COOKING WITH CAMBAY TIGER: Meet and eat with Cambay Tiger’s ‘live’ fish selection!

Counter at Cambay Tiger Seafood Mart

By Raul Dias

While fitness was on my mind last weekend, as I delved into the very interesting and innovative range of Cambay Tiger’s Fitness Packs in last Friday’s post, this week I wanted to highlight a very cool concept that’s unique to this seafood brand! Now, the Cambay Tiger Seafood Mart or CTSM for short is an exclusive lifestyle seafood retail outlet from the WestCoast Group—which, as you may be aware, is India’s only fully-integrated aquaculture and seafood company [see note on WestCoast ‘Cage Culture’ below].

WestCoast Cage Culture fish farms at Varasgaon, near Pune

What’s interesting, is that the Bandra and Lokhandwala stores of Cambay Tiger Seafood Mart in Mumbai differentiates the brand from its competitors in that they mainly sell seafood that comes from their farms. This is done with the aim of giving to their customers a true farm-to-fork experience with guaranteed traceability. As for the fish that they don’t farm, Cambay Tiger buys them directly from local fishermen whom they teach how to keep the catch fresh and viable till it reaches the stores. They then pick only then best. And that’s the very aspect of freshness that made me super curious about the operations of the CTSM model.

A tilapia harvest in progress

And so, one excruciatingly hot pre-summer afternoon, I made my way uptown to check out the Lokhandwala Complex store. The ambience, design, display and human resources at the store have been very well-tailored to give the customer a first-of-its-kind seafood experience in India and one that I’d hitherto only experienced at large supermarket and specialty seafood stores on my trips to the US and Europe.
The Lokhandwala mart along with its Bandra counterpart offers a trifecta of chilled, frozen and get his…live seafood! (This live purchase facility is also available at HyperCity in Malad, Mumbai and HyperCity in Vashi that stock Cambay Tiger). Yes, I was surprised to find a dozen or so Indian basa and tilapia in a variety of sizes swimming happily in a large wall-embedded glass tank. The staff at the mart are skillfully trained to humanely cull the fish of your choice, gut them, clean them and slice them in pieces, filets or even whole as per the customer’s specifications. 

Tilapia in tanks

As for me, I preferred to get an already on ice medium-sized tilapia that was superbly fileted into four filets in a matter of minutes, trimmed, washed, vacuum packed and handed over to me. My plan was to return home and try out for dinner, a grilled tilapia summer recipe I’d been waiting to cook, using a zesty mango salsa that my grilled tilapia filets would be anointed with [see recipe below].

The Cambay Tiger Bandra store

The range of fish and seafood available at the mart was staggering to say the very least. It included, besides the aforementioned Indian basa and tilapia, white prawns, seer fish, black pomfret, mud crabs, sardines, lady fish, Chinese pomfret, silver pomfret, silver anchovies, rawas, mackerel, rohu, catla along with Atlantic salmon that’s flown in all the way from Norway. 

Workers at Cambay Tiger's shrimp processing plant at Surat

At the mart, you can also shop for accompanying items such as rubs, seasonings, marinades, spray on herb oils, canned fish and regional fish pickles.

An inside view of Cambay Tiger Seafood Mart with live tilapia tanks above

And as a courtesy to those customers who would like to have a bite of their purchases right then and there, the staff very kindly offer to grill up, fry up and microwave your fish and seafood that you can enjoy eating seated at the tables and chairs provided in the store’s foyer.
Now that’s truly from farm to fork!

Grilled Tilapia and Mango Salsa 

(serves four)
Ingredients:
4 Cambay Tiger tilapia fillets
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tsp dried basil
2 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp salt
2/3 cup chopped semi-ripe mango
2 tbsp lime juice
2 tbsp orange juice
4 tsp minced jalapeno
4 tsp minced red onion
2 tsp minced red capsicum
1 tbsp fresh coriander leaves
1 tsp ground black pepper

Method:
* Stir the olive oil, garlic, basil, black pepper, and salt together in a bowl. Put the tilapia fillets in a resealable plastic bag; pour the olive oil mixture over the fillets and seal the bag. Marinate in refrigerator for 1 hour.
* Make the salsa by stirring the mango, lime juice, orange juice, jalapeno, red onion, red capsicum, coriander leaves, and black pepper together in a bowl. Refrigerate for 1 hour to allow the flavours to blend.
* Preheat the grill for medium-high heat, and lightly oil the grate.
* Remove the tilapia from the marinade, shaking off any excess oil, and wrap each fillet in a piece of aluminum foil.
* Cook the tilapia on the preheated grill until the flesh easily with a fork, 3 to 4 minutes per side. Spoon the salsa over the tilapia to serve.

(Recipe developed for Cambay Tiger by Raul Dias) 

For more information, please contact Cambay Tiger at:
Website - https://www.cambaytiger.com/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/cambaytiger/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cambaytiger/?hl=en
Pinterest - https://in.pinterest.com/cambaytiger/?eq=cambay%20tiger&etslf=7241
Twitter -    https://twitter.com/Cambay_Tiger
Call - +91-7071707170, 022-67906787 for free home delivery of Cambay Tiger’s range of products

Store addresses and contacts:

Lokhandwala
Shop no. 8, Grenville CHS Ltd., Plot no. 98-A/116, Opp. Samarth Vaibhav, Lokhandwala, Andheri (w), Mumbai 400053

Bandra
Shop No 1, Kenwood Cooperative Housing Society, Ambedkar Road, Near Zig Zag Road, Bandra West, Mumbai 400050

Delhi
B-87, Bhishma Pitamah Marg, Block B, Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024

Pune
S No 199 Pl 95 Shop No 5/6, Gulmohar Regency Viman Nagar, Pune 411032

Cambay Tiger Products Available in Nature's Basket, HyperCity, Star Bazaar, Aditya Birla More, Big Bazaar, Nilgiri's in all metro cities pan India.

WestCoast Cage Culture – Pilot Project for the Maharashtra Government

·         WestCoast has taken on lease near Pune, 1200 hectare Varasgaon reservoir and 800 hectare Panshet reservoir for fish (in cage) culture. WC has received permission from Maharashtra state fisheries department for utilising 1% of these water bodies for cage culture.

·         WestCoast has plans to replicate its successful shrimp model in fish i.e. the fully integrated, hatcheries to retail model. The company sees a huge potential in the business as the world is moving away from sea caught fish to farmed fish.

·         The company currently has put up 160 cages at Varasgaon and Panshet. The idea is to gradually increase the number of cages up to 2,000 in the next 2 years. For Tilapia and Pangasius culture, each cage is 5 meters x 5 meters x 3.5 meters with one cage being able to harvest approximately 5 tonne fish per year.

·         At present Tilapia is reared in 110 cages and Pangasius in 50 cages.

·         The company plans to harvest 10,000 tonnes of fish from these two reservoirs by the end of 2018.

·         Cage culture is a technique of rearing fish in net enclosure with minimum predatory pressure. It is a technology which is practiced in confined water bodies where the quality fish seed is reared organically with well-monitored probiotic diet in pollution free environment.

·         Advantage with cage culture is – the company has total control over the origin of the fish, the quality of environment in which it grows, its diet, ensuring its overall goodness. This also supports traceability, which the new market is very particular about

·         They are also experimenting cage culture of Seabass for the first time in India. They use small cages of 2mx2mx1m cage in which 1,200 kg of fish could be harvested in two crops per year.

·         Live Tilapia is currently sold in Mumbai at the company’s flagship fish retail outlet Cambay Tiger Seafood Mart and major  fish markets in Mumbai, a first of its kind trend in the country

·         WestCoast also has plans to sell Cambay Tiger branded Tilapia in the market to highlight traceability factor

About Tilapia -

·         Tilapia is the largest consumed fish in the world with a global production of 45 lakh tons/year or 143 kg per second.

·         Tilapia is the fourth largest consumed fish in US, after shrimps, canned Tuna and Salmon and is popularly known as aquatic chicken. It is quietly catching on popularity in Europe.

·         China, Egypt and Indonesia are the major producers and exporters of Tilapia.

·         Tilapia is rich in proteins, vitamins, omega 3 fatty acids, selenium, and minerals. It helps in muscle growth and development. It also benefits heart, bone and brains.

Tilapia Cage Culture – a game changer-

·         Cage cultured Tilapia flesh does not have typical odour that you get in wild caught or pond reared fish, making it more & more popular among fish lovers.

·         WestCoast is primarily targeting leading hotels and restaurants in metros with live Tilapia fish. It has employed advanced transportation technology to transport live Tilapia in tanks, so that the market gets the freshest fish.

·         Tilapia can be an excellent base fish for value added fish based products such as fish fries, fish fingers, fish cutlet, breaded fish, fish chips, grill fish, fish pakoda; and boneless fish gravy-based dishes

·         Right now the market for base fish is controlled by basa (Pangasius), mainly imported from Vietnam

Direct and Indirect benefits of the project -

·         Promotes farm-to-fork model in fish.

·         Promotion of Cage culture helps tap 4.5 million hectare fresh water resources for fish production and thereby increase consumption of healthy proteins in the country. Maharashtra has 3.5 lakh hectare which is suitable for cage culture. Per year fish consumption of the world is 18.4kg per capita, and in India it is less than 2kg.

·         In line with Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Make In India’ concept, as against the current practise of importing fish

·         Employment generation - for every 10 cages, 3 people are required

·         Make fish available to market at highly economic rates

·         Guarantees traceability and hygiene

·         Helps in controlling overfishing in oceans and rivers, which is causing extinction of fish and environmental degradation.

·         Enables sale of live fish and develops a consumer behaviour trend of buying live fish from the market