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Welcome to Hunt Gather Talk, Season Three. This season will focus entirely on fish and seafood, freshwater and salt. Think of this as the podcast behind my latest cookbook, Hook, Line, and Supper, which covers all things aquatic.

I am happy to be working with two title sponsors, E-Fish and Filson. These will be the only two commercial sponsors of the show, a move I’ve made to keep things as uncluttered as possible. I happen to already wear a lot of both Filson and I love what the folks at E-Fish are doing, so it’s a natural fit.

Every episode of Season Three will dig deep into some aspect of the fish and seafood world, from prep and how to sessions to sustainability and the farmed vs. wild debate, to how fish and seafood plays into other world cuisines, to episodes on specific kinds of fish. 

In this episode I talk with Scott Leysath of the TV show “Dead Meat,” and Tom Dickson, who wrote the book “Fishing for Buffalo” about so-called trash fish.

I’ve always loved the unloved fish: sea robins, bergalls, catfish, freshwater drum, burbot… one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and my guests Scott and Tom feel the same. We explore the history of “trash fish,” why they are unloved where they are, and how to fit more of them into your fishing — and cooking. 

For more information on this episode, here are some helpful links:

• Tom Dickson wrote a great book about fishing for “rough fish” called Fishing for Buffalo. You should definitely pick this up if you live in the center of the country. 
• Scott Leysath hosts “Dead Meat,” which features off the wall fish and game in each episode. I am particularly fond of the Asian carp episode… 
• An interesting article on rough fish, tracing back many of the term’s origins to conflicts between white and non-white Americans. 
• More on rough fish, from Wikipedia. 

A Request

I have brought back Hunt Gather Talk with the hopes that your generosity can help keep it going season after season. My two sponsors help things a lot, but you are the third leg of the stool. Think of this like public radio, only with hunting and fishing and wild food and stuff. No, Hunt Gather Talk won’t be a “pay-to-play” podcast, so you don’t necessarily have to chip in. But I am asking you to consider it. Every little bit helps to pay for editing, servers, and, frankly to keep the lights on here. Thanks in advance for whatever you can contribute!

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Transcript

As a service to those with hearing issues, or for anyone who would rather read our conversation than hear it, here is the transcript of the show. Enjoy!

Hank Shaw:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Hunt Gather Talk Podcast. I am your host, Hank Shaw and today, we’re going to talk about something that has been really, really important to me for as long as I can remember and that is loving the unloved. Everybody who knows me, who has been following Hunter Angler Gardener Cook and my cookbooks and buy stuff on social media for decades now, has known that I’m really, really into the things that maybe not everybody else is. So, in the area of fish, this would be the inevitable trash fish. This is a term that’s kind of loaded in a lot of ways. But what it generally means is this is a fish that for some reason or another, the dominant culture where you’re catching that fish doesn’t happen to like it, for reasons that are often nonsensical.

Hank Shaw:

So today, I’m going to be talking with Tom Dickson and Tom Dickson is the author of a fantastic cookbook called Fishing for Buffalo. And it is everything you wanted to know about not only catching rough fish, which is the other term for this kind of fish, but also how to deal with them in the kitchen. It’s a great book, and I’m really happy to be talking to Tom.

Hank Shaw:

And also I’m going to have my good friend, Scott Leysath and Scott Leysath, you may or may not know. And he is the guy who is behind the TV show Dead Meat, which as you might imagine, is an entire TV show about zigging where other people’s zag. And so, both Tom and Scott and I have decades of experience among us dealing with fish that many people think are unloved or unworthy or somehow less than perfect. And we’re going to dispel myth after myth after myth on this show, and I really, really hope you enjoy it. And without further ado, let’s take it away.

Hank Shaw:

Scott Leysath and Tom Dickson. Welcome to the Hunt Gather Talk Podcast. I am super glad to have both of you guys on. This is a topic today that is near and dear to my heart. Welcome.

Scott Leysath:

Good to be here.

Tom Dickson:

Thank you, thank you.

Hank Shaw:

So, we are going to talk unloved fish, trash fish and the species that are less than glamorous. And I brought you guys on for specific reasons. In the case of Tom, you wrote, one of the coolest books I’ve ever read about fish and seafood. It’s called Fishing for Buffalo and you’ll tell me a little bit more about that book in a second. But it is the only book that I know of that is dedicated to not only catching, but to eating what they call rough fish, fish that are not glamorous. They might have extra bones or whatever, whatever. But I like this book so much I stole it from my friend Chris Niskanen, about 15 years ago, and I still look at it from time to time. And you are now with Montana Fishing Game, right?

Tom Dickson:

That’s right, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Hank Shaw:

There you go. A unique freshwater perspective. And Scott Leysath, you are, among other things, the host of the Dead Meat TV show and the Sporting Chef. And you are equally well-known for treading the unbeaten path when it comes to random animal matter that you put into your mouth.

Scott Leysath:

I’ve got a mission to let people know that a lot of these ugly slimy fish are actually pretty good eat.

Hank Shaw:

I know. Totally. I mean, I also grew up on the New York-New Jersey area on party boats. And I have, since the time I was a teenager, had been not really accepting whatever the conventional wisdom is, no matter where I am, in terms of, “Oh, this fish is good to eat, this fish is bad to eat.” So, I kind of want to start there. What makes a trash fish, in many cases a trash fish for you may not be a trash fish for me, and there’s this kind of universal pigeonholing of this out of the other species, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.

Hank Shaw:

And I’d love to start this with you, Tom. What in your experience makes any group of people or even an individual say, “Oh, well, that’s a trash fish?”

Tom Dickson:

Well, I think what happens with fish with both saltwater and freshwater, I’m not as knowledgeable about saltwater, but certainly it seems to applies. There’s a hierarchy of fish among anglers and among people who eat fish. And depending on where you live, there’s certain species that are at the top and then there’s certain species at the bottom and I’ll just give you an example. In Minnesota where I grew up. No one in Minnesota would ever need a bullhead. They just, they would rather die than eat a bullhead or-

Hank Shaw:

That’s kind of like only the Iowans eat bullheads, right?

Tom Dickson:

That’s right, that’s right. And so, but Iowans come up to Southern Minnesota in droves. Sometimes, they come up in busloads to fish for bullheads. And by the same token, Minnesotans would never eat, what they call, an eelpout or a burbot, but in a lot of states and especially in Montana where I live now, a burbot or a ling are highly esteemed food fish. And so, it doesn’t really make sense why one fish is considered palatable or considered a premier game fish and other fish aren’t. But I think there’s a number of factors. And I’d be happy to talk about them if you want.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, give me your top one or two and then we’ll move it over to Scott.

Tom Dickson:

Well, I think the biggest thing is the boniness of the filet. So, generally fish that have a lot of bones in the fillet like suckers, goldeye, mooneye, carp are disparaged as food just because they’re a more bother. And the other big factor I think, is the lip, the lip factor. And for whatever reason, people don’t like fish with lips. And I think, it reminds them too much of their own lips and it’s like eating a person. That’s my theory.

Hank Shaw:

I had never actually heard this. That’s hilarious. And I’m thinking of my own experience and I think the lippiest fish that I ever grew up with was a fish called a tautog, also called the blackfish. It’s a wrasse that lives in the North Atlantic and they are highly sought after. Again, there seems to be no rhyme or reason. Scott?

Scott Leysath:

Well, Tom, you were talking about fish with lips and I immediately flashed on sucker gigging in Missouri on the opening night of sucker gigging season. And I’m guessing that most of America hasn’t been sucker gagging, I hadn’t been either, so flat crystal clear water. There is, I don’t know how many boats on the water, picture of frog gig about twice as long. And these suckers as they’re hanging along on the bottom, you go by and you’re gigging suckers. You throw them into a bucket, and you’re drinking a fair amount of moonshine while you’re doing it because the suckers, as you mentioned, have got lips. And they’re super bony. And who else besides these people in Missouri, eat suckers.

Scott Leysath:

And so it was intriguing to me because at the end of the night, basically, you just cut the sides off, leave the bones in. They’ve got this thing that looks like a waffle iron that has a whole bunch of blades on it and it scores the sides of the sucker. Then they bread it and deep fry it. And I remember asking the question, “Do you ever pair any dipping sauce with your fried sucker?” And they looked at me like, “Why would you want to ruin a perfectly good piece of sucker?” And I thought, it could have used a little dipping sauce. But somewhere along the line, these people in Missouri decided that sucker is good, whereas I’m guessing the rest of the country says sucker is bad.

Hank Shaw:

Well, there’s a funny side note to that very particular waffle iron-y thing. I saw that on your show and I’ve seen Tony Bourdain did it as well. It’s kind of a rite of passage in some senses to that sucker gigging in [crosstalk 00:08:16]. And as soon as I saw it, I’m like, “That is exactly the same as the honegiri technique in Japan that they use for pike eels, which are similarly bony fish, except they do it by hand with a Japanese knife. Where if you can imagine as you’re listening to this a side, I mean, you don’t really want to call it a filet because it’s got bones in it, but a side of a fish and then you make lots and lots and lots of thin, narrow cuts perpendicular to where the spine was.

Hank Shaw:

And with that every cut goes down almost to the bottom, but not quite, because you want to keep that skin on there. And you want to go through the bones, but keep the skin on and you do cut after cut after cut. And the guys in the Ozarks have kind of made a science out of it and they’ve created these devices that do it more or less automatically. But in Japan, they do this by hand and the net effect is really cool. Because when you fry them, and Scott, you’ll corroborate me on this, that skin contracts and so the pieces of the fish open up a little bit like a peony flower. You don’t even notice the bones at all.

Scott Leysath:

You could taste no bones, because those thin cuts are so close together. I mean, you’ve got just these little tiny pieces of bone that as they fry they disappear.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, yeah. And it’s very ingenious way of making accessible a fish that otherwise would be not accessible.

Scott Leysath:

Right.

Tom Dickson:

Yeah, Chris, that’s the same technique that I was taught by a guy named Bud Ramer. He was the owner of Ramer’s Fish house in Winona, Minnesota, and he was the top commercial fishermen on the Mississippi River, pretty much from the Twin Cities down to the Iowa border. And he would catch tons of carp and big mouth and small mouth buffalo. And that was the technique that he used for cooking carp.

Tom Dickson:

And I watched him do exactly what you said the Japanese chefs do with carp fillets is he would have these massive knives that he would score those filets and then he would deep fry those filets. And the hot oil was softening the bones. But what it was doing is kind of what Scott said, it sort of just disintegrates them. They’re still there, but they become soft or almost brittle. And you can just basically chew them right up. And so, they’re still there, but they’re rendered palatable. And that’s, it’s an ingenious technique.

Hank Shaw:

And it seems to be done all over the place, too, because the Japanese wouldn’t cornmeal fry it like they do in the Ozarks. They would just do it with tempura or with just rice flour.

Tom Dickson:

Another technique for suckers, and Scott, I saw this on your show. I think those guys were boat fishing for bighead carp, and was that it? That it was a bighead carp or silver carp? I can’t remember.

Scott Leysath:

That, it was that, whichever Asian carp it were on the Illinois River outside of Peoria.

Tom Dickson:

Yeah.

Scott Leysath:

And-

Tom Dickson:

Yeah. They were grinding up the meat and dealing with the bones that way. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Scott Leysath:

It worked great. So, the Asian carp are bottom feeder. I mean, they’re filter feeders, not bottom feeders, and so, it’s a lighter fleshed fish. To me, they taste better than your common carp. And we were with a guy Dirk’s Fish and Gourmet in Chicago. And we were invited up by Austan Goolsbee, who was Obama’s Chief Economic Adviser. He said, “I love your show. Let’s go shoot some carp.”

Hank Shaw:

That’s so random.

Scott Leysath:

And we never discussed politics. He’s a really good guy. I’ve connected with him a few times since. Anyway, what Dirk did after we shot the carp and it was weird. And I don’t know, Tom, you probably know what this is. When opened the carp up, rather than whatever the inside of a normal fish looks like, there was all this kind of olive drab algae looking goo that ran out of them. What’s that?

Tom Dickson:

I have no idea. I’ve never seen that carp species.

Scott Leysath:

I’ve never-

Tom Dickson:

Fortunately, they haven’t made it this far to Montana.

Scott Leysath:

Well, I’ve never seen goo run out of a fish, and a green goo, anyway. And so, all we did we just, I mean we left the bones in. We take a side, take the skin off, some of the bottom line, and then run it through a grinder and ground the whole thing. Dirk made fish cakes out of it. They tasted just like any other fish cake. You never tasted a bone.

Scott Leysath:

I had since tried the same thing with some American shad, which if you’ve got some patience, you can pull little strips of meat out of that shad. And I think we’ve probably all tried different things to do with shad. They’re really good flavored fish, but the bones and the little feathery bones get in the way. So I did the same thing with shad last year. I ran some sides of shad through the grinder, made fishcakes out of it and they were absolutely delicious and you tasted no bone.

Hank Shaw:

That’s a great idea. So, one technical point, what size DI are you using? Because I imagined it would matter.

Scott Leysath:

He started with a larger plate and then went to the smaller and I don’t remember which one exactly he used. But you want to go big and then go small, because obviously small is going to eliminate some of the other pieces of bone.

Hank Shaw:

Good idea. Probably like a 6, 5 and then 4, 4-1/2, which is kind of your normal, [crosstalk 00:13:37].

Scott Leysath:

Normal deal. Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

So a little bit along these lines, I suspect that the-

Scott Leysath:

But it worked with any bony fish.

Hank Shaw:

Sure. I suspect that along the lines of the green goo that one of the things that makes a trash fish a trash fish is there’s got to be some sort of ick factor. And it’s very clear with burbot. So, if you’ve ever picked up a burbot, eelpout, mariah, lawyer fish, whatever you want to call it. It has this disconcerting habit of wrapping around your arm when you try to get it off the hook. And I have seen big strong grown men scream like a little girl, when that happens. And it’s definitely you have to get through it the first time then, “Okay, they’re just going to do it.”

Hank Shaw:

Well, the same basic fish in the North Atlantic is called a cusk and there’s wolf eels. And then Scott, you and I have caught pricklebacks, which are the monkey-faced eels. And so, there’s kind of a weirdness factor there. Then you have the idea of like, “Well, if you think about a prickleback or a wolffish or some other fish like that, they have two eyes right in front of their face. So, they actually have faces whereas most fish, if you look at them dead on, there’s eyes way on the side of their head. These are on the front. there’s typically some kind of a weirdness factor about them. I can tell you that choupique, a bowfin, they have an odd smell. And they also are fairly challenging to cook with, once you actually work with them.

Scott Leysath:

Sorry. I just flashed on my only bow fish experience and it was-

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. Bowfins are… so okay, so bowfins have the same enzyme that Arrowtooth flounder do in Alaska which is once they die, you have to go through heaven and earth to prevent their meat from turning into wallpaper paste.

Scott Leysath:

Fish pudding is what I call it, yeah.

Hank Shaw:

There is the visual factor, goes into it. Most of the fish that we’re talking about, most of them, there’s a, “Well, that doesn’t look a regular fish.” So, that could throw it into the trash fish category. But again, if with everything that we’re about to say there’s going to be an exception, sometimes there’s a touch factor.

Hank Shaw:

So, along with the cusk and the burbot, the ling, which is not related to a lingcod, but it’s a codfish relatives that lives around the coast of New Jersey and New York. They’re also kind of gooshie and ookie. Then the extra bones is definitely a factor. So, I would say I want to kind of lead the conversation in this direction now, along the lines of the choupique, the bowfin, that is one of the two most difficult fish that I’ve ever had to work with because of the wallpaper paste aspect.

Hank Shaw:

The other one being menhaden and menhaden is also known as bunker and they’re kind of a mackerel-y, herring-y, sardine-y relative that you use universally for either fishmeal and industrial purposes. Include in fact, the Port of Rietveld, Virginia where the omega protein is the single largest port for fishing in the United States and it is only menhaden. And if you try to cook a bunker, I know everybody from about North Carolina domain is squinching up their nose and with good reason. They’re so greasy fishy that you could probably lit them on fire if you dry them.

Hank Shaw:

And so, those two fish, the bowfin and the menhaden are the only two fish in my many years on this earth that had kind of defeated me. How about you guys?

Tom Dickson:

Well, Chris, you’re kind of, “How low can you go?” And I think for everyone, there’s a fish where they just couldn’t eat it. And I think after Scott’s description of the big head carp, I think the green goo, I don’t think I could get past that. No matter how savory those fish cakes were. But I also think, you can go really high with rough fish or trash fish.

Tom Dickson:

And some of them, there’s just a strange prejudice like with eelpout or lingcod, as they’re called in parts of the United States. Those fish had an incredible fillet of beautiful white meat. They’re so delicious and it’s as good as any fishes you can find it. A lot of people call it poor man’s lobster and they’ll fillet out an eelpout, and then boil it and then dip the boiled meat and fry in butter, it tastes lobster. And yet, the eelpout, as you said, is so gross. I’ve got a friend who calls them the ish of fish. And so, there you have to get past them something with those.

Tom Dickson:

And another one that’s interesting, that’s got an incredible fillet that you don’t have to get past anything other than just sort of weird prejudice, is the freshwater drum.

Scott Leysath:

100%.

Tom Dickson:

It’s a beautiful fish. If you ask me, “What’s the top rough fish for eating?” I’d have to say the freshwater drum, also called the sheepshead.

Scott Leysath:

Yep, 100%.

Tom Dickson:

It’s just fantastic. And I think you could catch a Mesa drum and a Mesa walleye in a lake like Lake Waconia in Minneapolis. I’ll cut both of those and fillet them out and butter fry them and you couldn’t tell them apart. No way.

Hank Shaw:

I can tell them apart because of one major thing and it’s actually an advantage for the freshwater drum. Freshwater drum are considerably more fatty than walleye are. Walleye are super, super lean and every freshwater drum I’ve caught and eaten, which is in the dozens and scores at this point, has been greasy enough to get the cutting board greasy, and that makes them phenomenal to smoke.

Tom Dickson:

That’s interesting because I haven’t encountered that nearly as much either in Minnesota or Wisconsin, South Dakota or in Montana. There is a red line on them that I fillet off, but the rest of the fillet seems to be as unfatty as a walleye, so that’s interesting your experience.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, and my experience includes a bunch of freshwater drum from the St. Croix. It could be a time of year thing.

Tom Dickson:

Maybe it is, yeah.

Hank Shaw:

Do you have an experience with the freshwater drum, Scott?

Scott Leysath:

I don’t, but I don’t feel like we gave bowfin enough time. I’m telling you. Because I was unaware that they need to be processed. I’m telling you immediately if you can fillet them in the water, it’s probably best before you put them in the boat. Because had taken, and for people that don’t know just look up bowfin. They’re not all that attractive. We were night bowfishing for longnose guard. And our guide said, “Look, there’s a bowfin.” And he got all crazy about it and said, “We got to get this for the Dead Meat show.”

Scott Leysath:

So, the next day I had gutted it, put it on ice, kept it really, really cold. The next day, I’m filleting it and you could fillet it with a spoon. When I say fish pudding, I mean, fish pudding. It’s that, it turns that soft and yet I brought it to a guy, somewhere in there Tampa, Florida, a chef guy an d he made, when in doubt make fish cakes. He made fish cakes out of it and they firmed up .

Scott Leysath:

They tasted just fine. They no longer tasted like they looked. The texture was gone. I don’t know what the deal was on that. But I’d to give bowfin another try just, but the first thing I’m going to do is process it and cook it. Yeah.

Hank Shaw:

So, the cages that I talked to for Hook, Line, and Supper because I do have a little piece on bowfin in the book. What I said is, “Hey, man, how do you do this?” Because I’ve had that same experience that you did. They said, “Yep, you bonk them on the head and so, stun them and then you basically fillet them alive and then you put those filets in a plastic bag and you put it in an ice slurry right away. And then it will stay okay.

Scott Leysath:

Because you said there’s an enzyme in there that breaks it down, is that what happens?

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. It’s my understanding of that that particular fish has an enzyme that just kind of, it’s a little bit the enzyme that affects shellfish when they die where it kind of dissolves from within.

Scott Leysath:

Sure.

Hank Shaw:

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Hank Shaw:

So, have you ever had a fish that’s defeated you, other than the bowfin, Scott?

Scott Leysath:

Not so much. I had a fish that wouldn’t die. We had snakeheads in Florida, and I buried a chef’s knife through the middle of his head. I did everything I could to dispatch this thing and it wouldn’t die. When we did the monkey-face eel, same thing happened. So, we were in Golden Gate, Kirk Lombard, same guy that you did the monkey-face thing with.

Scott Leysath:

We took the monkey-faced eel, kept them in a cooler for the better part of the day. Brought them to a Thai restaurant down by AT&T Park in San Francisco. These fish had been in a cooler for I don’t know how long and yet when I went to clean them, they jumped off the cutting board which was really good. It was really good for TV. But I don’t know, I didn’t realize they could survive not in water for hours and hours and hours.

Scott Leysath:

And by the way, across from AT&T Park in San Francisco, there’s McCovey Cove. There is a hole in the asphalt in the parking lot across from McCovey Cove, across from the park, where at high tide you can drop a shrimp in, throw a fishing pole as you’re sitting in your car and pull out rockfish out of the bay.

Hank Shaw:

That’s crazy.

Scott Leysath:

But City of San Francisco wouldn’t let us use it on TV because they didn’t want to encourage people parking lot fish.

Hank Shaw:

So, speaking of McCovey Cove, we can kind of get into another category of so-called trash fish, and that’s sharks. So, right outside McCovey Cove, in that general vicinity, is a very good place to fish for leopard sharks and sometimes seven gills. And I find that sharks, in general, are misunderstood in pretty much every conceivable way.

Hank Shaw:

Number one, I think there’s a lot of people who think that every single one of them is endangered, and that if you eat any shark, you’re somehow, some kind of a monster, which is simply not true. There are lots and lots and lots of species, especially United States that are plentiful and that as long as you’re following the rules, you’re not going to do anything to the species. And two, that they’re just not worth eating.

Hank Shaw:

The only shark that I’ve ever had any experience with that was really absolutely challenging was the blue shark. And all sharks that I have tried either in a restaurant or from catching them, it’s just, it a bit like the bowfin where you need to catch the shark, decide if you’re going to keep it, bonk it on the head, bleed it. So, I usually will run a line through its jaws and out the gills and bleed it over the side for a while and then gut it right there and get it on ice. If you don’t have ice, you’re out of luck.

Hank Shaw:

And this is why many people who have had experience with sharks, skates, and rays, the elasmobranchs that whole category of fish, they do kind of sort of pee through their skin, so you get this ammonia effect that is super unpleasant. And it’s why when you see cazon in Mexico, which is basically their word for little shark, they are often heavily, heavily sauced because they’re not doing the ice thing on the boat the way that I might do it.

Hank Shaw:

And I know you have experienced with shark, Scott, but Tom, I don’t think there is anything like that in the freshwater kingdom. Is there?

Tom Dickson:

A fish that pees through its skin? No, as far as I know, there’s nothing like that. So, I’ll defer to you guys talking about eating these sharks. It’s nothing that I’ve ever tried before. I don’t think would be interested in, but I’m intrigued. What was it like eating the ones you have eaten?

Hank Shaw:

They’re the finest fish and chips you’ll ever eat.

Tom Dickson:

Wow.

Scott Leysath:

I thought, by far, my favorite has been the mako. I’m not sure why. It was just, maybe it was that particular mako. I got it from a wholesaler. It was a bycatch for them and it was absolutely delicious. Creamier. It seemed like it’s not quite as firm as some of the other. I’ll be tagging sharks in Florida next Friday. And I know that we’re targeting tigers, but I think black tips are going to be probably the most common we’re going to run into. We’re going to be in the Gulf by Crystal River in Florida. But I have really, other than people mishandling the fish, I think shark is exceptional.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I do, too. I mean, I think mako is so popular because it’s very similar to swordfish.

Scott Leysath:

Right.

Hank Shaw:

And I remember as a kid in the 1980s, going to fish markets and seeing mako shark right next to swordfish all the time. And I don’t think it’s still done that way because I think makos do get over fished in some places, so I think they’ve kind of put a put the brakes on that in terms of a commercial fishery. But the little sharks, bonnet heads, black tips, leopard sharks, and all the varieties of dog fish, which are sort of your generic small, brownish grey stealing all your bait kind of shark, I think there are those who hate them and then those who love them. And I think the people who hate them are just maybe just hate sharks or they’ve just mishandled them.

Scott Leysath:

Well, and then the other saltwater fish, the Barracuda, mackerel, all the dark oily fish, they get the same kind of bad rap, but I’ve had really good luck with all of them.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, I think it’s, and again, this goes back to the preparation. And not necessarily like many of the freshwater so-called trash fish are what Tom’s talking about which they’ve got an extra set of bones or they’re weird looking. I think in the salt water you get the darker meats, the fish that go off much faster, which is pretty much all of the what I call the gray fish. That’s blue fish, mackerel, bonito, the jacks, none of those are really fantastic unless you treat them well on the boat.

Scott Leysath:

And if you do, they are every bit as fantastic as the other. I mean, the bonito are incredible fish. I love them.

Hank Shaw:

I know and they’re so hated in Southern California.

Scott Leysath:

I agree.

Hank Shaw:

I can’t tell you how many times I will be fishing for yellowtail or something else and a bonito will swim by. And everybody in the boat is like, “God damn, bonito.” I’m like, “Yay, bonito,” because-

Scott Leysath:

But I look at that kind of spoonies and snow geese is a lot of the people that say they don’t like them have never had them. They’ve just heard that bonito is not good to eat, so “Yeah, I don’t eat bonito. I don’t eat snow geese. That’s [inaudible 00:28:47].” So, I get the same kind of thing. I don’t know that a lot of these people have actually tried it or at least tried it, done correctly.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s true kind of universally. I mean, let’s explore that for a second. So Tom, where do you think this comes from? Where do you think this kind of hierarchy that you mentioned before, where does it come from and why does it stick around?

Tom Dickson:

Well, I think there’s a number of factors going on, Hank, but one of them is just class. I mean, there’s a hierarchy of fish in North America. And there’s the fish that the sort of the rich hoity toity people go after. And then there’s the fish that poor people fish for, bullheads and pan fish. And the higher end, the fly anglers in Montana with their $400 rods and $600 reels, and they’re all catching the premier game fish, brown trout and rainbow trout. And so, that’s a factor. And I think people sort of tend to turn their noses down on fish that they just see sort of regular people fishing, shore fishing for and so I think that’s part of it. I think that’s one of the factors.

Tom Dickson:

Earlier, Scott had mentioned bottom feeders and I think that’s another factor, too. This idea that fish that feed off the bottom have less prestige, don’t taste as good. I think that’s a myth but I think that’s a very strong perception regarding channel catfish, bullheads, carp, certainly suckers. This issue that they’re feeding off the bottom and that that’s a bad thing. Trout mostly feed off the bottom. They’re feeding on aquatic insects on the bottom. They mostly are not feeding on the dun form of mayflies on the surface and even if they are, that insect spend his life on the bottom. So, it’s kind of a strange notion, but I think that’s part of the bottom feeding.

Hank Shaw:

I mean, you’re right. I mean, now that you mentioned, I thought about it years ago, and because I mean, there’s the term, “Oh, that person is a bottom feeder.” And it’s filtered into the greater societal all-American linguistics in general. And yeah, I mean, benthic versus pelagic, it is a little bit more strongly associated in the saltwater, because there’s this entire set of pelagic species like tuna and Dorado and wahoo and fishing, you need an expensive boat and expensive gear to catch.

Hank Shaw:

Whereas if you’re just dropping, deep drop it on the bottom, A, it’s in my opinion it’s more fun, because you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to get. And B, I mean, you never know what you’re going to get. I mean, that’s the thing, even in freshwater. I was in Gods Lake in Manitoba and we were extensively jigging for a lake trout. And I kept bringing up burbot after burbot after burbot, and I was the happiest guy in the boat, because these guys couldn’t keep their, “Oh, damn burbot. They’re everywhere.” I’m like, “Yay, damn burbot are everywhere.”

Hank Shaw:

And it’s funny, even to the extent of, you mentioned class and class is definitely a thing, but even within a relatively homogenous society, you’ve got weird hang ups, it’s like. So, the guides on that particular trip were Cree Indian and so, the Cree guides never ate the burbot, ever. It wasn’t fit to eat. And so, here’s this crazy American saying, “No, no, I’m going to do it.” They wouldn’t even let me cook shore lunch in the same pan as their pike because pike was there shore lunch. And I cooked the burbot and sure enough, they liked it, they ate it, but it was something that had never occurred to them, that was not a fit fish to eat.

Hank Shaw:

And I do see this a lot. I bet you, you guys, too. You mentioned class and that’s definitely one. But you kind of have to throw in ethnicity in here, too. I mean, there’s a great number of fish that that other group catches. And it’s usually some other group and it’s very fluid and variable. But it’s that fish that somebody else catches and that you identify part of at least your fishing identity with not eating that fish. And I find that fascinating.

Scott Leysath:

When I was a kid, we would snag carp below the dam at Lake Accotink in Northern Virginia. And whenever we would snag, we were just using big treble hooks and whatever kind of mono. And whenever we would get the car to the shore, the black guys would come over and say, because they knew that those stupid white kids aren’t going to want those carp and they knew that they could make a great meal out of it. So, it’s not an opinion, it just is. The black guys would come over and they’d take out whatever carp that we didn’t want, which was all of them.

Scott Leysath:

Prior to 1900, Americans thought tuna was a trash fish. And now, I say California is the ahi tuna state is because that’s all anybody eats around here. And carp was on the menu in the finer restaurants in the US but then all of a sudden, “Hey, tuna. Let’s try tuna.” So, you just never know.

Scott Leysath:

There’s ethnic diversity on what we do and we don’t eat in Texas, where we’re getting long or excuse me, alligator gar, big alligator gar, 6-, 7-ft. alligator gar, which are ridiculously hard to process, but once you get to the meat, it’s really good. It’s white, flaky, moist meat. And yet the white people that we ran into in Texas didn’t do much with it. They considered it a trash fish. And then there’s others there that said, “Trash my ass. This fish is delicious.”

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, I learned about alligator gar in terms of as a food fish down in Brownsville. And Brownsville is basically Tamaulipas, Mexico. It sits right on the other side of the border. And I first ate it at a place called Mariscos Lauro Villar in Brownsville and we were just actually going to the liquor store right next to it and then they had Catan painted on their display window.

Hank Shaw:

And I didn’t know. I mean, I know gar is pejelagarto in Spanish, but Catan is a local word for the alligator gar. And so, my friends Jesse Griffiths and Miguel González, their eyes lit up, “They have catan.” And so, we walked in and made sure that it actually was alligator gar and damn if that wasn’t some of the best fish I ever ate and-

Scott Leysath:

Right. And people consider it a trash fish, a lot of people do. And it’s so good.

Hank Shaw:

I know, it is funny. So, you’ve got class, you’ve got ethnicity, and you also have region. So, two of my favorite examples are the Cabazon, so the Cabazon is a big giant sculpin that lives here in the Pacific and they are highly sought after in California. Highly, like if you catch a cab, it’s like it’s a big deal. People want it. Well, virtually the same fish is the sea robin in the North Atlantic and they’re starting to eat them a little bit more of these days.

Hank Shaw:

But when I was there all the way up through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and even the early 2000s, no one would eat them. And yet, you can go further east, so we like them in California, they hate them in the northeast, but if you go further east to the European side of the Atlantic, the rascasse, which is basically the same thing as a sea robin, is one of the quintessential fish in bouillabaisse, so it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Hank Shaw:

And then you go the other way shad, American shad is highly sought after and is considered one of the kings of fish in the Atlantic seaboard. Well, it’s a garbage fishing in the Pacific Northwest and here in Sacramento.

Tom Dickson:

Hank, one of the things that you mentioned is the changing tastes of people and how their tastes change over time. And I think the best example of that that I know of is carp. And carp are not the common carp. Carp are not native to North America, but when Europeans came to this country in the late 19th Century, they looked around and there were no carp and they wanted carp. That was a highly esteemed fish in Europe and especially in Eastern Europe, so they imported carp from Germany.

Tom Dickson:

The US Fish Commission, they imported carp here and carp were distributed by rail to states all over the country, at first only to the most prominent citizens of a region. And so, they would go to the mayor or they would go to some business tycoon and that person would have a carp pond in his backyard. And then they would serve carp at Christmas and then on other religious holidays like they did in Europe. But eventually, the carps escaped and they can survive in about anything, and so they were found in waters all over the United States.

Tom Dickson:

But even by the late 19th Century in the 1890s. They were sold in fish stalls in St. Paul and in Kansas City. And in Chicago, they were still highly regarded. But then something happened. And carp became the most despised fish of all, I think, in the United States. And I think what happened is that water got increasingly polluted and because carp can survive in anything, and all the native fish had died out. And so, people look down at these rivers of Mississippi and the Missouri and the Ohio, these cesspools, and the only thing that was left, left alive swimming with the turds and toilet paper, were the carp.

Tom Dickson:

And people thought, “God, those carp like that and I’m not going to eat those fish,” because of course, if we haven’t even talked about that, but how fish take on the taste of the water they swim in. And so, indeed, those carp were not any good to eat. And so, carp just became the bottom of the bottom feeders. But since the passage of the Clean Water Act, waters have cleaned up immeasurably, and I think people are increasingly seeing that carp and other fish that are able to survive in polluted water are also able to survive in very clean water and can taste quite good.

Hank Shaw:

I think you’re definitely onto something there for sure. Because even out here and even in modern times right now, carp are kind of hated because they will live in an irrigation ditch and here in the Central Valley of California and virtually nothing else can.

Tom Dickson:

Scott is there an equivalent with saltwater fish that there are species that are able to survive in kind of a tepid lagoon with an oil slick on top and people would turn their noses down at that or?

Scott Leysath:

I cannot think of a saltwater equivalent. Hank, can you?

Hank Shaw:

Yep, the oyster toad. The oyster shell cracker, known as an oyster toad, and imagine, it’s sort of a mini monk fish, which is to say a big giant head with a little tail and it doesn’t do a lot of swimming because it kind of scuttles along the bottom looking for shellfish. And its head is so big and his muscles are so big that it can crack oysters when it finds them. And you typically fish for them on the bottom in the marina and nobody I knew ate them.

Hank Shaw:

But I was probably, God, I was probably 12 years old maybe, and I was on the Norma-K III in Point Pleasant Manasquan area in New Jersey. And before we even untied from the dock, the guy sitting next to me, he was a Korean War veteran, and he was fishing right there.

Hank Shaw:

And he said, I’m like, “What the hell are you doing?” He’s like, “Oh, fishing for oyster toads.” And like, “You mean the shell crackers?” He’s like, “Yeah.” “Why on earth would you eat them?” He’s like, and he brought one up. He’d be caught one 10 minutes later. And he said, “Look at this head on this thing.”

Hank Shaw:

And so this fish, I kid you not, was no bigger than about maybe 8 to 10 inches, maybe about 10 inches. And he stuck his fillet knife in its head to kill it and then cut the cheeks out. The cheeks on this 10-inch fish or the size of a silver dollar kind of like a sphere, the size of a silver dollar. And his wife loved them and they would just fry them and eat them. And that fish has no problem living in a nasty lagoon with the oil sticking on top of it.

Hank Shaw:

And I wrote about it in my first cookbook, God, 10 years ago, and I got all this you know feedback from people, “You can’t eat those.” I’m like, “Well, you probably don’t want to eat a ton of them, but little mercury never hurt anybody.”

Hank Shaw:

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Hank Shaw:

I just think this whole topic is just really interesting because it is constantly shifting kaleidoscope of tastes and opinions. And I mean yeah, you’re right, you mentioned Bluefin before, very much in tuna, in general before. Well, Bluefin, in specific, were considered cat food until the ’70s.

Scott Leysath:

Right. Once the canneries opened up in San Diego, as we’ve talked about on the Fishmonger TV show, was the tuna capital of the world, but prior to that, not so much. Tuna was something, you’re right. Tuna was something in a can. You didn’t have tuna sashimi anywhere for a long time.

Hank Shaw:

And you also, have a similar, you have this kind of industries where it’s trashed to somebody, but it’s revered to somebody else, which we’ve been trying to talking about that all this time with recreational fishing. But pink salmon in a can is a great example of virtually nobody eats pink salmon in Alaska, because why would you eat it. You’ve got four other species that are considered better than pinks. And I mean, that’s an exaggeration. Of course, some people eat pinks and whatever, whatever. But no one is going to choose a pink over a sockeye or a king or a cod.

Hank Shaw:

However, pinks run in unbelievable numbers to this day, and they have always been the focus of the salmon cannery. So, for a century or more, the canned pink salmon and I’m sure many of you can envision in your head that that pint-size can is a big can, that with a red label with a salmon jumping on it, it’s just canned pink salmon. You can see it in old Popeye cartoons even. And that particular kind of canned Pink Salmon has become revered in the south.

Hank Shaw:

I’m looking at a stack of Southern cookbooks right now. And there’s about 15 of them stacked up next to each other that looking at and about 11 of them have a recipe for a salmon cake or salmon croquette. It always uses canned Pink Salmon. To the point where when I went down there and I talked about how much I like salmon and the only thing anybody ever does in the south with salmon is to use, well now, they probably use some fresh salmon or frozen or Costco or whatever. But historically, it has always been that one dish with that one salmon.

Scott Leysath:

My mother is very southern and I grew up on that canned salmon. It was always some kind of fish patty of some sort. And it tasted really salmon-y and I can still picture it right now. But mom wasn’t a very good cook, which might have been part of my inspiration, too. I don’t know.

Hank Shaw:

How about you, Tom? Is there a… I mean, you wrote Fishing for Buffalo. And actually, you know what? Let’s, I want to know why he wrote that book because it is unique in the sense that I don’t know of another so-called trash fish book ever written. And you might be the only one.

Tom Dickson:

Well, thanks, Hank. And it’s worth noting, I did co-write that with my friend, Rob Buffler. And we wrote it in 1989 and we wrote it because in the late ’80s, we would fish a lot. We both lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was a wilderness guide is in Northern Minnesota and I was working for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources as a writer at that time. And we fished a lot together when we get together and we’d like to fish for trout. But the trout fishing in the Midwest is pretty much over by midsummer. The water is too warm, and there’s so many nettles along the streams. It’s just torture getting around there and so, we just decided to start fishing rivers.

Tom Dickson:

And just using the same techniques we used for trout, mainly nymphing and doing some dry fly fishing if we saw fish come up like sometimes a mooneye would come up to the surface and take a [inaudible 00:46:31]. And we’d start catching all these fish and we didn’t know what they were. We were catching red horse and drum and longnose gar and high fin carp suckers and hog mollies and small mouth Buffalo. And we just, we didn’t have a clue what they were. And we’ve been fishing our whole lives.

Tom Dickson:

And we’ve seen that people were just throwing them up on shore and we’d ask them, “Why are you doing that?” And they’re saying, “Oh, they kill the game fish or they eat the eggs of the game fish.” And I was looking for a Natural Resources Agency at that time and Rob had a degree in Aquatic Ecology. It just struck us wrong that there had to be more to it than that. That couldn’t be right. So, we started looking into it and started learning about these fish species and then catching them and we were having so much fun. And we’d go fishing in downtown St. Paul and we’d catch fish until our arms couldn’t catch any fish anymore. We’d have cramps in our hands.

Tom Dickson:

And we were the only ones fishing and a lot of those fish like drum and smallmouth buffalo. They were great to eat. We’d take them home and we fillet them up. And we just thought what is everyone else missing? We just didn’t get it. And so, we started to call around. This is all before the internet. We called around and we sent for flyers from other agencies. We got information from the south and from eastern states. And we started compiling all this information, all of these so-called rough fish and finding these traditions in other parts of the country. And we just thought, “Jeez, we should compile this into a book because no one will ever believe it.”

Tom Dickson:

And since then, it’s been called the bible of rough fishing and it really is, there’s really nothing quite like it. There’s certainly people who has since have taken rough fishing to a higher level. There’s a roughfish.com website that’s based out of Minnesota, and these are some young guys in their 20s and 30s and they just put me and Rob to shame, their skills with rough fishing.

Tom Dickson:

But there’s the Carp Anglers Group, there’s a GAS, the Gar Angler Sportsmen Society, and Bowfin Anglers Group, BAG. And together they’re a GAS-BAG. And they’re kind of a tongue-in-cheek angling group, but they’re still in existence, and they’re based out of Illinois. So there’s the whole concept of rough fishing has really caught on in the United States, mainly for sport, but also for the culinary qualities of some of these species.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, I mean, one thing that I was struck by, when reading your book, actually, first. I think that’s where I first saw it is that even though there’s a bunch of natives that looked like carp, all the various suckers and the mooneyes and the buffaloes and such. I mean, they superficially look a lot like carp, but almost none of them can handle the wretched water that real carp can. And so, I’ve always told people, “Well, you if you’re here catching suckers that means your water that you’re fishing in is pretty good quality.”

Tom Dickson:

Yeah, that’s a great point. And again, it depends on the species. White suckers can tolerate a lot more polluted water than a fine scale sucker or a blue sucker or especially the longnose sucker we have in Montana. Yeah, those are found in the same stream that you’ll see less of cutthroat trout and bull trout. The same water quality requirements and water temperature, but mistaking the carp for suckers. Suckers are all in the Catostomidae family in the Midwest of South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota. Michigan. Yeah, there are anywhere between 15 and 20 sucker species. There’s 35 in North America.

Tom Dickson:

And all those fish we’ve talked about, the buffaloes, the big mouth, the black and the smallmouth buffaloes. Those are all sucker species. And then the high fin carp suckers are called carp suckers, but they’re not carp. And the carp is actually a member of the minnow family. So, it’s related to the fathead minnow and other minnows. It’s just a giant oversized minnow.

Hank Shaw:

That reminds me. We forgot to mention a pikeminnow, Scott.

Scott Leysath:

Pikeminnow, fuck, yeah. That’s-

Tom Dickson:

Oh, my God.

Scott Leysath:

That’s what we call it now, yes. And they’re bony. Nobody eats them. You’re fishing for something else, you happen to get a pikeminnow and you’re annoyed by it most of the time, and yet their edible. We’re going to actually target them here for a Dead Meat show in Northern California.

Scott Leysath:

And back to the buffalo just for a second, we’re going to bow fish for buffalo later this year in Texas. And when I was talking to our guides, I said, “What do people do there? How do they prepare it?” Because part of the Dead Meat show, we want to know how people cook it, not how I cook it. And they said, “Well, nobody eats it.” “Well, what do you with it?” I mean, you’re bow fishing to these things. It’s not like you can release them. And apparently they just end up at the landfill and nobody eats all of these buffalo that people are shooting there.

Hank Shaw:

That’s a total race thing because my first experience with buffalo fish ever. So, I worked for a black newspaper called the Madison Times weekly newspaper from 1992 to 1994. And I was kind of the only white guy on staff and I ended up leaving Wisconsin and left that job. And so, they had a big giant barbecue for me. So, imagine the whole soul food spread. And in that spread were big chunks of fried buffalo.

Hank Shaw:

And so, what they had done was they had fillet the big sides of the buffalo and they’re basically like carp in the sense that you’ve got that extra set of Y bones. And so, they had moved around it, but the fish was so big that they had these big 2-inch on the side chunks of fish that were just deep fried and were amazing. And that’s the first time I’d ever even heard of the fish. I’m like, “This is just perfectly good fish.” And I think that sort of circles back into what we were talking about 10, 20 minutes ago where it was just like, those other people eat them.

Scott Leysath:

And I do remember offering somebody $100 to eat a piece of paddlefish in Missouri and as much as he likes to snag paddlefish, he would never thought of eating them. And I’m thinking like, “Who doesn’t eat paddlefish? These things are delicious.” I offered him 100 bucks, he wouldn’t it.

Hank Shaw:

Weird, because I mean, in my experience, they’re not that different from sturgeon.

Scott Leysath:

No, no, no. They’re delicious.

Tom Dickson:

Yeah, sturgeon is another lipped fish, so there is a prejudice against sturgeon by some people. But I think both of you guys have had sturgeon. They’re really extraordinary fish with a really sort of such a different texture from any other fish that I’ve ever had, any other freshwater fish.

Hank Shaw:

Albany Beef.

Tom Dickson:

They’re fantastic.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah, I mean, the old Atlantic sturgeon that they’ve overfished to the point where, I don’t know if that fish really will ever come back. But a century ago, before they closed it, it was known as Albany Beef because they would catch so much of it, that they would sell these steaks. The industry is based at Albany, New York, and they’d sell these steaks of white beef because it had a very similar texture.

Scott Leysath:

Yeah, I’ve always thought that sturgeon were very pork-like, in a good way, especially the bigger ones. I love sturgeons.

Hank Shaw:

I think one other piece of this is the oddity. We’ve talked about how they looked, but there’s another piece to it in the sense that there are a lot of fish that are deemed as trash fish are not easy to catch. You don’t catch them into this course of a normal day. And carp for one are one of those because if you’re fishing for regular fish, you’re not going to catch carp very often if you’re fishing with say bait or lures unless you are actually targeting carp with different sets of things.

Hank Shaw:

And then there’s a whole bunch of other things that white fish. Lake white fish are not that easy to catch in the course of a regular fishing trips. So, there’s these set of fish that are oddities like, “Whoa, I’ve never seen that fish before. Is it edible?” And you see that all over the place.

Tom Dickson:

I think another factor is fish that are sort of problematic to just deal with and I’m reminded of Scott’s show on the lion fish, catching those lion fish. They had these beautiful little fillets, but it required kind of an industrial of spine removal process. The guy, I think he was using heavy gloves and Scott, you can explain that, but he had some sort of a tin snips, he’s cutting those spines off.

Tom Dickson:

And then it’s the same with bullheads and catfish. I mean, people who’ve never held a bullhead. If you have ever been stepped on a bullhead, you’ll never forget that. And so, I think a lot of people don’t know how to handle a bullhead, don’t know how to handle a catfish, don’t know how to handle a northern pike. And so, they just throw it back because they don’t want to have to deal with it.

Scott Leysath:

And lionfish, as you mentioned, and he did use tin snips, and kind of steel gloves, and once you cut those spines off, they fillet any other fish and they’re incredible. They’re really good. Sculpin, that we get here, can be a little tricky to process, too, but you cut the spines off, you’re good to go.

Hank Shaw:

Yeah. I mean, even the regular rockfish. I mean, I’m looking at my hands right now. I was rock fishing couple days ago and yeah, all kinds of minor lacerations. And then I got one, back wheel off of, I think it was a vermillion. And it [inaudible 00:55:55] me so bad in the back of one finger, the spine bounced off the bone. And that hurt like a son of a bitch for a good 25 minutes. And you think you’ve been poisoned, but it’s really just who knows what was on that spine.

Hank Shaw:

So yeah, I mean, I think if you had to do the opposite of trash fish, in my opinion, the opposite of trash fish, the supermodel of fish would be the salmonids, the salmon and trout family. I think everybody views them as an attractive looking fish that and I don’t think anybody dislikes them in terms of a food fish. I know there’s people who don’t necessarily like to eat salmon, but I think no one would deny that like, “Oh, well. Salmon are for eating.” I think everyone would agree that. And I’m wondering, what would your vote for the supermodel of fish be?

Tom Dickson:

Well, getting back to trout. I think it’s interesting. I think everyone thinks trout looked beautiful. But when I was growing up in Minnesota, to have trout for dinner that was sort of the ultimate luxury, especially if you’d go to the Black Hills or oh gosh, to Montana or Wyoming. My parents would always want to have trout and it was such a big deal. And when I moved to Montana 20 years ago, no one here eats trout. It’s just not done except in that country. If they go up into a mountain lake and they catch some brook trout or some cutthroat up there, they might fry them up.

Tom Dickson:

But generally people don’t eat trout. I never really understood why it is. But my two theories one is, is that the catch and release ethic is so strong, that just people don’t kill trout. It’s just not done. It’s just forbidden. And the other is that a lot of the trout that people are catching, during the height of the season, the water is quite warm in Montana and in Wyoming in midsummer, the waters getting up into the high 60s. And so, the trout just don’t taste that good. The meat kind of mushy, and they’re just not that palatable.

Tom Dickson:

But the tourists, of course, they’re eating trout all the time. In the Yellowstone Lodge and in the big hole river area lodges and cabins. Those trout mostly are farm trout, so they’re eating farmed rainbows that probably were raised in Missouri.

Hank Shaw:

Or Idaho.

Tom Dickson:

Right, Idaho, yeah.

Scott Leysath:

And I don’t think , I mean, to me, there’s a lot of so-called trash fish that tastes so much better than trout.

Hank Shaw:

There it is. There it is.

Scott Leysath:

Trout to me, just doesn’t. I mean, there’s not a whole lot to it. I don’t think they have a whole lot of flavor. That’s just a personal opinion. There’s a whole lot of fish I’d rather eat before a trout.

Hank Shaw:

And here, I’m going to say it, too. I would rather eat a freshwater drum than pretty much any trout in America.

Scott Leysath:

I’m with you.

Tom Dickson:

And I’m with you, too. Yeah.

Scott Leysath:

Maybe a big steely is a little different, but we don’t typically keep those. But if we do happen to keep one, a big one, they are more salmon-like. But just your basic rainbow trout that was planted a week ago, I got nothing. I’m not interested.

Hank Shaw:

Yep, yep, 100%. So, I think I want to close this up with advice for people listening to this, about how to get over your hang ups, because everybody listening to this has a trash fish or three or 12 in his or her mind. I did it from scarcity. So, I got over my hang-ups on trash fish, because number one, I’m just kind of that kind of guy who always zigged where people zagged.

Hank Shaw:

And number two, I had this great experience, when I was in my 20s. I used to hang out at a bar in Bayport Long Island. And if you’re a guy in your late 20s, you tend to talk a lot of smack and I was no exception. So, I walked in there one day, a place called Kavanagh’s and I just walked in there one day and I said, “Hey, man, I bet you that every time I go fishing this year, I’m going to catch something.” And they told me to put my money where my mouth was. And so, what they did was like, “All right.”

Hank Shaw:

So, the bet was this. It’s an honor system, but I wasn’t going to lie. I would let them know that I was going fishing. And then I would come back to the bar and show them what I caught on a given day. So, the bet was this. If I won, I could drink free beer there for a month. If I lost, I had to pay the entire bar’s tab for a night. So being in my late 20s, the prospect of financial ruin was real. So I had to learn, I became a much better angler in general, but I also became a student of the unusual. And this is really what it gets down to for my piece of advice, and I want to hear yours in a second.

Hank Shaw:

You have to understand that not every fish is good, floured and fried. Many are, but some are just not. And you have to understand that not every fish is going to be eaten and/or look the same as the fillet that you have in your head. So the grim days, which turned out to not be so grim once I figured it out, eels. I would catch eels off the dock sometimes, and eels are unbelievably delicious, but they’re weird looking, and you have to peel their skin off much like a catfish.

Hank Shaw:

White bait. One day when I was throwing bait, throw a little mist net for the little minnows that live by the side of the dock and I’d use them as bait. Well, one day, that’s all I had. And so, the guys at the bar were like, “You got to eat it.” So, “All right.” So, I floured them and fried them and they were, I didn’t know at the time that there was a thing called white bait, which is English thing of they call it fries with eyes. A little tiny hole fish fried and they’re fantastic.

Hank Shaw:

Puffer fish was another one. So, I didn’t realize that you could eat puffer fish, because I’d heard about fugu where you die if you eat some of the liver, but they’re a delicacy in the eastern seaboard. And so, I learned all of these other fishes and these special ways of cooking them and eating them that A, it allowed me to drink free beer for a month and B, it made me a much better angler and C, it made me understand the nuances and the different ways of cooking something.

Hank Shaw:

So, my advice is you don’t have to make a financially ruinous bet to do this. But start thinking outside the flour and fry world and use the internet to search for, “What do you do with this unusual fish that you just caught?” And that will go a long way to give you some steps to enjoying everything that you catch. So, that would be my advice. What do you guys think?

Scott Leysath:

Tom, go ahead.

Tom Dickson:

Well, I guess I have two pieces of advice. The first one and this is freshwater fish, but most of the freshwater fish in North America are edible. And so, right off the bat, you can eat pretty much anything you catch, so just knowing that is, I mean, have at it.

Tom Dickson:

And the other is that most things that people have learned about fish and what fish are good fish and what fish are bad fish and what fish are trash. And those are things you learn from your uncle Ed or your brother-in-law, that’s just mostly nonsense. And they learned it from their uncle or some guy at work and he learned it from some guy at work and they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Tom Dickson:

So I think if you just know, for hearing from the three of us that almost all freshwater fish are edible and the whole idea that there is a hierarchy and there’s some good fish and some bad fish is just, again just kind of nonsense, too. And look at all fish with an open mind. They’re all fun to catch. They all could be caught in a fly rod if you want to. And almost all of them are not only palatable but can be downright fantastic to eat.

Scott Leysath:

I think what I’m going to do a show in search of the fish with forward facing eyes and big lips, I think. That’s I think, that would be an excellent show. I’ll tell you if I’m reminded when I was a kid, I would fish with my dad and when we were done fishing, and we’re talking about Northern Virginia, 90-degree lake water, catching crappie bass, whatever. He would scoop water out of the lake, into this metal bucket, put it in the back of the truck, and then we drive home for about an hour and a half. Hated fish. Fish was so bad and I thought this is what fish tastes like.

Scott Leysath:

So, if you’re going to try some new fish, give the fish the best chance you can and get them gutted, bled, on ice, all that stuff because it’s going to be a better fish. If it just happens to be, “Oh, let’s try cooking this catfish. It’s been on the stringer in the 90-degree water for the last six hours.” Maybe there’s a better way, but I’m with you. They’re all edible. And when in doubt, run them through the grinder and make fish cakes.

Hank Shaw:

Fish cakes, the universal savior.

Scott Leysath:

Right.

Hank Shaw:

Or broth. I once caught a whole bunch of, God, they were just, I forgot what they were. Africa what they were there’s some kind of a little sucker like a dais. And they weren’t really, they were really small. They’re 6 inches long and I tried my best and it just wasn’t working, so I ended up making a really good broth. And then I made fish risotto out of the broths and then that was delicious, so.

Tom Dickson:

I talked to a park manager in Southeastern Minnesota one time and the stream down there had brook trout in it, native brook trout. But also had creek chubs and creek chubs are a big minnow species. They get to be 8 inches long and they’re about the same size as the brook trout. And I was down there one time, and I was talking to the park manager, and she said, “Most people here catch creek chubs. And they just, I walked by their campsite and they’re frying them up and they’re talking about how great they are.” And I said, “Well, do you tell them that they’re not trout?” And she said, “No, why bother?” And so, they thought they’re eating trout, but they’re at creek chubs, so if you don’t know, maybe it doesn’t matter.

Hank Shaw:

That is totally fair. So, Tom is Fishing for Buffalo, still? Can people still get it on Amazon or in regular bookstores?

Tom Dickson:

Yeah, it’s still available at both.

Hank Shaw:

Excellent. So, I will definitely put a link to that in the show notes. And Scott, you have a lot of different ways that people can get in touch with you, but-

Scott Leysath:

Sportingchef.com is probably the best place to start. There’s recipes and all the other links to wherever it is you have to go. We’ve got Sporting Chef, Dead Meat and the Fishmonger is our new show that’s on Outdoor Channel that we’ve got hosted by Tommy Gomes. And I’m back on the road pretty much full time now, shooting shows.

Hank Shaw:

Yay, yay for the after times.

Scott Leysath:

Yay, yay.

Hank Shaw:

Well, thanks a lot for being on the show, guys. This has been great. We could probably just talk about weird and unusual fish forever, but this has been fun. And I look forward to seeing you guys in-person when I am on the road this year.

Scott Leysath:

Very cool. Thank you.

Tom Dickson:

I’ll look forward to that, Hank, thank you.

Hank Shaw:

Thanks again for listening to the Hunt Gather Talk podcast. I’m your host Hank Shaw. As usual, you can find me on social media @huntgathercook on Instagram. I also run the Hunt Gather Cook group in Facebook and if you want to join that group, you just have to answer some questions and say that you heard me on my podcast and I will let you in. The core of what I do is my website, which is Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. You can find that at Huntgathercook.com. And you will find literally thousands of recipes for wild food ranging from all sorts of fish, all sorts of seafood, venison, small game, ducks and geese, plants, mushrooms, you name it. So, go to Hunter Angler Gardener Cook and you will find all that good stuff.

Hank Shaw:

And finally, a request. Yes, I do have two sponsors, Filson and E-fish and they are both fine companies. But I specifically keep my sponsorship and my ad level very low on this podcast so that you guys can have a much cleaner and more pure listening experience. And to do that, however, I do ask that you might consider going to the website @huntgathercook.com and clicking the button in the podcast page that says, “Support this podcast.”

Hank Shaw:

And it’s a bit public radio where no, I’m not going to go off the air if you don’t chip in. But chipping in is exactly like public radio in the sense that it allows me to stay as sponsor-free as I actually have been able to do and if you listen to other podcasts you know, there are tons and tons and tons and tons of ads and podcasts and cut ins throughout the whole thing. And I just don’t want to do that. And the only way I can do that is with your help. So, go to Hunt Gather Cook, go to the podcast page and you will see a “support the podcast” button, click that.

Hank Shaw:

And if you do you get everything from six bucks, we’ll get you my very good thank you and I will send you a bumper sticker for Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. You can also get signed books as premium. So, it’s exactly you would with public radio except you’re going to help me out. So, I hope you consider it. I really appreciate it and I will talk to you next week. We’re going to have another fantastic episode on fish and seafood. You’ll just have to wait until next week to find out. I’m your host, Hank Shaw. This is Hunt Gather Talk and thanks for listening.