen fish to buying fresh, then (possibly) using a domestic freezer.
Have never forgotten how quickly IQF froze solid, bulk quantities of prawns (when working on trawlers in the Gulf of Carpentaria - many, many years ago…).
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This topic is like a rabbit hole.
Much is written and reported, and some is left to the imagination.
All fresh meats will lose water if stored due to proteins losing their ability to hold onto water and the breakdown of cells within the meat. When placed in a package, meat will continue to lose water until such time that the meat is inedible. The meat will be the weight as packaged, not as if it is stored and released fluid over time. The fluid is part of the meat, just it no longer is in the meat but has been released as a natural process through its storage.
If all meat was hung for a days/weeks before packaging, then moisture loss may be less…but the meat may look very different to that currently seen as being acceptable. Well hung meat is usually dark in colour and consumer may think it has gone off.
Meat in Australia from commercial abattoirs is processed quickly after slaughter (hanging time is minutes to hours and more about draining free fluids immediately after slaughter). Well hung meat is usually only found from specialist butchers which have the facilitates and time to do so.
Not a point being argued. In this case we buy (bought?) the product almost weekly for years, and knew exactly what to expect and never worried until the pieces were visually deficient, weighed, and just met the T2 variance because of significant water. There could be a multitude of reasons why that was so. Not the point, and I accept it might have been a singular anomaly in the packing process - until I started checking other products to see what I was paying for.
Today I also learned that there is a surprising latitude to legally underserve many products, including some that do not ‘shed’ liquids because they are liquids.
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Meat naturally contains about 3/4 water at slaughter. So even what may seen to be significant could be expected from unhung meat stored over time.
If the meat was processed quickly after slaughter, the fluid volumes will be higher than those processed some time later. It could indicate the meats were processed ‘fresher’ or under ‘unhung’ conditions. Poultry is often processed and packaged quickly (automated process) and will have significantly more fluids than a hung chicken from a specialist farmer/butcher. Likewise with other meats.
I started this about fish not meat, although it could be extrapolated to a broad curiosity of all packaged products sold to AQS that are not easily or reasonably portioned such as mince can be.
It really does not need to be belaboured, I hope.
Even fish are processed on factory trawlers…where they are processed (filleted quickly after catching) and packaged ready for selling. It may mean that the fish has been processed fresher than those which don’t lose much water. I would like my fish processed quickly after being caught as fish goes off quickly if not done so.
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I watched “Cook Like An Italian With Silvia Colloca” on SBS TV this afternoon during which she bought 2 fresh whole chickens at David Jones which she asked the butcher to spatchcock, and she left with them in a brown paper bag.
When she finally took them out of the bag, each one was wrapped up in some thin brown paper, and there was no liquid visible anywhere.
Perhaps they were simply too fresh for liquid to egress or it may just have been the magic of David Jones.
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Or the ‘magic’ of film editing??
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The poultry may be have been hung. It usually demands a premium and maybe DJ has decided to sell specialist meat products…rather than run of the mill supermarket type meats.
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I thought “premium” and “David Jones” were synonymous.
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In relation to hung meat, in the 1980s I was fortunate enough to go to a 21st birthday at cattle station at Taroom (QLD). The station owner’s daughter’s birthday. Anyway, he (father) had killed a beast 3 months prior and let it hang to tenderise it and also as a special BBQ treat. The meat was black…and was a bit worried about eating it…it is one of the best steaks I have ever had…and I survived. It proved that my university animal production lectures were right in relation to hung meat.
Meat from a supermarket isn’t hung as the average consumer won’t buy it (for price and the way it looks). But…if one has the opportunity, it is worth trying.
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When I was in high school, I went with some mates and their father and a couple of others to a former cattle ststion at Princess Charlotte Bay on Cape York where they caught copious numbers of barra and we went shooting feral pigs.
The property manager had some steak from a freshly killed beast cooked for our breakfast and it was the toughest, most inedible steak I have ever tried to eat.
It was supposed to be fillet or rib fillet, but whether the problem was that it had not been hung, or it was simply Braham cross rubbish, or both, I hope to never experience anything like it again.
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The topic is weights on packages. Perhaps topics dedicated to buying the best meats and fish, and so on should be started? There seems more than enough interest. As for weights and AQS and prices for product, perhaps including water or ice, or even air?
We are all guilty of minor distractions or in threads from time to time.
The discussion about water from meat being stored, and different methods of meat processing is pertinent to weights and AQS.
The barramundi product you have measured, the water/liquid is unlikely to be added to production to make up packaging weigh to 255gm.
The barramundi would have made water/liquid in the packaging for possibly two reasons, the first from the fish flesh due to storage time (as outlined above). The second is these fish portions have salt added. The salt will result in additional moisture loss from the fish flesh.
If one doesn’t want to find water/liquid in any meat product, one would need to buy meat which is aged (e.g. hung) where most free fluids have left the meat before processing or processed (such as drying) in a way to remove free fluids before packaging.
Just because there happens to be a product which meets weights and AQS because there is fluids in the packaging when opened doesn’t mean the manufacturer has deliberately deceived the consumer. Fluid loss is a natural process from storing meat and possibly be variable between packed products.
Should a manufacturer try and estimate fluid loss from storage so the consumer gets a net product meeting the labelled weight - which is the weight excluding fluid loss? It could be a solution, and then it becomes the measured weight for meeting packaging and weight/AQS requirements.
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One thing that I have noticed, especially with things like prepacked chicken such as Lilydale chicken pieces and Steggles chicken necks, the closer they are to their use by date, the more liquid will be in the bottom of the trays.
So the juices obviously continue to seep out of the meat from the time of packaging to the end of their shelf life.
I’ve been buying LAZZIO Dark Coffee Beans - 1 KG from Aldi for years and I empty every bean from a 1 KG pack into the same container I’ve had all that time. After shaking the beans in the container it’s obvious I’m getting less than I used to over the years. Someone is skimming or short changing the 1 KG of coffee beans
I called Aldi last year and wrote to them - They wanted me to
Give them the Date Of Purchase:
Best Before/Use By Date:
Batch Code:
Variant: Peru or Brazil
Which I couldn’t do and I let it slide after lots of going nowhere emails from
Kathryn
ALDI Customer Service
ref:_00D7F1xExv._5002v2sSt1U:ref
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Do you weigh the beans? The weight could still be accurate and fill up to various marks on your container if they pack differently. One way for that to happen is if the beans are now smaller. There are other possibilities.
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