Cod - the highlight of winter!

During the winter months from January to April, Norwegian cod are at their very best.

Party food in mid-winter

It's easy to understand why cod is the culinary highlight of winter for food lovers. Restaurants advertise loudly as soon as the fish arrives, and guests flock in. Cod season is a time of celebration!

Since cod is a seasonal ingredient, Norwegians are good at taking advantage of the opportunity to enjoy this fantastic ingredient. The Norwegian coastal cod is also at its best during the winter months. Whether served as regular cod, you will experience a fish with especially good quality. The fish is firm, white, delicate, and unparalleled in taste. More and more people are discovering Norwegian cod. The export has never been greater than it is now, and China is currently the largest export market.

The mystery of skrei.

For a long time, there have been different opinions about whether cod and skrei are fundamentally the same fish. Both coastal cod, which we commonly refer to as "torsk" in Norwegian, and skrei share the Latin name "Gadus morhua". But is skrei simply a regular cod from the Barents Sea that changes its name when it migrates to spawn outside of Lofoten and Vesterålen from January to April?

Norwegian fishermen have accumulated knowledge about the different fish species along our coast for generations. The ability to distinguish even the most similar types of fish from each other was passed down through generations. Today, when fishermen are no longer in contact with the catch in the same way, we see that this knowledge has been weakened. On fish receiving docks, cod and skrei are only recorded as cod in the statistics.

In the old days, fishermen always claimed that cod and skrei were not the same fish. They believed they could see differences in head shape, color, and so on. However, researchers have had difficulty proving the fishermen's claim. Some minor differences have been found, but historically, they have been explained by environmental factors. There was nothing to prove that cod and skrei belonged to two different genetic stocks.

In the 1990s, a method was introduced that could measure differences directly on the fish's DNA molecule. To the surprise of many researchers, the results showed significant differences between coastal cod and skrei. Both coastal cod and skrei are, of course, codfish, but it was finally confirmed that coastal cod and skrei could not come from the same genetic stock.

The old fishermen probably smiled to themselves, but many "new" fishermen feared unwanted consequences, such as more rigid quota regulations. In today's quota rules, both coastal cod and skrei are only categorized as cod. Separating the cod catch into cod and skrei would mean additional work and significant investments. The mystery is thus solved: a skrei is a cod, but a cod is not always a skrei. Whether the long-awaited answer will have any significant impact is uncertain.

Ask your wholesaler about this year's supply of skrei!