In today's New York Times Magazine, there is a great short article on Fish-Flavored Fish to confuse your logic and your tastebuds. To feed demand from the fast food industry (who needs the fishy flavor before they deep fry) one aquaculture company has come up with a way to put the fishy flavor in farmed fish.
This spring, after 10 months of testing, the aquaculture company HQ Sustainable Maritime Industries created what it calls "sea-flavored" tilapia, the first farmed fish manipulated to taste like a wild fish. "It met 10 out of our 10 taste parameters," says HQ's president and C.E.O., Norbert Sporns. The company, which is negotiating distribution deals with several fast-food chains, employs good old-fashioned food-processing technology to imitate the industry standard. It uses flavoring compounds to replicate the mild taste of Alaska pollock, a northern Pacific whitefish that holds a near-monopoly over products like fish sticks, imitation crabmeat and frozen fish fillets. HQ has even found a way to replicate the mushy texture of cooked pollock.
My question: what, beside wild fish, gives that fishy flavor?
Some kinds of seaweed, kelp for instance, kind of. "Fishiness" is actually the only real missing flavor in veggie cuisine - lots of things taste "meaty" and umami-ish, including, of course, khombu, the seaweed that is the original source of MSG; but not much tastes properly fishy, sigh.