King & Prince

The supplier King & Prince hosted us down at St. Simons and it was beautiful.  When we arrived we got to enjoy the muddy beaches of Georgia!  It was still pretty, but I was not going in the water.  That night we enjoyed a delicious dinner and met everyone who was attending the Seafood University.  The next day was a "filling" day full of food and information.

Continuing our amazing evening we had to be to the "King and Prince Seafood University" this morning at 7:30.  I have never felt so important and grown up in my entire life.  We had an agenda of the day and learned a lot about shrimp and the process it goes through to get into our mouths.  It was crazy!  I learned a lot some of the quick things I learned were:

• The average person eats 4.1 pounds of shrimp per year.  300,000,000 people you do the math....that is A LOT of shrimp.  They do a process called aquaculture which is basically having a fish farm.  Very interesting, you have to drain the water, keep it the correct pH and make sure the fish are eating properly.  Who knew??
• No matter how great your product is....if the deep fat fryer is not calibrated to the correct temperature, well then your product is no longer the top.  Never even thought of that.
• Gene showed us how to decapitate the poor little guys.....it was a little thrilling, still sad though.  HA!
• There are multiple ways to cut shrimp some include: butterfly, cowboy, and butter-round which is a combination.  Presentation is everything and part of the presentation is the cutting. 
• If a shrimp says 16/20 that means that per pound there is no less than 16 and no more than 20.  Never knew.
• When you think of imitation breaded shrimp what do you think??  That it is fake??  Well, that is what I thought and that is not true.  What that means is that more than 65% is breaded.  They also have two other types.....breaded (50% breaded) and lightly breaded (less than 35% breaded).  It will be good to know this information in my career.
• Sustainability is huge in the fish industry and K & P shows a lot of pride in the fact that they are sustainable.

We ended up going on a tour, which was amazing.  I wasn't able to take my phone for pictures to prevent any spread of the pics to their competition but it was neat.  It was the most shrimp I have EVER seen.  Amazing.

The day was completed with a shrimp fishing experience which was truly incredible.  Bubba Gump does it and so did we!  Below are a lot of our pics from that experience, we all had to kiss a shark for good luck.  There are so many different species down there!  We saw things like horseshoe crabs, puffer fish, blue crabs.....the list goes on.  The captain and his "mates" were so much fun, they had so many interesting facts about fish that I never knew.  Such a fun experience.

I learned a lot about this supplier and when I need to get a large amout of seafood for whereever I end up I will definately be considering King & Prince seafood.