My experiences with swai. I frequently go to the seafood restaurant chain called Captain D's. Several years ago they started selling Southern Style Whitefish (dinner is $5.99) which is a big piece of swai fish lightly breaded and fried; always tastes the same - very good, mild flavor, never fishy, never an off flavor like tilapia sometimes has. It is the only fish my friend and I eat there. We eat at Captain D's 2 - 3 times/mo. He used to always get the tilapia until the swai became available. Tilapia was too inconsistent in flavor while the swai has always been consistently very good.
There is another restaurant that I know regularly serves swai - Beef O'Brady's; menu item called Big Catch & Big Catch Salad. Whenever I go to Beef's I get the Big Catch salad with the fish blackened; a big piece of fish on their tossed salad - again excellent - IMO. It was so good the first time I ate it in FL the flavor and texture was very similar to the Captain D's Southern Style Whitefish (swai). I asked the manager what kind of fish it was. He said they used to call it grouper until the commercial fisherman and officials made them stop calling it grouper since it was not grouper.
Manager says the box label has farm raised grouper, which I discovered is actually swai after using a web search.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-21-florida-fake-grouper_x.htmAnother swai story. My brother's wife does not like to eat like fish. Period. Brother likes fish including YP, WE, salmon, trout, even bullheads, and other ocean species. He keeps trying new types. A couple years ago he bought some swai at Kroger's. Grilled it, wifey tried it, and now the only fish she will eat is swai.
Internet information indicates swai is a Vietnamese catfish that is grown in poor water quality and fed low quality foods.
My thinking is hogs used to (depression era and maybe even a few currently) be fed garbage which lead to common problems with trichinosis. A lot of animals eat 'bad' food including the bacteria. The digestive system then processes and breaks down the food into the basic compounds and biochemically rearranges the basic components to new animal protein, fats, blood, organs, tissue, nerves, fins, scales, bone, etc to grow or develop the new animal. I doubt that few if any of the bad foods that the animal ate are directly deposited to make new animal flesh or body parts. If the swai directly deposited what it ate, it would likely taste pretty unsavory.
When terrestrial wildlife - 'game animals' live on the nature's food (bark, leaves, nuts, vegetation, etc) the animal meat will often taste "gamey". I am not sure why this happens to most wildlife and not fish.
The off flavor of some fish such as catfish and tilapia is usually and often caused by 'bad' algae (often Cyanobacteria) in the water that produce metabolites (likely water soluable types)that are absorbed into the fish flesh. These fishy or earthy flavors will be purged when the "algae soaked fish" is removed for a short period form the offending water source. Some chemicals are fat soluble and will not purge when the fish is placed in 'clean' water.
Other fish flavors. Some fish have a layer of dark meat between the skin and white flesh fillet. This dark meat is usually in fish that are 'hard or strong fighters, swimmers'. This dark meat has a very strong flavor due to the type of chemical in the dark meat that allows the fish to build up a high lactic acid content during muscle stress periods. This allows the fish muscles to work longer before tiring. When the animal rests the lactic acid is removed and the animal is 'rested'. Cut out this surface layer of dark meat from the fillet and the white fillet is very mild. Eat the dark meat and it is very strong flavored. Try cooking some dark fish meat that has been removed from a fish. When we catch larger Great Lakes walleye they have a layer of dark red meat that we remove before cooking. Interestingly the walleye that I have seen from inland lakes rarely have this dark meat. Great Lakes walleye have apparently adapted to more and stronger swimming needs to survive thus the presence of more read meat. Tuna have a lot of red meat in their body which often gives them a stronger flavor.
