Have you ever sat down to the perfect flame-grilled steak, only to have the whole experience ruined because the beef tastes like fish? Some people say you shouldn’t complain and that your taste buds might just be particularly sensitive to a little molecule present in both seafood and beef called trimethylamine (TMA). But your meat shouldn’t taste like fish; it’s one of the signs that the beef isn’t all that fresh anymore.
Beef doesn’t contain as much TMA as seafood, but as it ages, more of it is released into the meat. As the levels of TMA in the beef go up, so does that fishy flavor. As it gets closer and closer to spoiling, that fishy flavor will get stronger and stronger. Spoilage isn’t the only reason you’ll get high amounts of TMA in beef, though. If the cattle was fed fish meal or other marine-based feed, you might encounter that fishy flavor in the meat, too.
To clarify what actions you should take if you taste a fishy steak, we asked an expert. Kevin Chrisman, Executive Chef at Golden Hour Bar & Grill in Asheville, North Carolina, confirmed our research with this simple statement: “If the steak tastes fishy, you need to go get your money back.”
Why your grocery store steaks taste fishy and how to avoid it altogether
The majority of steak is aged, at least a little bit, because it tastes strong and somewhat metallic right after being butchered. There are different ways to age steak, and grocery stores often reach for one type of aging method. And though it’s a cost-effective timesaver, Kevin Chrisman said the method could be contributing to fishy tasting beef. He explained: “[If you have fishy tasting beef], chances are, you bought it from a grocery store, and they ‘wet-aged’ it.”
When meat sits in a vacuum-sealed bag in a refrigerator being wet-aged and then goes through the distribution process, it could be very mature by the time it reaches your grocery store. When managed perfectly, wet-aging is a great way to prep a steak. But if it wet-ages in refrigeration for a week or more and then goes to a warehouse or two before you see it on the shelves, it could be closer to spoiling than you think, and may have developed off-flavors.
Much in the way that restaurant steak tricks your taste buds, supermarkets also use tricks to keep their meat looking as good as possible — like blasting it with carbon monoxide and pre-packaging aged meat into marinated cuts. This can make it really hard to know if your grocery store steak is fresh. Chrisman’s solution to the problem is to be strategic about where you find your steak. He said: “The best way to ensure the quality of your beef is to buy from your local butcher’s store.”
