Seafood Handbook Finfish Page

The Seafood Handbook is the most comprehensive seafood directory available online. Featuring more than 100 of the most common seafood species in the U.S. market, the Seafood Handbook is the ultimate guide to seafood sourcing and preparation, brought to you by the editors of SeaFood Business magazine. And it’s free!

For each type of seafood species, there is a comprehensive overview of the item, its origin, history, availability, product attributes, nutritional value and cooking tips, along with an original hand-drawn depiction.

Explore Finfish by searching here:

The bottom-dwelling, kite-shaped skate is found worldwide in temperate and cold waters as well as in deep, tropical waters. Skates are taken with longlines and gillnets, both as a targeted fishery and as bycatch. Fresh skate landed in winter is considered the best. Only the wings of the skate are… Read More
Feeding on some of the world’s fastest tunas and billfish, the mako shark is at the very apex of the marine food chain. It’s also among the best-tasting of the hundreds of shark species around the world. There are two mako species: Isurus oxyrinchus, or shortfin mako, and I. paucus, or longfin… Read More
By all accounts, monkfish is one of the ugliest fish in the deep, having a huge head, tiny eyes and an enormous mouth filled with needle-like teeth. On top of that, to lure other fish into its grotesque mouth, it is equipped with a peculiar apparatus that looks like a spike with a bit of meat on… Read More
American eels are one of 15 related, snakelike fish species that include the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) and eels in tropical or subtropical rivers entering the Pacific or Indian oceans. Eels are catadromous, meaning that they spawn in the ocean but mature in fresh water. Most eels are caught… Read More
Albacore is best known as America’s highest-grade, “white meat” canned tuna. In fact, it’s the only tuna meat allowed to be labeled “white meat.” However, it has also developed a reputation out of the can in fresh and frozen markets. The albacore has a streamlined, torpedo-shaped body.… Read More
Hailed by many as “the ultimate pan fish,” yellow perch is rivaled only by walleye as the most popular freshwater fish on restaurant menus. The perch are typically 6 to 10 inches long and weigh 1/2 to 1 pound. The species was one of the most important Great Lakes fisheries until the 1990s, when… Read More
Groupers belong to one of the largest and most widely distributed families of fish, the sea basses. Red grouper (Epinephelus morio) is the most frequently seen grouper in the marketplace and is valued for its availability, flavor and size. Because of limited commercial supplies of the true black… Read More
This high-valued species is the favored sea bream, prized in Mediterranean cuisine and highly regarded by European chefs. It gets the “gilt-head” name from the golden stripe between its eyes. The Romans reportedly called the bream “Aurata,” the gilded one. The Greek goddess Aphrodite also… Read More
Gourmands describe the Atlantic pompano as “the world’s most edible fish.” The flat-bodied, pan-sized pompano is easy to eat whole, a form that shows off the beautiful, silvery skin. The species is harvested from Virginia to Texas, but primarily off Florida’s west coast. Commercial landings… Read More
Though regarded as a substitute for cod, many chefs, including James Beard, have argued that “cusk ought to be more popular in its own right.” A member of the Gadidae family, along with cod, haddock and pollock, cusk resembles its relatives through the head, but the rest of its body looks as if… Read More