“You’re going to put fish sauce on…whipped cream?”
Onggi customers look momentarily bewildered as Liam Fisher, owner and founder of Maine Garum Company, offers them a sample of his garum fish sauce, drizzled lightly on top of a spoon of whipped cream.
“Yes, absolutely!” Liam replies, holding their gaze with a confident smile. He offers our shop-goers no additional reassurance, but the tone of his voice suggests, “I promise it won’t be what you expect.”
Some customers seem apprehensive, others wrinkle their nose in revulsion, and there’s even a few who seem overjoyed to give this unusual food pairing a go. But regardless of their initial gut reactions, all who are presented with a spoon full of fish sauce and whipped cream give it a taste. Curiosity wins.
It’s a sunny, crisp November day in Onggi’s market. Liam has joined our team for the afternoon to familiarize shop-goers with his locally made garum, an ancient style of fish sauce hailing from the Roman Empire. From where I stand behind Onggi’s front counter, I see numerous guests take immediate interest in Liam’s product, too intrigued by the peculiarity of his proposed culinary combo to turn down a chance to experience its flavor. With each sample, I see the look of surprise and immediate satisfaction cross their faces.
“I can’t believe this tastes so good!” They exclaim. “This doesn’t taste like the fish sauce I know!”
While it seems for many in the shop that afternoon that the taste of Liam’s garum has pulled off a great culinary feat, Maine Garum Company’s more silent, and perhaps powerful, accomplishment lies in garum’s emerging role in Maine’s seafood industry.
According to Seafood Economic Accelerator Maine (SEA Maine), approximately 57 million pounds of waste is generated by Maine’s seafood industry annually, representing roughly twenty five percent of the state’s total seafood volume per year. If that number sounds exorbitant, it pales in comparison to the 2 billion pounds of seafood discarded by fisheries and seafood processing plants across the United States annually. In fact, the World Economic Forum estimates nearly fifteen percent of all fish and seafood caught is wasted during processing and capture internationally.
In the face of climate change, exacerbated issues of overfishing and excessive waste pose immediate and irrevocable threats to not only the environment, but global and local economies at large. Bearing witness firsthand to the complexities and complications of the seafood industry’s supply chains, Liam proposes a new pathway for Maine producers. Through Maine Garum Company’s garum fish sauce, Liam offers producers an opportunity to lower production costs and increase their company’s sustainability- all while offering consumers a delicious fish sauce that can truly set the stage for the future of American cuisine.
I sat down with Liam to learn more about Maine’s first local fish sauce and the pillar of progress it represents for Maine’s seafood industry:
Alli: Can you explain what garum is and how it’s made?
Liam: Absolutely. Garum - and I like to use this particular language- is the Roman word for fermented fish sauce, or a family of fermented fish sauces, that existed during ancient Roman civilization and even predates that and some other civilizations as well. And the reason that we consider it Roman and use that word is because of the military power and cultural power of the Roman Empire. This is a product that many, many people were using probably in many cultures in small communities that weren’t even recording the information, or the information that was recorded has been destroyed or lost to history.
Really, garum is a seasoning product that is made generally with whole fish, sometimes with trimmings, that are allowed to self degrade or autolyse. So, garum technically is not even a fermented food. Because it's the enzymes that are naturally present inside the fish, most concentrated in the viscera, that over time cause the fish to liquify and break down into really delicious, savory compounds.
Alli: Wow! I didn’t realize that garum wasn’t actually fermented, but is instead a controlled preserve, or controlled decomposition.
Liam: Yeah! And it’s not unlike something like miso where you’re using enzymes that are in the body of koji mycelia to do the breakdown [process]. Since miso is at a much lower salt level [than garum], there’s quite a bit more fermentation that happens, more yeast and bacteria are acting on that substrate. In the case of garum and fish sauces broadly, the salt level is so high for food safety reasons, that almost all of the extra bacteria and yeasts are completely immobilized.
You can imagine that there’s so much salt that it sucks all the water out of the bacteria and it becomes shriveled and immobilized and can’t act on the substrate. There are some families of yeast and bacteria that can grow there, but they are super slow growers. They are extremophiles. They have adapted to those extreme environments and they are successful in them by growing really slowly in a particular way, so they don’t have that much of an impact on the final product.
Alli: Interesting! Thank you for providing that explanation. Is there a difference between garum and Vietnamese fish sauce, nước mắm?
Liam: Yeah! I think it goes back to the definition I gave you. Garum is not one thing- I think it should be thought of as another culturally significant product; like beer is a great example. People make beer all over the world and it tastes different all over the world. It has different ingredients, but there are some core ingredients that are the same. There’s a [general] methodology where you are taking grain, converting it to sugar, then converting it to alcohol. It’s fizzy, it’s golden. There’s overlap, but there’s all of these distinct expressions of [beer] all over the world. And the same thing is true for fish sauce.
When people ask me, what’s the difference between garum and really any of the products and fish sauces from Southeast Asia- because the Philippines has their own name for their fish sauce, Thailand has their own name. Japan, Korea, China, they all have their own fish sauces and they all are unique. Within any one of those individual countries, there’s going to be regional differences. Within any one of those regions there’s going to be two companies that make their fish sauce differently.
So, actually, I think the question is more nuanced. Every fish sauce is different because everyone is making fish sauce uniquely with different fish in different environments, with all of these different factors. But at the same time, all fish sauce is the same; it’s the same process of taking fish and putting the viscera through a degradation process that results in umami compounds. But, then there’s unique characteristics based on what the weather is like, whether they use controlled or uncontrolled environments, how much oxygen access there is, what fish they use, whether it's first press, second press, or third press.
I think we can understand that in the world of beer and wine, we’re a lot more comfortable accepting that diversity and how large that world of fermentation is. There’s something about the perceived newness of garum and fish sauce that has resulted in people working a bit harder to categorize it. That question feels natural and I would encourage people to look at fish sauce a bit differently.
Alli: That’s super helpful, thank you. Tell me about the start of Maine Garum Company. How and why did you begin?
Liam: I had been interested in starting a waste-based company for a while. I looked at a lot of different options. I worked in trying to design aquaculture feeds for oysters that were based on waste, I worked for a fertilizer company exploring different waste streams to make products with. I really wanted to start my own project and I really wanted it to be food related. It wasn’t until a roommate of mine came home from smelting with a bunch of little fish and said, “I don’t really want to deal with these, do you want them?” And I said, “Absolutely, what an opportunity to make fish sauce!”
Being someone who has spent a lot of time cooking and has an engineering background, technical, weird stuff is really exciting for me. There were a handful of cookbooks that I had that talked about fish sauce methods. I cooked with a recipe for garum and loved the resulting product, so of course I wanted to make fish sauce myself, because that’s the type of person I am. So, I made that first fish sauce with those whole smelts and it came out really good. And it wasn’t so hard.
It kind of clicked for me then that the least valuable component of a fish that’s most likely to get thrown away, the viscera, is the most important ingredient for making fish sauce. And that’s when a lightbulb went off for me that this was an opportunity to get into a waste-based food business. As I learned more about making garum, the history, and that no one else was making it in the United States, it seemed like a really great business opportunity. Not to mention, here we are in Maine with some of the best seafood in the entire world to make fish sauces with- and a great culinary community that’s interested in local products to support it as well.
Alli: I know that Maine Garum Company uses eel as the main ingredient in your fish sauce. How did you come across or decide to use eel?
Liam: It really has nothing to do with eel itself. I wasn’t seeking out eel. It was really all about already having a personal relationship with some of the people working at American Unagi.
The first time I ever came to Maine was on a little field trip with the restaurant I was working at. We got invited to do a dinner at the James Beard House and my chef wanted to bring us up to Maine to see some of the producers of the products we were going to show off and were already using in our restaurant. And one of those was Sara Rademaker’s eel at American Unagi. At the time, she was at the Darling Marine Center- a teeny, tiny lab with multiple floors- and she was pumping out eels and selling them live. I got to meet her and see the whole process and she actually connected me with my first job working with oysters in Maine.
So, I already knew Sara. The processing manager at American Unagi at the time, Charlie Walsh, was somebody I had worked with on that oyster project that I moved out to Maine to work on. They have a video that Eater did with them where they show their whole process from farm to final product and I was watching Sara and Charlie on this and seeing them as a small business make these fillets, but I was sitting there thinking about everything else.
Where’s the head? Where’s the guts? Where’s the spine? That’s all the good stuff for me. So I just texted Charlie- he was already in my contacts- and asked, “Hey, can I get some of your garbage?” And that’s how I ended up working with eel because it’s an unreasonable ask for a business that is trying to figure out a market for eel fillets. They have to determine the farm, the harvesting, the processing, the marketing, the branding just for an eel fillet. The idea that they can somehow also develop a whole other project with a small team and limited budget just isn’t reasonable.
It’s a big challenge for any type of producer like that with a waste stream. It’s like, “I’m already expending all of my resources to do this, how am I supposed to do more?” It’s not that there aren’t excellent, wonderful people who do, it’s just a big barrier for a business. So, starting Maine Garum Company was more about a local opportunity, personal relationships, and it was convenient. I already knew American Unagi was a great collaborator with a similar value set to me. They looked at a market where eels are being caught here in Maine and then they get shipped somewhere else before being brought back- why not just process them here?
I have the same perspective on fish sauce. We have all the raw materials here and we’re putting them in the dumpster when we could just make that product that we’re importing or relying on a fishery to process on the other side of the planet. We could just make it here, with our own stuff.
It made a lot of sense for everybody for me to come on American Unagi’s team, and I’ve been working in processing and helping build the company since then.
Alli: That’s awesome. During the garum tasting event we held at Onggi in November, we had a lot of interest from our community to try your garum. There was a lot of shock when you offered to pair it with whipped cream. What’s the reaction you normally receive from people when you tell them about Maine Garum Company, garum, and upcycled fish sauce?
Liam: Yeah, they kind of fall into three buckets. One is the super enthusiastic person. Those people- I don’t need to explain anything to them. They either already have a relationship with fish sauce, they know the story of garum, or they love umami foods. They’re people who say, “Oh my god, I’ve been wanting something like this to exist for so long.” I have those people who are just so excited and invested for so many reasons- whether they are foodies or history buffs, whatever it might be.
Then I have the person who just doesn’t get it. They might not even know what fish sauce is. Actually, a lot of people refer to it as fish oil- I don’t know why, but that response is so persistent. Many of those people might be cut off from any knowledge- whether about the culture, or market opportunity, or waste- and doubt that anyone would want to buy garum. I have that group of people who are like, “What’s this rinky-dink crap that you’re doing, it doesn’t make any sense.”
And then- maybe one of my favorite types of people- are the ones who react with outright disgust. An incredible amount of disgust, I get that often. I think Americans generally might feel [disgust] around fish. They are maybe more comfortable only dealing with fillets. In America, when you go to the grocery store, you don’t see any fish heads, nothing is on a bone- even though fish is so much better when it’s cooked with bones.
Even in Maine, I feel strongly that we have a really underdeveloped culture around seafood and that’s why we took eels and shipped them to Asia for decades. Seafood is something that’s so cherished around the world and also fundamental to our own culture. They ate eels on Thanksgiving. To have no knowledge of that relationship and pass up on that opportunity…
It's the same with sea urchin and tuna. I don’t know personally everything about this, but in Portland it wasn’t until people from Asia started showing up and saying, “Wait, you guys are doing this with seafood? Okay, I’m going to start a business here and I’m going to be rich and successful and sell this to the markets I already know exist because I have extensive experience with these ingredients.” Maine, I just don’t think meaningfully has that yet, outside of some subsets.
So, there’s a lot of disgust and so many people that are more closed-minded to garum. They often want me to change the name- that’s a really funny response I get from people all the time. “You need a name that helps people feel comfortable!” And I’m like, “You want me to target my product to someone who is fundamentally disgusted by it?” I’ll ask that question and they’ll say, “Oh, you’re right, that's a terrible idea, I can see where you’re coming from.”
But I really love speaking to those people because I think that people should feel very differently about food in general. So it’s a really exciting opportunity to make a product that is able to be appreciated if somebody gives it a chance. And that might make them completely reevaluate what food is ‘good,’ what food is ‘disgusting,’ what waste is, what foods have value. I want to shake up all of those questions and perceptions in peoples’ minds.
Alli: During our tasting, I did witness some of those reactions. But there was also a pretty consistent reaction- my own included- that felt your garum tasted very similar to soy sauce.
Liam: [laughs]
Alli: It didn’t have the gamey, fishy taste or odor to it that people might have been expecting. How do you achieve the result of that flavor and do you select for that flavor profile in particular?
Liam: I absolutely do. There are some actions that I take to select for it and some things come from the nature of the raw material I am working with.
But first, I have to push back a little bit- [the garum] doesn’t taste like soy sauce.
Alli: [laughs]
Liam: I know what people mean when they say that. I understand why people say that and I’m not saying they don’t have a right to feel that way. I hear one-hundred percent where they are coming from. I mean, it’s a fish sauce that lacks the most aggressive and decisive flavors that people consider fundamental to fish sauce. For many cuisines and cultures making fish sauce, those flavors are fundamental- as they should be, there’s nothing wrong with those flavors.
I also think it’s really important as a white person making fish sauce- as fish sauce is considered to be an Asian food- not to ‘other’ those fish sauces in a way that’s negative. There are excellent, fantastic products coming out of those regions and those flavors exist for particular reasons, and they’re delicious. For example, I was making chicken wings the other night and I wanted them to have a lime and sugar flavor profile, so I didn’t reach for my fish sauce. I wanted it to be funky, so I reached for Red Boat.
Those more decisive, funky flavors have a place and there’s also some places, especially in the American diet, where those flavors don’t need to exist. I think when people taste my fish sauce and they don’t eat a diet that actively engages in those more funky flavors, the only other thing they can relate it to that has some roasty-brown flavors and umami, is soy sauce. But I have to push back, it doesn’t taste like soy sauce.
Soy sauce has a totally different set of flavors; it has a sourness, and alcohol, and a deep roasty flavor that [my] fish sauce absolutely does not have. I think [my] fish sauce has significantly more umami per ounce, I think it’s really distinct, and I think what I offer is so much more clean [tasting] than soy sauce. I find soy sauce to be much less versatile than fish sauce because of that roasted wheat flavor that is often in there.
But, I get it. I get where people are coming from. It’s a more comfortable flavor profile, plus umami, is what I think they are saying.
All that to say, I do absolutely select for that flavor. One of the things I have to credit though, is American Unagi growing fantastic eels. One of the things that’s really wonderful about working closely with them and their quality standards is that they sell to many of the best restaurants in the United States, especially sushi restaurants. They just grow a really fantastic product in a really clean way- no hormones, no antibiotics. It’s a very righteous and just operation and the way that they operate yields a really wonderful eel. I have never tasted anything better and I’ve tasted a lot of alternatives in my role here at American Unagi. So, I get really fantastic starting material and the way it's handled is excellent.
The eel is dispatched and then within twenty minutes, its temperature is lowered to about thirty two degrees Fahrenheit. Then, it’s held at that temperature and over processing, that material never gets above even forty five degrees Fahrenheit for more than one second. It stays really cold. It’s really well preserved, and it’s a really freshly killed fish that I get to salt before it gets to absorb anything that is going to degrade its quality.
So, I start with something that’s excellent, and because of American Unagi’s processing and the way they’ve been able to work with me, I’m starting with something that is so good to begin with. That really helps you create flavors. If you have fish- and this is definitely the case in a lot of lesser developed countries that are making fish sauce- that fish is probably going to get a lot warmer because it’s like, one hundred degrees [Fahrenheit] outside and you’re in the sun. And it’s challenging to do all of those things when you’re out on a boat, or you have to wait until you get back on land, whereas, everything is happening for me within American Unagi’s building. The fish gets salted twenty feet from where it’s harvested and that’s just a really fantastic setup that I am able to take advantage of.
Once it’s salted, I have a very particular ratio of salt that I use that allows for a pretty fast fermentation at a lower salt level than anything else that I’ve tested on the market, which is really good for enzyme activity. I also put the garum in a warm environment after it is salted, which helps accelerate fermentation, and I do a handful of things that help prevent fat oxidation, which is really what people are talking about when they talk about my fish sauce lacking those fishy flavors.
It’s all about fat oxidation. When fat breaks down, it releases a bunch of aromatic compounds that are not fundamentally bad, but a lot of them just smell like stinky fish. When you smell that, you’re smelling oxidized fat. And by preventing that from happening during the fermentation process, you can get that very clean result that people tend to appreciate. It goes super well with cream, mashed potatoes, margaritas, and Thanksgiving turkey.
Alli: Fair enough, I respect the pushback. How would you describe the flavor of your garum and what flavors would you like consumers to pick up on when they try it?
Liam: I think umami, first of all, is a word that people should understand and use. I’ve had people taste [the garum] and tell me, “It just tastes like salt.” And I think, “Well it definitely doesn’t just taste like salt.”
No, no, no, there’s definitely something else going on there.
I think of it as a clean, oceanic umami. It definitely has a briney-ness, it is not completely devoid of fishiness, but it’s so much more subtle and elegant, I like to think, than what people are used to getting out of fish sauce. It’s a clean, oceanic, umami that’s super versatile. Enhanced salt.
One of the ways that I hope that it’s used- and one of the ways that I like to use it that is not only useful to home cooks, but also to some of the food that’s popular in the United States and some of the most sought after recognized restaurants- is really allowing the ingredients that you’re cooking with to shine. Your asparagus should taste like asparagus, you should source the best asparagus, as an example. And how do we make those ingredients delicious in a way that’s sustainable and nice?
I think an upcycled fish sauce that isn’t going to bring so much of its own flavors into a dish, but enhance what you’re already working with was something that I was targeting. I’ve spent a lot of time cooking in restaurants and that’s the type of tool that I would love to have to make dishes with.
Alli: Nice, that’s how we’ll write the product description for garum on our website! [laughs]
Liam: What do you think? Do you think I’m right? That’s how I experience it when I taste it.
Alli: Yeah! I think the umami flavors or notes of soy sauce that people are picking up on, that I initially picked up on as well, are definitely there and I can see how those have a clean and oceanic finish to them.
Liam: I saw that Onggi describes the garum online with, ‘a subtle, umami sweetness,’ which I think there are very few people who can taste the sweetness in the fish sauce. You have to be an avid consumer of that type of product to taste that, but it’s totally there! So I was very happy to see that.
Alli: That’s a shoutout to one of our owners, Erin, who wrote that. Erin, you nailed it!
Liam: I don’t know where the [sweetness] comes from, but I consistently try to target for that and I find it really amazing. I’ve never tasted a fish sauce with a sweetness like that.
Alli: It’s so good and easily an instant favorite of ours here at Onggi. Once we tried it, we knew we had to use it in our kimchi!
Switching gears, at Onggi, we know preservation of heritage foods, or foods in general, is important to you. Can you tell me more about how garum fits into these values?
Liam: I aspire for people to think about my garum as an American product. When I think about what I want garum to be in the American sense, I think of targeting something like bourbon or Tabasco. Where they are really fundamentally American- not that other people don’t make whiskey, not that other people don’t make hot sauce. But, it’s a storied brand and identity that people feel a relationship with.
For me, it’s less about preserving or recreating a tradition. There are products out of Europe that are doing that with garum in a really meaningful way and I don’t think we should try to do that in the United States because that’s not of this land. I’m really comfortable making something that is unique and targeted for an American palate and is going to be useful for Americans.
Maine’s seafood culture and America’s food culture as a whole is underdeveloped at this point. Every group of people where there has been a sustained civilization for a long period of time has developed the type of products that Onggi carries in their store for example that take time to develop, but eventually become really fundamental to a cuisine and the dishes of that cuisine. I think it’s really important for Americans of all types to imagine what that means for us. I almost think of it as a starting point rather than something that is preserving the past.
I am not making any effort to make something traditional at all. I actually like the word garum. One, because I think the story is fantastic. I think it’s a word that I am more comfortable using for my product because I am white in America. I don’t use it because I am targeting that, I use it because of the groundwork that has already been laid, especially by people in fine dining restaurants to describe a broad array of liquid umami sauces. Also, we’re good to pick it up. No one is using the term ‘garum.’ The Roman civilization is gone and we lost garum for thousands of years. It’s cool to pick it up and reuse it.
I don’t know if you know about the garum ketchup story?
Alli: No, I don’t.
Liam: The word ‘ketchup’ is a Chinese word for fish sauce. While there was an active trade going on after the breakdown of fish sauce production of the Roman Empire, people were getting fish sauces from Asia and the word ‘ketchup’ came into popularity. Then, mushroom-based alternatives came into the market, and a variety of umami sauces, eventually tomato ketchup began popularizing as tomatoes came in from the New World.
There was a big food safety scare around people using things that they really shouldn’t be consuming to preserve foods in the 1860s- I could be totally off on the year. It was the Heinz company that came up with the solution to load their tomato ketchup or tomato umami sauce with so much sugar that it was shelf stable and that’s how we get thick ketchup that currently exists today.
Heinz ketchup is obviously fundamental to American cuisine. But to then trace that back to something that existed in ancient times and then bring it back to make it American is a really fantastic story and makes a lot of sense to me. In some ways it’s preservation, but I definitely think about it more as starting fresh and creating something to build off of rather than just preserving something that was in the past.
Not that there aren’t lessons there, but I am a person who is more about the present and the future, personally.
Alli: In order to properly preserve a culture, it needs to be able to grow, adapt, and change.
Liam: Totally. That goes back to the difference between garum and these other products- it’s not one thing, that’s not the way to think about it. If you’re going to attempt to recreate garum, you should attempt to recreate a specific person’s or company’s recipe that existed once upon-a-time ago. Even then, there’s going to be diversity throughout the period of time and places that the garum was made.
Alli: How is waste traditionally handled in Maine’s seafood industry and how can utilizing waste through garum production change Maine’s seafood industry going forward?
Liam: I specifically know the most about how waste is handled in small seafood operations in Maine, so that is what I am going to speak to. Working from some of the best operations, like Bristol Seafood, I know has no organic fish waste coming out of their facility in Portland. They’ve made a lot of efforts, they are a certified B-Corp, they do really wonderful things.
What helps them do that is that most of the fish that gets delivered to them is called ‘H&G.’ So the head and guts have already been removed at sea. They work with huge Icelandic fishing fleets that have giant boats that are fishing and processing plants that float on water. They cut the heads and guts off and almost exclusively dump them straight back into the ocean. That isn’t the worst thing in the world, it’s going to feed the ecosystem, there are plenty of other creatures that will eat those parts. Plus, you would have transport and storage costs if you want to do anything else with that waste. Maybe that’s the right thing to do, maybe not.
The waste that does come out of their operation goes into pet food. That’s the optimum use of it, but with that you have to abide by almost all of the safety regulations that go into producing human food. So the waste needs to have food safety plans made around it, it needs to be stored properly, it needs to be handled properly, it needs to be frozen and shipped as human food would. This has a lot of carbon emissions and is challenging, but it makes for good pet food and that’s nice.
Some operations might do something similar, but have the waste go into fertilizer, which gets you out of needing to deal with food safety regulations. It’s the same with bait. I know there are some small operations like True Fin, they used to be Gulf of Maine Sashimi in Portland. Some lobster boats that go out near where they are located, so the operation is able to just pass their trim off to the lobstermen and it gets used in a perfectly fine way.
But for small operations that don’t already have that setup, or maybe older operations where waste disposal was a lot easier when they started and now no one has wanted to change their processes, a lot of that waste ends up in a landfill, which is really tragic. Not only are you wasting resources to produce or harvest your product, you’re using resources to process the fish. If you don’t have a good processor, you’re getting as low as a forty percent yield depending on the fish. Not all of them are that bad, with eels you can get up to seventy percent sometimes. But that means that more than half of the fish is getting wasted, which is a shame because it’s all the things that we value in fish; the protein, the Omega-3s, the nutrition that is in the parts of the fish being wasted, sometimes in higher concentrations. To waste that doesn’t make any sense. And to put that in a landfill, all of that waste will become methane which emits twenty-five times the carbon emissions, not including the carbon emissions it takes to transport the waste.
That’s where American Unagi was when I started with them. The waste went into black contractor bags that you would pick up at Lowe’s, you threw them over your back like Santa Claus, and you walked over to the dumpster and you threw them in and that was the story. Then the dumpster stinks and it sucks, it totally sucks.
But, when I first showed up, there wasn’t the infrastructure to do anything else and there wasn’t the time or the money to make those things happen. There still isn’t. It takes me dedicating my personal time to make this waste solution happen and it’s taken me years. I still sometimes don’t have the capacity to take all the waste and I’m working on that, but sometimes, some waste still ends up in the dumpster. Because there really isn’t an economical solution at this point in time and it’s a challenge to figure out what to do with the waste when you’re putting all of your energy into selling eel fillets and there really isn’t someone coming around looking to take your waste from you.
Alli: It’s completely understandable that you’re finding imperfect solutions while operating within a large-scale structure and system that ultimately does not sustainably work. With that in mind, what types of economic opportunities might garum create within Maine’s seafood industry?
Liam: I think garum is a particularly good solution for a handful of reasons. One, its inputs are super flexible. When I take my raw material, it doesn’t need to be a certain ratio or size, the fish doesn’t need to be ground. It is so indiscriminate. When an eel fillet gets damaged in any way, it goes into the bucket. Cuts? Into the bucket. Heads? Into the bucket. The spine? Into the bucket.
You don’t even have to break down the spine, the fermentation process eats away every individual vertebrae and meat around it. They become free individual mini bones and completely disintegrate, it’s amazing. So the process is really indiscriminate because byproducts are variable and it needs to be low labor to work with. In pet food and bait you are getting maybe twenty-five cents a pound for this stuff, and in pet food you have to ship it and freeze it. With garum, one of the things you avoid is cold storage.
If you salt that stuff right away, which is really easy to do- it doesn’t require any equipment, you just add the right amount of salt and you’re done- you now have something that is shelf stable. It can be stored anywhere and it can be shipped without refrigeration which is both a big energy saver, but is so much easier on the logistics end. Working at American Unagi, one of our biggest challenges is coordinating freezer trucks to pick up and move our product around. It’s a huge challenge. The other option is FedEx overnight with insulated shippers and ice packs- which is a whole other waste problem as well- its so expensive.
By getting rid of that cold storage, everything becomes a lot easier and it’s connected to a high value market. I think that’s really key. I believe, in the world that we live in, if you want solutions to climate and environmental issues, they need to at least break even. I don’t believe that nonprofits can be the ones to solve this. I think durable and lasting change is going to happen when people are naturally incentivized to do it. That’s something that I am targeting with Maine Garum Company, I want everyone to be financially incentivized to the point where this is an obvious choice. How can we make this decision for both the businesses producing these products and the consumers an obvious choice?
I think the idea that we need to make sacrifices to improve things is a straight up fallacy. We can make the world better both in living experience and care for the planet. In order to do that, finding a way for it to be profitable is key. That incentivizes me to do my work, it gives me the ability to invest in infrastructure to do and scale this work and have a meaningful impact, it allows me to get the loans, grants, and investment I need to do this work, and it gives me the money to show up at someone’s door who is like, “What am I going to do with all of this waste?” And I say, “I can give you money for it and I have a system that you can use, its low investment, its low labor, and this is all I need you to do. It’s very simple, it’s just as hard as taking out the trash. Put a fifty-five gallon drum at the end of your processing line and put everything in it.”
Lobster mince is something that is produced by Ready Seafood. They take a lot of their lobster bodies and run them through this huge machine that costs millions of dollars to procure and run everyday. It makes lobster mince which is great for making lobster chowder. It’s a cool product and I really like what they’re doing, but there’s all kinds of food safety concerns with making that product and it's a huge investment. You need to be a large-scale company to execute that, like Ready Seafood, who is a huge player in lobster processing. I think I offer a solution that works for somebody at that scale, but it also works for a company operating at the same scale as American Unagi.
Alli: Along those lines, how might garum production benefit the environment or make Maine’s seafood industry more sustainable?
Liam: It gives you the opportunity to have absolutely no organic waste coming out of fish processing operations. It’s a full utilization opportunity. I don’t know of any human food products that involve fish that use the entirety of that fish, other than garum. Maybe other than making fishmeal or fish oil for aquaculture feeds- they’ll use every bit of the fish for those products. But, again, that production uses a lot of energy and is very scale intensive. That works for larger organizations, but it doesn’t work for everyone.
For example, if Maine catches a million pounds of a fish a year and they get a fifty percent yield on it, they actually caught five hundred thousand pounds of fish. With the garum solution in place, you can harvest one hundred percent of that catch.
Garum also offers a lot of opportunities for other side streams. There are substances that you filter out, like fish hydrolysate and fish bone meal. In the case of fish, those substances are super valuable for fertilizer ingredients and soil amendments. Part of my process allows me to get some fish oil out of my product as well, which is rich in Omega-3s and usually isn’t sustainably harvested along with other environmental concerns. So that would be an upcycled version of something that is really important to the human diet, especially as the population grows. It’s also important in terms of sustainable land use, overfishing, and all of the environmental concerns that are going to get more and more challenging with climate change. We really should ring that fish-product towel dry and get all the nutrients out of what we harvest and into our diets.
It’s the same thing with other opportunities- you get into making chitosan with the crab meal that I’m deprotonating in my process naturally. There’s a lot of opportunities for side income streams in this work and I think those types of opportunities happen when you start manufacturing things locally. Maine Garum Company is able to exist because American Unagi made the decision, at least at this stage, that they were going to make something here [in Maine]. Then, you get a whole other set of resources. By taking advantage of resources, it gives you the opportunity to snowball into so much more and I’d like to think that [Maine Garum Company] is evidence of that.
Alli: In recent years, I’ve seen a lot more media spotlighting Maine Garum Company and your work. It’s clear to me that Mainers are very proud of the innovation and opportunity that Maine Garum Company is creating. I really feel like Maine Garum Company is a leader in sustainability in Maine’s seafood industry, but also in the American food system as a whole.
What is next for Maine Garum Company? What impact would you like to see garum have, whether it be yours or others, over the next few years?
Liam: Yeah, what’s next? For me, right now, what’s next is scaling beyond the small, baby version of a company that I am right now. Like, I’m just the cute little thing in the corner of somebody else’s processing space. So it’s very sweet that you say all of those kind things, that I’m a leader, because it feels like I’m working out of an old, busted freezer with a Walmart grill on the bottom of it, you know what I mean? [laughs]
But it’s definitely been cool to see the level of progress the company has made. In order to really have impact, I need to scale my infrastructure in order to handle a lot more waste. I just finished writing a grant which is part of why I have a lot of sustainability related answers ready. [laughs]
American Unagi is still in their scaling process but they target producing about a half million pounds of eel every year. A seventy percent yield is a really good yield, the average is a little bit lower than that, so that’s thirty percent of a half million pounds that I am going to have to work with and so having the capacity to collect, store, process, filter, bottle, distribute, and build the markets to purchase all of that- that’s what I am referring to when I say infrastructure. Because I could make it, but then I would just be left with inventory and how would I make what is in the range of two hundred gallons of fish sauce a week, how do I move that consistently?
That's my focus and I want to really execute that well with eel. I think it’s such a fantastic product, I think it's really versatile, and it's a product that I want to introduce. It’s a product that I’m really proud of that I think a lot of people will love, so I think this is a great place to start to get people interested in the idea of garum and what I can do. After that, I think I will start throwing some crazier stuff at people. For me, the immediate next step after scaling- and hopefully a little simultaneously- is making garum with green crab.
What is beneficial about the garum making process for waste streams and processors, I think the same thing is true for using green crabs. They’re really hard to process, there isn’t much of a market for them, they’re small, but they’re easy to get. They can be really inexpensive as long as there isn’t a lot of labor post harvest, which gives the opportunity for fish sauce. There’s very little work, good yield, and an excellent story [because they are invasive]. They also have a more intense flavor that will end up being closer to the relationship people have with fish sauce that comes out of Asia. I think it’s going to be delicious for a subset of people and there is so much benefit to getting green crabs out of the water and using them. I hope to be one of many people doing that work, because it’s a large enough problem that I will not solve it on my own.
Then, after that, I think that there’s a lot more opportunity specifically for aquacultured fish. I think that’s a really great target for raw material for me. Like I was talking about with Bristol Seafood, a lot of the wild caught seafood (not all of it) is H&G when it shows up on land, so getting that raw material isn’t always available and I don’t think Maine Garum Company is big enough to incentivize companies of that scale to change their practices. There’s enough low hanging fruit for me to take advantage of to grow to that point rather than try to work uphill.
So, two operations that I know of that I have in mind to talk to- there’s a trout farm in New York that I met at the Boston Seafood Show that is really interested in partnering with me, and then there is a local seafood farm here, Springworks Farm, which grows tilapia in the process of growing lettuce. They’ve had some challenges finding someone to purchase their tilapia- it’s really difficult to process tilapia and do something with it profitably due to its really low price. And for them, they make lettuce and their byproduct is an entire fish [laughs], which is kind of weird, but it’s their business’s reality. I’ve made tilapia garum with their stuff and it came out really nice.
That one actually tastes quite a bit like soy sauce- that one I will not push back on, it’s pretty similar to soy sauce. [laughs]
Alli: I’ll hold you to that.
Liam: [laughs] Fair. I hope to keep snowballing into these opportunities and just like we were talking about with the incentivization, aquaculture is going to grow. There is going to be a lot more fish produced on land or near land and that fish is going to have to get processed. I don’t see Americans starting to buy whole salmon for their homes anytime soon.
So, what are we going to do with everything else? That responsibility falls on the seafood industry in general and I want to take part in that. I hope that five, ten years in the future when somebody thinks, “Oh I’m going to build a farm that’s going to make however many metric tons of whatever fish I’m growing and processing, the obvious choice is to send Liam an email to talk about the waste stream I’m going to have in two to three years.” And then grow the business alongside aquaculture. Rather than building the capacity to produce a material and then have to figure out what to do with that material later. These things can be strategically put together and I hope that what I am doing with American Unagi and what I will do with these other businesses and operations in the future is going to make people think, “Of course we are going to process our waste into garum, why wouldn’t we do that?” It’s so obvious.
It’s like solar panels: why build a building and not put solar panels on it? They’re so inexpensive and the benefits are so obvious. So I hope that fish sauce can end up being the same way. And I hope it’s good for consumers’ psyche- that they can have something that they love that makes their food better and it's made out of something that used to go into the dumpster. I hope that helps people wonder if they should really be putting some of their foods in the dumpster.
When people make financial models and they look at their waste disposal costs, what if we could figure out how to make that negative number a positive number? That is what I am hoping to bring to the seafood processors.
Alli: I think that would be really cool to make that thought process more of the norm and to make a circular production process more of the standard than a linear production process. I hope the industry continues to move in that direction as well.
I have one final official Onggi question for you- I have about ten other personal questions [laughs]- what is something that you hope consumers and even producers take away from Maine Garum Company and your product?
Liam: I hope they think it’s delicious and they want to buy more! [laughs]
First, I hope that businesses aren’t built without a plan for what to do with half of the product they are going to process or make. I think that about everything.
I actually hate that I put my fish sauce in glass bottles- they are so energy intensive to procure and glass recycling is really bad in Maine. So it’s actually a terrible vessel for me to put it in, but it’s the most approachable for consumers and it gives them a sense of the product at the price point that I have to sell it at.
I just got three hundred Bag-in-Box wine containers that are a way easier to ship. One of my dreams is to have an online shop where the only thing I sell is a litre and half Bag-in-Box with the spout on top so that your first buy can be refilled and you can fill squeeze bottles and keep them in your cooking station. It’s the lowest waste, single use option that I can get my hands on that’s the easiest to distribute and ship. I just got those in and am going to transition to those for food service and then eventually have those available for people online.
I hope that people wonder about the food that they are throwing away and whether there is something great that they could do with it. I hope it opens people’s minds to what can be delicious and I hope that garum becomes a part of American cuisine. That’s what I really want. I want people to think of garum like they think of ketchup, as something that of course we use. “Of course, garum. You can’t eat that without garum.”
The same way that people will say, “I can’t have French fries without ketchup.” I hope that people feel that way and garum becomes something that is on everyone’s table, or in everyone’s pantry, or is something that people really understand the value of and want to participate in. Not just because it’s delicious, but because it does something nice for the world.
Alli: That would be so fun. That’s a whole other waste conversation- the packaging! Well, I hope we see a world in American food culture where garum is an everyday item for us and it’s not even questioned.
Thank you so much Liam for taking the time to talk with us today, the work you’re doing is so innovative and imperative and we are glad to have Maine Garum Company at Onggi and in Maine’s seafood industry!
Liam: Thank you!
Interested in putting garum on your own spoonful of whipped cream- or anything else for that matter- and trying yourself? Find Maine Garum Company’s garum in Onggi’s shop or on our website.
