One of my favorite canapes, this defeats the zillion bones in the shad by flaking out the smoked meat and mixing it with a rich, sharp garlic aioli. This dish also works well with smoked trout, bluefish or mackerel. You could do it with smoked salmon, too. It takes some time and some doing if you don’t buy pre-smoked fish – but with pre-smoked fish, it’s a snap. Here’s how to do it from scratch.
- Flake the smoked shad into pieces, discarding bones and skin.
- In a mortar, add three minced garlic cloves, a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of mustard. The mustard need not be grand; I use whatever I have around. Mash them together. Add 1 tablespoon of minced fresh oregano leaves and mash to mix.
- SLOWLY add olive oil to the mixture. I drizzle a little in, then mash and mix, then add a bit more oil, mix, and so on. Take your time and add enough oil to make is less of a mayonnaise and more of a thick sauce.
- Mix this with the flaked shad and serve on crackers or crusty toasted bread. For an elegant touch, garnish with bright orange flying fish roe.
More Shad & Other Bony Fish Recipes
Sounds great. I’m a huge fan of smoked fish, and although I’ve done my share of it, I haven’t done any lately. And I miss it. So good.
Mr. Shaw: Any inclination to do a piece on cooking shad roe? The roe of multiple species is a traditional dish here in coastal North Carolina: pan fried for breakfast. Nation-wide readers might be very interested in your take, and spring fisheries in the east are about to get going. You are certainly on to something with an emphasis on natural, local, simple. Agreed with and applauded.
I adore shad roe. I will post my favorite roe recipe soon for you Easterners – I ate quite a bit of herring and shad roe when I lived in Virginia and caught them on the Rappahannock.
Our shad don’t arrive until around Memorial Day, but you can be sure I will be catching lots and lots of them – and posting on it.
And thanks for the vote of confidence, Warren!
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Alright Hank, I need that shad roe recipe. Went with friends on the Neuse River in eastern North Carolina yesterday and kept a small roe. I plan to smoke the fillets, but unless you’ve got something more exciting than roe with scrambled eggs, that’s where I’m heading.
Try this:
Soak the roes in salty water overnight.
Cook some bacon.
Dredge roes in flour, then fry in bacon fat over medium-low heat.
Serve with toast, the bacon, a squeeze of lemon and some chervil, dill or fennel as garnish.
Thanks.
I will report back to you on how it goes. Also planning to make the garlic aioli with the fillets for Easter. I should have taken a picture of the fish before cutting. It would have been an awesome close-up of the head.
Hank,
I prepared and served your flaked shad for Easter Sunday and had a modest success. I probably did not have enough smoke when I cured the fish. The outer layer was lightly smoked, but underneath, it was just cooked fish. My fault though. I soaked my wood chips for 12 hours, which I think was way too long. They just didn’t give off much smoke in the 45 minutes I had the fish on the rack. The bones in my little hickory shad (maybe a 1-1/2-pounder) were quite simply amazing. For those who have read about, but not personally experienced filleting a shad – it’s everything you could imagine.
Next up, shad roe on toast.
Tell me about it. The Indians were right with that porcupine reference. Sorry your shad did not harden enough. There are so many variables (amount of smoke, temperature, length of the brine, how long you dried the fish afterwards, etc) that it can be hard to write down an exact recipe.
If you do it again, smoke them harder – more smoke, more time, longer brine.