When I cook salmon (I usually bake it while roasting veggies) there's some white, goopy, globby stuff that comes out of the salmon while it's cooking. It looks kind of like cooked egg whites.
At first I thought the salmon wasn't cooked enough, but then I realized that it was cooked, but this stuff was just sitting on top of the fish.
So . . .
1. What is it?
2. Do I eat it?
I haven't been eating it, just scraping it off, and then today I had the thought that maybe this is where some of the Omega-3s are and maybe I should be eating it?
Really interesting! I have no idea how you found those articles, but they were helpful.
I realized the same thing sometimes happens with chicken, and with both chicken and salmon it happens when I've thawed it from frozen - all that makes me think the albumin theory is right. Plus, it just looks SO much like egg white, that I like thinking it's the same stuff.
Thanks, JenMusic, for my very favorite thread title of the day. Maybe of the whole week -- over the next seven days, we'll see what other things 3FC members wonder about & finally dare to ask. (Usually, they are things I've kinda wondered about myself.)
We eat a lot lot lot of salmon (I live in Alaska, we fish it all summer and eat it all winter) and we eat the white stuff, too.
I didn't read the articles, but I know no matter what way we prepare the salmon, or who cooks it, etc - there's always white stuff. I always assumed it was fat too.
Yep it's albumen - and so is the "scum" that rises to the top of poultry and meat broths and sometimes oozes out of meats when simmered, roasted, or grilled. My grandmother always told me it was congealed blood, but apparently not.
I think I learned about albumen from one of Alton Brown's shows.
The goopy stuff in salmon
