I'm not sure what's going on here. I buy Atlantic salmon from Costco and then apportion it out into ziplock bags and freeze it within a couple of hours. When I give it a whiff it smells exactly like clean salmon should: sharp and with a hint of saltwater, fresh, delicious.

When I take a piece of salmon from the freezer, I put it into a bowl of cold water for 1 hour or so. When I open the ziplock bag and put the fish onto a cutting board, it always smells very fishy, sometimes repulsively so. I've never gotten sick from it, but it's impacting my ability to enjoy my meal- sometimes, on the more fatty bits of salmon where you'd usually get a delicious buttery taste, I'm instead getting a hint of that fishiness and a nasty rancidified taste.

What's going on here? My freezer is definitely freezing the fish for sure, and this has been happening with fish that only spends 1 months in the freezer. I recently thawed some salmon that was in there for 1 years (badly freezer burnt) and it was actually very delicious and not smelly. It feels like it's a total toss-up as to whether or not my piece of salmon is going to come out of the bag slightly smelly or VERY smelly