Claire’s Tip of the Week:

Janice from Plantation, “a faithful reader,” asked where to purchase ground conch. The answer: Look for fresh, frozen or canned conch at your local seafood monger, Caribbean markets and larger grocery stores.

The key to any fritter, chowder, salad or cracked conch recipe is to start with good quality meat. When you purchase conch at a store, you usually get the meat or the muscle of the Queen conch removed from the shell. Look for conch graded No.1, the most desirable, with the membranes removed.

According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch (seafoodwatch.org), Queen conch caught in Honduras is a “Best Choice” because there’s an annual catch limit to prevent overfishing and no other species of concern are caught. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (fws.gov) states that Queen conch was once found in high numbers in the Florida Keys, but that due to a collapse in conch fisheries in the 1970s, it is now illegal to commercially or recreationally harvest queen conch in Florida.

Before conch is ground, it needs to be tenderized. Slice any thick portions in half horizontally to create thinner pieces. Use the coarse side of a meat mallet to pound the conch meat. When tenderized in markets, it is passed through a tenderizing machine with teeth. When buying pre-tenderized, look for whole pieces, instead of ground, to visually inspect the quality.

After tenderizing, the conch can be finely chopped by hand. For ease of preparation, a food processor fitted with a blade attachment or a meat grinder can also be used. When grinding, do not overprocess the meat, you want to see visible pieces.