A bit about hoki, another bit about portions
My past week started with hoki and ended with orange roughy portions. Half the rest of the staff were in the back doing dressed fish while I was packing hoki. I think it was alphonsino, based on the random bright red fins all over the washroom floor. I would’ve much preferred to be back there with them. Hoki packing is the (second) worst (after dory size 2s). Meanwhile, orange roughy portions are pleasant enough to pack, but watching them cut up all the gigantic, gorgeous fillets into little pieces makes me sad.
Ye Olde Hoki Blocks
Two days of hoki packing was enough to bring back all my unfond memories of last hoki season. To sum up: if things are going well, it’s boring, and if it’s not going well, it’s annoying. And during hoki season there’s no end to it in sight.
This week’s hoki was extra mashy. I think they’d been sitting around a bit long. Large numbers of them had yellow belly, which is a yellowish stain on the flesh next to where the gut pouch was. I can’t imagine that it tastes good.
We packers don’t have knives, so when we have to “trim” bad bits off a fish, it’s by ripping it apart. The annoying thing about hoki is, the bad bits tend to hang on better than the good bits, so you could be standing there ripping up flake after flake, and it’s still there, so then you just rip the whole thing in half. We lose a lot more good fish flesh than I like to see, when the trimmers don’t get it before it gets to us.
Worse than that, both days I was assigned to the last place in line behind two newbies. The last place in line is the worst (for me). I don’t multitask that well. I’m fast when the only thing I have to do is pack the fish. I’m reasonably decent at also having to trim the fish while packing the fish. But throw in catch all fish going past me, on top of fixing the trim on almost every single fish, and pretty soon I’m not packing at all anymore, I’m spending all my time shovelling fish into bowls.
The mashiness also reminded me of past Good Times when I’d just let them go right past me to the mince bin. The reasoning was pretty straightforward from my view: if I don’t have time to put a mashy fillet in the box right away, there is no point picking it up and putting it in the bowl, because it won’t survive as an intact fillet. Later on when we’re picking through the bowl, most packers (especially newbies, such as the people I was packing last in line behind this week) will dump out all the loose flakes back onto the belt and let it go to the mince bin. So I’m saving us a lot of time by skipping the interim bowl step. Unfortunately, the supervisors don’t see it the same way, so I got yelled at a few times.
As I lost my own newbieness, I stopped dumping all the perfectly good loose flakes and started using them to plug holes, but that was later on in the season when management cracked down more on not letting it go to mince if it was remotely useable.
The two newbies did pick up on things quickly, though they hadn’t worked out all the ins and outs of proper teamwork yet, by the time we stopped. As the last place in line, my work was therefore all fits and starts. There would be long lulls where I stood around doing nothing, then one (or worse, both!) of the upstream packers would finish a box and start a new one, and suddenly I had to deal with three people’s worth of fish at once.
Orange Roughy Portions
According to the work plan whiteboard outside the factory, the orange roughy portions we did are going to Publix. It’s a grocery store chain in the United States. I used to shop there regularly. I’ve even bought fish portions from them - they’re labelled “Fresh (Previously Frozen).” Every time I did so, I would wish that I could buy whole fillets instead of just small pieces. So there I was in the factory, watching whole fillets get sliced into small pieces, and having to pack them that way, and I guess now I know how they got like that. Orange roughy is delicious, but possibly too expensive for most people to afford such big fillets. But I still wish I could get hold of a whole fillet.
The actual packing is an interesting challenge. Each piece needs to be separate from all the others so they don’t freeze together. There are basically three portion shapes:
Rectangles, which can be square, rectangular, rhomboid, or diamond shaped.
Strips. These are either very long skinny rectangles in two halves barely held together with connective tissue in the middle, or they are the front part of a single muscle lobe (and the more you see them, the more phallic they look each time you see more).
Triangles, which are the tails. They’re very roughly shaped like right triangles, maybe a bit on the obtuse side.
Rectangles are easiest to pack. You just put them all in a grid and voila.
Strips look like they should be easy, but they are extra tall, so it’s hard to pack a whole bunch of strips and make it come out flat. The single muscle lobes also tend to roll around, and it’s hard to tell which side is supposed to be up.
Triangles are fun. When I have enough to do an entire layer of them, and enough time on my hands to tinker with the pattern, I like to put them hypotenuse-to-hypotenuse. You can put a lot of tails in a layer that way.
Unfortunately, we weren’t doing them separated by shape, like we have done on occasion in the past. So the challenge was trying to get all of the different shapes to fit together in each layer. Fortunately, most of the time the work was slow enough that there was time to think about it.
Meanwhile, I have fond memories of shopping at Publix. As I packed fish portions for them, I thought about what I would’ve liked to see in the seafood display as a customer. I thought about shopping there in general. Every company employee has part-ownership, and they all seem pretty happy to work there. Customer service is excellent. Tipping is actively discouraged on the basis that everyone is paid well enough not to need them. (I have gigantic rants I could write about U.S. tipping culture, but that would be a massive digression from this blog’s topic…)
I remember when I first moved to Mobile, Alabama, there wasn’t a Publix. The two grocery stores nearest me did not carry my favourite yogurt (Dannon coffee!). One insisted that my requested yogurt did not exist, and the other pointed me to their dozens of other yogurt brands and flavours and indicated that I should be happy with those. So every week I drove 40 minutes across the bay to Daphne, which had the nearest Publix (and the nearest Dannon coffee yogurt), to do my regular grocery shopping. A few years later, Publix opened a store across the street from the grocery store nearest me. A few months after they opened, the other store closed, and that entire chain disappeared from the city.
There’s all sorts of other memories I could write about Publix, but I’ve definitely stopped talking about seafood so I’ll stop here.