Swai fish

Every now and again i trawl my server search engine archives to find out what people are searching for and the flavour of this week is... Swai fish.

You probably haven't heard of it but, chances are, you may have heard it referred to as one of its many aliases.

Swai (Pangasius hypophthalmus in Latin) is a river fish often tagged iridescent (angle changing hue) shark or Siamese shark but it isn't a shark at all, it's a catfish.

It's also known as tra, striped catfish, and also basa and panga. The latter two, while from the same species, are completely different fish of superior quality. They command a higher price but i'm sure the mislabelling is purely accidental!

Swai is cheap as chips and popular in Vietnam and Mexico. So cheap and so popular, in fact, that US regulation forbade the labelling of this import as "catfish" to prevent it from taking a sizeable chunk out of their homegrown catfish trade.

Flavour-wise, it resembles other white, mild, sweet, flaky fish, such as pollock and i would love to give you some recipes but the reported exessive levels of mercury discovered in the rivers it inhabits is a bit of a concern.

Recipes for avoiding disaster