The Seafood You Should And Shouldn't Buy At Trader Joe's

The seafood selection at Trader Joe's isn't perfect, but that's true of just about every category of product the store offers. One of the key qualities that sets Trader Joe's apart from its competition is that the vast majority of its products are packaged under proprietary labels. As a result, the things Trader Joe's makes particularly well are technically exclusive to the chain, but almost anything a customer might find subpar is without any in-store alternatives. Since this is true of the various seafood products at Trader Joe's, some seafood items are well worth going out of the way to purchase, whereas others are simply worse than what's readily available at other stores.

In order to find out just which Trader Joe's seafood products you should buy and which you shouldn't, I visited my local Trader Joe's and came home with 10 of the store's signature seafood items. The items I chose were intended to represent both some of the basics and more creative flavors in each major seafood department — refrigerated, frozen, and canned. After trying and analyzing each item, I determined which seafood products are worth buying at Trader Joe's and which are best purchased elsewhere.

Typically, food at Trader Joe's is cheap. Sometimes that results in lower-quality goods, but it also becomes an unlikely strength of the store's premade food items. Even if it's not necessarily using the highest-quality ingredients, Trader Joe's excels at combining those ingredients into tasty and oftentimes creative dishes. This phenomenon pretty readily applies to the Trader Joe's Battered Fish Nuggets.

Each fish nugget contains a piece of pollock fillet, housed in a pretty ample coating. As should be expected, the quality of that pollock fillet isn't necessarily high, but it does its job nevertheless as a meaty, umami-rich protein. What makes this item excel is just how much flavor is contained in its breading. Rather than just providing a nice crisp, there's a prominent butter flavor in that coating. Combined with a light yeasty bread flavor, each nugget bite adds up to more than just the sum of its parts. Presumably, these fish nuggets are meant to provide a somewhat healthier alternative to grocery store chicken nuggets — while they're somewhat fatty and not outright healthy, per se, they do taste great. If the idea of a fish nugget sounds good, then the Trader Joe's Battered Fish Nuggets are absolutely worth buying.

While Trader Joe's excels at fun flavor combinations in its snacks, frozen entrees, and other sorts of prefab items, the average quality of its raw ingredients is perhaps its most noteworthy weakness. As I found out from this experience, its refrigerated salmon fillets are among those relatively numerous raw ingredients of subpar quality.

I prepared the salmon fillet I purchased in the oven with just olive oil, salt, pepper, and some dried dill. It didn't taste bad, per se, but I found the quality of the salmon altogether lacking — it wasn't rich and oily the way a good piece of salmon should taste. Rather, just a hint of umami made it through a sort of pervasive blandness. I also picked up the slightest bit of fishiness, which would have been negligible under better circumstances, but given that I already wasn't loving this salmon fillet's flavor, it stood out. At a killer price point, salmon of this quality might still be worth buying, but salmon is in fact available for a comparable price at competing grocery stores. Lacking in both quality and value, then, refrigerated salmon fillets are best purchased somewhere other than Trader Joe's.

The Trader Joe's Argentinian Red Shrimp with Ginger Garlic Butter falls in a sort of middle ground, consisting of uncooked seafood — arguably a weakness for Trader Joe's — but with ample added flavoring. Notably, beyond just ginger-garlic butter, the shrimp are seasoned with a slightly spicy togarashi pepper. After preparing my Argentinian Red Shrimp per the cooking instructions on the package and trying them, not only did I find the flavor delicious, but I thought the shrimp itself was of a surprisingly high quality too.

It's worth clarifying that this item didn't necessarily check every box imaginable. Rather, the shrimp were pretty tiny once cooked, so volume is the quality they sacrifice for taste and affordability. With that said, I wasn't thinking all that hard about the size of these shrimp because they tasted so good. Every flavor advertised was both present and not overwhelming, adding slightly spicy, garlicky, buttery, and sharp ginger notes to what were pretty solid pieces of shrimp. Like the best shellfish, my shrimp came out firm without becoming rubbery and tasted a little nutty. One package of Argentinian Red Shrimp with Ginger Garlic Butter might not be enough food for even an entree for one, but it tastes good enough to justify a purchase all the same. Based on the quality of just the shrimp portion of the dish, I'd also try the unflavored Argentinian Red Shrimp from Trader Joe's in a heartbeat.

While I selected Everything But The Bagel Seasoned Smoked Salmon for how fun it seemed compared to conventional smoked salmon options, I was still a bit worried about how it might taste. Notably, it was cheaper than each of the unflavored varieties of smoked salmon at Trader Joe's, leading me to assume the brand was simply masking its lowest-quality salmon under Everything But The Bagel seasoning — the store's proprietary version of everything bagel seasoning, which originated at a bagel shop in the '80s. I was pleased to learn that this does not seem to be the case.

I tried my Everything But The Bagel Seasoned Smoked Salmon plain, and found that it tasted solid with zero accompaniment. What surprised me most about the product was that its seasoning was not overwhelming. Rather, it was relegated to each piece of salmon's edges, making for a subtle complement to what was otherwise a typical smoked salmon flavor. For what it's worth, this is an inelegant, super salty smoked salmon, but the bottom line is that it tastes great. And at a price point lower than most other smoked salmon products, at Trader Joe's or otherwise, Everything But The Bagel Seasoned Smoked Salmon is a straight up home run.

It shouldn't come as a huge surprise that the quality of refrigerated cod fillets at Trader Joe's is comparable to that of its salmon fillets. For what it's worth, I did appreciate that my cod was wild-caught, at a price point just about equivalent to the farm-raised salmon I purchased. Nevertheless, it still wasn't quite good enough to warrant a recommendation.

I prepared my cod fillet in the oven with my salmon fillet, also seasoned with olive oil, salt, pepper, and dill. My first couple of bites when it was fresh out of the oven were actually pretty decent. The cod was flaky and tender without losing its firmness. Flavor-wise, I picked up a subtle shellfish-adjacent richness. But for whatever reason, after about a minute, subsequent bites lost that rich flavor and kinda tasted like nothing. In fact, that nothingness became pervasive, dulling the seasoning I added to the fish. Those first couple of decent bites, then, felt like a fluke, because the rest of the fillet tasted aggressively plain. There was, however, zero fishiness present, so these cod fillets could still work in, say, a fish 'n' chips context or some other dish in which its protein's flavor is negligible — cod is one of the best types of fish for fish 'n' chips, after all. On the whole, though, it's probably a good idea to purchase cod fillets elsewhere.

Whereas my Trader Joe's salmon fillets and cod fillets came from the refrigerator aisle and consisted of just one or two servings each, the store's Branzino Fillets are frozen and come four or five to a bag. While each individual fillet is relatively thin and insubstantial, one bag is still enough for, say, entrees for three people. But the most important distinction between the other raw fish I tried from Trader Joe's and these Branzino Fillets is that the branzino was super solid.

While there are some specialized, European methods for cooking branzino, I stuck to the basics in order to assess the product's baseline quality. First off — after defrosting overnight and preparing my branzino fillets in the oven per the listed cooking instructions, with olive oil, salt, pepper, and dill — they came out melt-in-your-mouth tender, falling apart, even, as I clumsily attempted to plate them. Their falling apart was more of a user error than a problem, though, because they were soft without bordering in mushy, landing in a textural sweet spot. Their flavor, meanwhile, was mild but pleasant. The olive oil in particular accentuated a satisfying fattiness. Between a relatively generous quantity, perfect texture, and winning taste, the Trader Joe's Branzino Fillets earn an easy recommendation. Plus, even if it was represented by just a single product, the frozen fish section performed quite a bit better in this experiment than its refrigerated counterpart.

The ingredients listed on each box of Trader Joe's Crispy Battered Calamari are simple: squid, sunflower oil, wheat flour, rice, semolina, salt, leavening, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, and chili pepper. While a relatively natural mix of real food items is appealing, it all adds up to something just kind of standard rather than very good or offensively bad.

Flavorwise, the Trader Joe's Crispy Battered Calamari gains quite a bit from both an ample quantity of oil and the spices with which it's seasoned. Rather than just tasting like squid and batter, each breaded calamari ring is buttery and subtly spicy. Those flavors aren't good enough to move the needle, however, especially when I found the squid just a tad rubberier and fishier than I would have liked. The single quality that does, in fact, move the needle into "buy" territory, however, is its price. At $5.49 for 16 ounces of squid, one box is both cheaper and of a larger quantity than leading products at competing stores. For tasting decent at a killer value, then, the Crispy Battered Calamari barely but deservedly ekes out a win.

I tasted my Everything But The Bagel Seasoned Smoked Salmon before my Smoked Ahi Tuna, and figured the latter product would follow suit with how much I enjoyed the former. Unfortunately, the Smoked Ahi Tuna paled in comparison, lacking the pizazz that the smoked salmon had in spades.

Just like my salmon and cod fillets, my Smoked Ahi Tuna didn't taste offensive or anything, but it simply lacked flavor. Curious about why this might be the case, I checked its list of ingredients, and was surprised to find that it's not just seasoned with sesame seeds but flavored with sesame oil too. Both were negligible — I picked up no sesame whatsoever. Texturally, the fish is solid, so it might work in, say, a dressed salad, where its blandness wouldn't be to the dish's detriment. But given that it might only work in particular contexts, the Smoked Ahi Tuna is not recommended overall. On the whole, smoked salmon is a solid buy at Trader Joe's, but it's perhaps worth being pickier about alternative smoked fish items like this one.

Canned sardines may be simple in theory, but there's a lot that can go wrong with them, from textural weirdness to off-putting flavors. The canned sardines I picked up from Trader Joe's — Wild Caught Sardines in Olive Oil with Smoke Flavor — did nothing wrong, and were, in fact, a pretty ideal execution of a pantry staple.

Perhaps most importantly, the promised smoke flavor was subtle rather than overpowering. It acted as a complement to the sardines rather than insisting on a lead role. Each sardine piece was also sizable, tasting rich and oily. Noticeably absent was any sort of fishy flavor. The combination of subtle smoke, natural seafood umami, and that sort of sharp oiliness particular to sardines added up to an altogether pleasant culinary experience. They're not the cheapest sardines on the market, but at an affordable price point all the same, these Trader Joe's sardines are a solid value and well worth the purchase.

Canned tuna is the workhorse of the seafood department. Most aren't buying a can of tuna just for its taste, but rather because it's an affordable and nutritious protein easily mixed with more flavorful ingredients. Fittingly, it's a cornerstone of some of the 22 best tuna recipes. With that said, the Trader Joe's canned tuna — I opted for Solid White Albacore in Water with Sea Salt Added — does its job effectively enough to warrant trying.

What stood out most to me about my Trader Joe's canned tuna was its texture. Whereas some canned tuna is soft, this tuna was pretty firm and meaty, closer to a shredded tuna steak than the amorphous mess found in some tuna cans. Its flavor was mild to the point that it was difficult to characterize, but that's effectively a strength for a canned tuna product given that the majority of customers will opt to prepare it with other ingredients. Also of note, there was nothing off-putting about its flavor. For what it's worth, my cats couldn't get enough of it, but they're easy to please. Canned tuna, then, is worth picking up from Trader Joe's, adequately checking just about every box a can of tuna could. Plus, given how solid I found my canned sardines, the Trader Joe's canned seafood aisle ended up with a pretty impressive showing overall.

Before visiting my nearest Trader Joe's, I selected these 10 seafood products based on what I found listed on the Trader Joe's website's inventory after sorting items by department. While the Trader Joe's website doesn't offer a comprehensive list of every item available in-store, I figured that the online inventory is intended to feature many of the chain's most popular items. I also prioritized versatility — by selecting Everything But The Bagel Seasoned Smoked Salmon, for example, I was able to assess both the individual product and how Trader Joe's does smoked salmon in general.

After purchasing all 10 items on my list and bringing them home, I prepared and ate them over the course of three days. That way I could enjoy larger portions of each item and assess them more accurately than if I tried to compress that timeframe for the sake of expedience. I ate every item either plain or with mild seasoning — each of those latter cases is mentioned in the relevant slide — to ensure a level playing field. Trader Joe's had no indication that I was purchasing my seafood items for anything other than a routine shopping trip. All of my opinions are based solely on this shopping trip and not any prior experience.