IQF silversides, DIY style

[drache]

yes - I found one of the same kind of other fish once in a pack - guess it happens

does anybody have an opinion on the re-freezing?
I've just been breaking of chunks and feeding them to different sizes of snakes

[DrKate]

does anybody have an opinion on the re-freezing?
I've just been breaking of chunks and feeding them to different sizes of snakes

Yeah, I would do that but I've only got one size! The first time I broke a chunk off and thawed it, fed the smallest fish whole, fed the medium-size fish cut lengthwise, and the ones that were too big even for that ended up beheaded, gutted, and thrown into a test batch of salmon/halibut jello. But now I've got enough jello to last me a while so I wouldn't have anything to do with the biggest fish because they don't hold together very well when cut up.

The reason for not thawing and re-freezing meat or fish that I've seen in cookbooks is that it ruins the texture. I'm not sure my boys are connoisseurs enough to apreciate changes in the texture of their (whole) fish. It probably also degrades the nutritional content somewhat, which is why I was trying to minimize the number of freeze-thaw cycles by processing them all at once. (I dunno about you, but in order to break off a chunk to feed I had to let the whole flat get just a little mushy. Maybe if I'd hit it on the counter to shatter or something I could have broken it while frozen.) But I don't know that I've ever seen anything suggesting it's truly dangerous to re-freeze - unless you're leaving it thawed long enough to start to spoil.