The arrowtooth flounder is the most common food fish in the Gulf of Alaska. It looks something like a halibut. And it tastes, well, not like a halibut. "Inedible'' is the word the Alaska Department of Fish and Game once used to use to define the arrowtooth as table fare.

And yet, one of the great dreams of the commercial fishing business in the 49th state has always been to make marketable what fisheries managers call the Gulf's huge "biomass" of arrowtooth. The Fishery Industrial Technology Center in Kodiak, a division of the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, spent years trying to figure out a way to make the flesh of the arrowtooth mimic the firm, flaky texture of always tasty halibut when cooked.

The center met with little success. Nonetheless, arrowtooth is now in a market near you. The Wal-Mart Supercenter off Dimond Boulevard in Anchorage stocks it in the freezer case, and it appears arrowtooth is available in Wal-Marts across the country. The reviews coming in from the few Wal-Mart customers who have posted comments online are not good.

"Nasty" is how one reviewer put it, which just about sums up all the reviews.

Fillets of arrowtooth might look like fillets of halibut -- or at least edible fillets of fish -- but they still contain a dirty little secret.

From a culinary standpoint, arrowtooth are cursed with a naturally occurring enzyme that goes off when cooked and turns the fish to mush. The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration describes the situation this way: "Upon landing, a proteolytic enzyme released from a myxosporean parasite causes softening of the flesh ...(but) recently, several food grade additives have been successfully used that inhibit enzymatic breakdown."

"Inhibit" is the operative word there, according to Chuck Crapo, a researcher at the Kodiak technology center who spent a lot of time working with arrowtooth in the 1990s. No additive has been found to stop the fish from turning to mush. The additives only partially work, he said, and "the process of doing this (treatment) is so hard" he wonders if the fillets now appearing in the market were treated.

Short of treating arrowtooth to block the enzymes, he added, selling the fish is a crap shoot. The consumer might get a fillet low in enzymes, and that fillet might hold together when cooked. But the odds are low.

"There's really no telling which fillets are going to be soft," he said. "A large percentage of them are going to turn out to be soft and mushy."

'A lot of disappointed customers out there'

This has not, however, stopped Chinese fish processors from pushing arrowtooth fillets into American groceries. Not even the blowback from Wal-Mart customers seems to have had much of an effect. "Do Not Purchase this flounder," reads the very first customer review posted on Wal-Mart's own website for "Household and Grocery" reviews. "This flounder turned out very mushy. It was completely inedible."

"NASTY!" reads the second review. "The first time I bought this I thought maybe I had a bad fish. So silly me, bought another package later in the month. I just LOVE flounder. Again, the fish was prepared as directed and when I removed it from the pan it was total MUSH. This was nasty. I tried to eat it even though it was mush, but I was not able to enjoy this."

There are another five reviews posted. They're all the same. The last one says simply: "This is the nastiest fish i have ever tasted!!"

The researchers in Kodiak are not surprised. "It's not a high quality product," Crapo said. Still, he and coworker Scott Smiley have noticed arrowtooth creeping into the marketplace. The Chinese, Smiley said, have been using the readily available fish to try to jump start a fish-processing industry. "I don't think it will work," he added.