We recently visited an Alpenlachs fish farm with Slow Food Vienna. The farm raises salmon (lachs is salmon in German) in the mountains, which as one of our hosts said, is strictly not correct since they don't spend any time in the ocean, but they are a very closely related species.
We started the day with a tour of the hatchery facilities. Outside Markus described the overall process (left photo) and the breeding of the "Alpenlachs" variety of salmon. Inside the hatchery Salmut described the process of raising fish from eggs to full-grown fish.
Next Salmut (right photo) showed us the fish ponds where the salmon spend about three years. The Alpenlachs people have developed a fish feeding system that helps the fish increase their omega oil production. It's based on feeding the fish only a small amount of food every few minutes throughout the day. This forces the fish to swim more and builds up their muscles.
Next we learned how to filet fish. Here's a photo of Christa in the process.
Finally, we learned how to cook the fish, here's another photo of Christa. We had a marvelous lunch featuring Alpenlachs prepared by the traveling cooks with fine Slovenian and Austrian wine. It was a wonderful way to spend a spring Saturday! You can get the Alpenlachs at the Karmelitermarkt in Vienna (Fridays and Saturdays).
1 comment:
That sounds like great fun! And tasty, too.
W.
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