Good or bad news?
I can’t imagine…
We’ve had fugu as sashimi, hot pot and deep fried. We’re still alive, as far as I can tell. 
Just had it in an izakaya in Tokyo last month. Quite delicious. Deep fried chunks were moist and meaty.
The versions you had in Japan, do you think they were prepared from toxic-free fish or not?
I’m not sure if any versions were from toxic free fish. We did have a multi course dinner at a fugu specialist that I’m fairly certain was the real deal.
My wife claimed her tongue tingled eating the sashimi.
Fugu Skin.
Fugu salad with puffed yuba?
Fugu deep fried.
Fugu nabe. With skin, bones, meat, veggies and tofu. Loved the “pot”. A parchment lined wicker basket with a metal disc to transfer heat from the induction stove.
Interesting… I wonder how long it’s popularity will last now? Everything I’ve ever read about fugu has always intimated - when not stating outright - that the Big Reason so many people sought it out and paid Big Bucks for it was mostly for the thrill of probably-not-dying-as-long-as-it-was-properly-prepared.
(Not to mention favoring the particularly-poisonous-if-the-knife-slips areas around the liver…
)
Is the fish the best tasting ever , or is it the danger factor that makes it popular ?
Yikes! I knew they “puffed”, but I’ve never seen a photo of one “in statu” all-puffed-up, as it were. No wonder it’s a viable defense mechanism…
What I do seriously wonder, on the other hand, is why it would occur to any sane person to eat one in the first place (unless they were starving, with no prospect of finding anything else possibly-edible in the foreseeable future), much less why enough people ate them, often enough, to figure out how to eat them without dying…
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…The Japanese variety of blowfish called fugu is a delicacy notorious for containing potent neurotoxins in several of its organs. Fugu can only be safely cleaned by specially trained and certified fish cutters. The northern puffers caught in the mid-Atlantic coastal waters of the United States are safe, since they do not eat the things that create poisons in Japanese blowfish. The toxic blowfish are 6739 miles from here—the best argument I’ve ever heard for eating local fish.
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Do/did people, at least in significant numbers, eat them, though, before “fugu” gave them notoriety (even if only vicarous, given their lack of toxicity)? I haven’t even touched a fishing pole myself since I moved back to NYC in the late 70s, but as a kid/young teen I did live in what was one of the last bastions of commercial fishing on Cape Cod for most of the 1970s, and while you’d hear about “weird” fish like monkfish (known there and then as “goosefish”), I don’t recall ever even hearing about pufferfish as something that anyone ever caught, even as by-catch in trawler nets, much less took home to eat…
