The Unexpected Fish Chefs Turn Into Bacon, Pastrami, And Cracklings

It's one thing to repurpose a meal, like turning leftovers into a whole new dish. The best chefs never let food go to waste, but instead get creative (and FYI, here are Carla Hall's suggestions for making the most of your leftovers). But it's another thing altogether to take a food item and transform it into something wholly different. Such is the case with swordfish belly, which a growing number of creative chefs have turned into a sort of ocean-going version of pork and substituted it for bacon, pastrami, Bolognese sauce, and other applications.

How did swordfish become a replacement for pork? Two ways: Swordfish is denser and less flaky than other fish and has a higher fat content — much like pork. "You can interchange [swordfish] with pork in a recipe without adjusting the recipe in any way," said chef Michael Nelson (via The Local Palate), whose restaurant, GW Fins in New Orleans, Louisiana, specializes in using swordfish to make andouille sausage, muffaletta, and other pork-centric dishes. Other restaurants have followed suit, like Birmingham, Alabama's Bayonet, which serves a Reuben sandwich with pastrami made from swordfish belly.

The other reason is sustainability. Nelson noted that GW Fins' policy of buying whole swordfish and other fish rather than filets left them with a great deal of meat that ended up in the trash, including the belly. "A lot of these fish only have like a 23% or 28% yield," said Nelson in a separate interview with Food & Wine. To fight that waste, he began devising ways to craft these castoffs into menu items — first with fish charcuterie, and later swordfish belly bacon, cracklings, and other creative efforts. In doing so, he and other chefs are reducing the need to harvest more fish while preserving the swordfish population — which in the past two decades, has rebounded after decades of overfishing.

Reducing environmental waste and providing healthy food options are good reasons to advocate for using swordfish as a pork substitute. But there's another school of thought that advises against its use in this manner — or for eating it at all. For many, swordfish is one of the 13 menu items you should never order at a seafood restaurant due to the high levels of mercury found in its system (about six times the amount found in a can of tuna). It's also notorious for harboring some large and grisly parasitic worms, which can only be eliminated by cooking the fish to 145 degrees Fahrenheit or freezing it to 4 degrees below zero Fahrenheit for a week. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fish is rendered inedible, which, along with the worms, is why Anthony Bourdain said to skip eating swordfish.

GW Fins chef Michael Nelson said he found a workaround for those issues by sourcing swordfish from the nearby Gulf of Mexico (renamed the Gulf of America in 2025 by U.S. President Donald Trump), which he claimed has lower levels of mercury. However, there doesn't appear to be a substantial amount of evidence (if any) to support that claim, and many governmental and environmental agencies advise against eating large amounts of swordfish sourced from the Gulf due to the amount of mercury found in fish in that area.