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Any idea what market price for blowfish might be in the U.S.? Fried or sauteed both sounds good to me.
OMG!!!! the last thing you want to do with fugu...a very delicate white-fleshed fish...ARGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!! You eat it sashimi, maybe a little sushi, the last flakes of fleshy goodness on rice and then the soup is made from the left-over parts....heavenly!!
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The best way to enjoy blowfish would be eating sashimi but fresh one is very chewy because it contains a lot of collagen. So usually it is necessary to be matured for a couple of days. However, having a blowfish stew (mild one) is second best way to taste. The one Escoffier and I had in Seoul was very good. We went to the best place in the city. That's why it was very expensive. Usual blowfish season is November - February.

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Not at all. Blowfish stew is very safe if it is handled by a licensed chef. All of the organ is removed and its blood is completely washed before it is cooked. I didn't see the show but the sashimi shouldn't make the eater's mouth numb.

Tetrodotoxin is 14 times stronger than cynide. If you take 0.5 mg of it, you will die.

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Also, only about 20% of the puffer fish out there are super-deadly. The usual puffer fish you find here on the East Coast, the northern puffer, has never had a recorded death due to its consumption. So, if Han Gang were to get it or one of its essentially non-venomous brethren, wouldn't really matter. (I say essentially because I think eating an Atlantic northern puffer's innards will make you "not well", but it won't kill you like the Japanese variety.)

Now monkfish/angler fish? They are all ugly. :D

ETA: Huh, apparently you are more likely to get saxitoxin poisoning from an Atlantic northern puffer than tetrodotoxin poisoning. If they eat infected clams down in Florida, they can accumulate it.

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My absolute favorite beverage in the whole wide world (well, alcoholic anyway) is hirezake. It's the dried fin of pufferfish steeped in hot sake for several minutes. Rich, earthy, nutty, smoky, complex, not heavily fishy unlike what you would imagine.

Hirezake is listed on the sake menu at Tako Grill, but I've also had it at Makoto and a couple of other local venues. Not so much for the warmer months, and not something you would want to drink all night, but faintable savory during a chilly evening.

Plus, no pesky neurotoxins. Well, so far anyway...

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Here is the comment of my college roommate, who has lived in Japan since 1985 and is a professor at a Japanese university:

"Fugu has poison all through its body, some places more than others, females more than males, and more or less depending on the time of year. You can get stoned on fugu, and some people aim to to that -- obviously with the connivance of chefs. This is a kind of risk-taking that I can imagine in Japan, but not so much in the U.S., at least until fugu reaches teenagers who would otherwise sniff glue.

"So my hypothesis is that some customers, and of course some chefs, put themselves at risk. Also I wonder if deaths from fugu in Japan have increased in the last 10 years, in line with a general increase in suicides as businesses fail. A second source of suicide by fugu would, of course, be chefs whose customers have died from it."

To that, I would add: Fugu chefs in Japan study 5-7 years to gain their certificate, they have special knives and a cadre of assistants, and still people die. This is not a trivial subject. When I was in Tokyo some years ago, a well-known sumo wrestler was a victim. The buzz that you're supposed to get from fugu is le petit mort, which can also be translated as orgasm.

In this video, note how the fish continues to struggle as it's being cut up:

http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/200...ty_and_dead.php

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