Which tuna is most expensive

Mostly as a symbolic gesture, or a publicity stunt. Wilcox: In Japanese culture, that first thing you do all year is the most important. It sets the tone for the whole year. That first tuna of the year always goes for the highest price that any tuna will go for the whole rest of the year. Narrator: And the different parts of a bluefin tuna also vary drastically in price. Wilcox: If you imagine a tuna as like a torpedo, they'll split it into quarters lengthwise, cut off the head, and the collar, and we will take one of the two belly quarters.

Narrator: Here's what one quarter looks like when it's delivered. This piece came from Boston, and was caught the previous day. Wilcox splits up the meat based on type. Wilcox: It's just like sides of beef. You know, you buy a side of beef, it's all the same, but once you break it down, the filet ends up being the most expensive part, because it's the most desirable. It's also small, and it requires a lot of labor to peel off the silver skin. Otoro is the fattiest part of the tuna outside of the head and collar area.

Narrator: This is the most expensive. Wilcox: The chutoro is getting around toward the side of the tuna, and it doesn't have the striations of fat, but it still has fat within the red of the meat, so you get a mix of fat and red.

And then, akami which means, literally, red meat in Japanese, is the leanest part which you find more towards the center of the tuna closer to the backbone. Narrator: Akami is the most common and cheapest part of the fish, but it's still more expensive than that can of albacore at your local market.

Wilcox: When you're assessing the quality of the tuna, you wanna taste the red meat, the akami. It's a wild animal, so it tells you whether it had a good diet, whether it had a good life, and it got exercise, and it lived in clean waters, and was able to swim around a lot.

So, a farm-raised tuna is, generally, force-fed sardines, and you can actually taste sardines in the fat of a farm-raised tuna. Whereas a wild tuna has a varied diet, and has a much cleaner and milder flavor to the fat. Narrator: But for decades, wild bluefin tuna were over-fished in the Pacific, which was harming their population and making it more difficult to come by.

Yukitaka Yamaguchi, the president of Yamayuki, was thrilled at getting this year's priciest bluefin. The fish was expected to be delivered to a company that operates the sushi restaurant Ginza Onodera. He hauled in two giant maguro around 8 a.

The pandemic, which has drastically sapped demand in the restaurant industry, forced the price of tuna the local fisheries cooperative in Oma handled in to plunge to one-third of that in normal times. Almost every month in , the transaction volume and billings at the Toyosu market were below the previous year.

The market has maintained regular operations, but a total of people who work there, mainly intermediary wholesalers, had contracted the virus by Jan.

At a. For one, all were armed with face masks and hand sanitizer to protect themselves against the virus. Please keep a safe distance from each other. Lost your password? Remember me. No account yet? Create an Account.

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