A Sacramento-area fish hatchery's spawning salmon fed families in need — no longer

Benjy Egel, The Sacramento BeeSacramento Bee

Between 80 and 200 Chinook salmon spawn at Nimbus Fish Hatchery in Gold River each day from early November through this Friday, ending their life cycle with an ascent up the fish ladder to the processing room.

For years, their meat went on to feed hungry Californians via California Emergency Foodlink, a southeastern Sacramento nonprofit group. This year, it's different.

California Emergency Foodlink had relied on Washington-based American Canadian Fisheries to fillet, freeze and deliver the salmon to its distribution headquarters, where it was distributed to food banks. The subcontractor did so free in exchange for keeping some of the fish.

American Canadian Fisheries chose not to continue its gratis processing and distribution earlier this year. With California Emergency Foodlink no longer able to handle the salmon, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife sought other proposals and landed on Sacramento Rendering Co. in Mather.

Sacramento Rendering Co. processes animal waste from local supermarkets, feedlots, butcher shops and more, converting it to products used in pet food, fertilizer and soap. That's the future that awaits Nimbus' salmon, Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Peter Tira said.

Chinook, also known as king salmon, are the largest and most expensive Pacific salmon -- when caught in the ocean, where they spend two to five years building muscle and fat reserves for the arduous end-of-life trip back to their spawning grounds.

The fish that arrive at Nimbus are beaten up and weathered from fighting upstream for months, and their fillets would be out of place on fine-dining restaurant plates. Still, they'd been good enough to supply people in need with 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of salmon meat in years past.

After Nimbus' salmon swim up a fish ladder, get stunned via an electrical current and are determined to be fully mature, hatchery technicians kill males with mallets and bleed out the females before cutting out their 5,000 or so eggs. Those eggs are then fertilized with a squeeze of the males' milt, and raised in the hatchery until they're ready to be released to the wild.

It's a bit of a grisly scene, though all salmon naturally die after returning from the ocean to their original spawning grounds. Some hatcheries return fish carcasses to nearby rivers, where decomposers pick at the meat (and the next generation of salmon fry, in turn, eat some of the insects that dined on their parents), said Molly Shea, a fish and wildlife interpreter who oversees Nimbus' education programs.

What I'm Eating

Soup season is officially upon us. For me, that always means trips to cozy south Sacramento pho dens such as Pho Ru, the latter word translating to "cradle" or "lullaby" in Vietnamese.

Seven-foot-tall faux noodles greet customers as they walk into the Southpointe Plaza restaurant on Mack Road, owned by Lynn and Patrick Nguyen. Lynn lived in Vietnam before immigrating to the U.S. in the mid-1990s, running a San Fernando Valley restaurant called Song Phat for 11 years and moving to the capital region to open Pho Ru, where Patrick is the chef, in 2015.

Pho Ru offers 11 types of lemongrassy pho ($11.75-$14.75 for a medium bowl, $2 extra for a large)stocked with tendon, well-done brisket and rare filet mignon. Yet my favorite bowl was the mi hoanh thanh sup sate ($13.75), a clear broth spiced with the Vietnamese chili oil sate and filled with shrimp, fried garlic, pork wontons and the customer's choice of egg or rice noodles.

Wok-tossed clams with shrimp chips ($11.80) are a simple and easy-to-like appetizer, one you might pull together at home with a few pantry basics. Shelled clams shine through a sea of water chestnuts, Thai basil and onions. The plate is topped with sesame seeds, ready to be scooped by airy, crunchy cups of shrimp-flavored fried tapioca starch.

Pho Ru may be Sacramento's only Vietnamese restaurant to whip up bobo butter crunchy beef ($15). Strips of meat are dyed ruby red by a fish sauce/chili marinade that's two parts sweet and one part spicy, then pan-fried and served with do chua (pickled daikon and carrots) over rice.

Pho Ru

Address:6115 Mack Road, Sacramento

Hours: 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; closed Monday

Phone:916-476-3754

Website:phorurestaurants.com

Drinks:Smoothies, Vietnamese coffee, juices and sodas

Vegetarian options:Egg rolls and pandan caramel flan, but that's it. A couple of cabbage salads can be prepared without chicken or shrimp.

Noise level:Quiet

Outdoor seating:None

Openings & Closings

Sacramento's most popular chocolate shop, Ginger Elizabeth Chocolates, opened as a pop-up on Dec. 6 in Folsom's Broadstone Marketplace. Ginger Elizabeth Hahn's new store at 2770 E. Bidwell St., Suite 500, follows a midtown Sacramento location, and will serve customers through December before temporarily closing to install more permanent fixtures.

Ever After Wine also debuted Dec. 6 at 9639 E. Stockton Blvd. in Elk Grove. Nadia Pugh Mincey and Kelly Rhodes' natural wine bar and bottle shop offers a dozen shareable small plates such as charcuterie boards, salmon rillettes and seasonal salads.

Poppy by Mama Kim will close Thursday after three-and-a-half years at 533 53rd St., owner Kim Scott announced last week. She previously ran the innovative California cuisine concept on Del Paso Boulevard.