Junk fish?

So what is a good fish? It seems to be a fish that is either scarce or a fish with very little smell, preferably very little taste also and easy to prepare. And also a predator. For some reason we don’t eat the predators among birds and mammals.

Looking at some freshwater predators in Sweden the perch and the Zander are considered delicacies and the pike as junk. The water the fish live in and what the fish eat have a bit of an impact on its taste, but I find it hard to believe that perch and pike living in the same water would not be affected in the same way living in the same water. And the pike will grow faster and is easier to catch in good eating size. But the pike smells and have some bones that are a bit fiddly to remove. But when the pike is cleaned and prepared I’m sure that I could serve it to any one as cod or some other white fish. Pike makes great fish tacos or fish and chips.

An other freshwater “junk” fish is the bream. The only junky thing I can find with this fish is that they sometime fight like crap. As soon as they realise they have been hooked they just lay flat on the side on the surface to make as little resistance as possible. The bream actually is hard to prepare and smells really bad before it is prepared, but I think that it makes up for this in taste. The ribcage on a bream is like armour and inside the meat there are long thin bones, quite a lot of them. There now exists machinery that can process bream into mince. But that is not something you will have at home. At home scale the bream, wrap it foil with butter and garlic or lemon. When it is cooked it is easy to remove the meat from the ribcage and remove the long bones embedded in the meat.

Eating bream and other fish in the cypriniformes family is also a better idea than the predators since it better for the water in general. Too many bream, roach, and other small fish put excessive pressure on zooplankton which lets the phytoplankton to take over. This makes the water cloudy, which is also amplified by bream and the other small fish bubbles at the bottom. Good for the bream and small fish, but makes life harder for the predators so the effect is amplified further. This also gives better conditions for algae bloom, which is killing the oxygen supply at the bottom of the lake and making life pretty shitty for all the fish in the lake.

In the salt we have one fish that is considered as junk by many. The garfish—a fish that is simultaneously hard and easy to hook. Some find that they disrupts fishing for seatrout so much that fishing for seatrout becomes impossible. So it seems like the best way to catch garfish is to not target them and at the same time it seems to be a very good method for seatrout to target garfish. The only junky thing about this fish is actually what they do to your tackle when you catch them. They really like to roll in the water when hooked. So they are very likely to make a mess of your terminal tackle. But easy to prepare and the bones turn green when cooked so the bones are easy to find. It has distinct flavour though, so according to many it is junk. I would describe the taste as Atlantic mackerel without the fat. Which leads us to the next junk fish.

In some parts of the world the Atlantic mackerel is just junk and bait. Here it is considered both a delicacy and bait/junk. Sometimes very easy to catch and that makes people go crazy, they don’t stop when they have their dinner. They catch so much they cannot use it all and have to give it away. And then we have those who trap lobster. These persons catch mackerel in the hundreds or thousands just to use as lobster bait. And to what use? You are not allowed to sell fish or anything else you catch without a license so they catch so much lobster that they get bored of eating it. We have plenty of crab, and again it has a taste of its own so it is considered junk. And the cod is effectively removed by commercial fishermen so the crab doesn’t see any predation from either cod or humans. So we have a lot of big crabs.

I find the predatory fishing of the mackerel to be barbaric and wasteful. Especially when used as bait. So I think that it should at least be regulated with quotas.

Recent years we have had pretty bad fishing at the mackerel. Climate change is one part. The pressure on the herring is an other part. Recently we didn’t get the usual shoals of small herring and during that summer not much mackerel were caught. But I don’t think that the people that harvest large amounts of mackerel are entirely blameless.

Declining mackerel population is extra sad since we in recent years have gotten back bluefin tuna in our waters. The last time they were in our waters were in the 1960s. But now they have started to visit our waters again. But they won’t do that without food.

But back to mackerel as actual food. There are many ways to prepare mackerel. As fresh as possible from the ocean to the grill is the simplest and one of the best ways to enjoy mackerel. But a gateway to mackerel eating is to flip the fillets in flour. Fry on both sides in butter, to get some surface and colour. The cover the fillets in cream and dill, salt and pepper. This takes the edge off the mackerel taste a bit. Serve with potatoes. And a cold beer.

I have a bonus junk fish also. I think that the barracuda is also considered a junk fish. The barracuda is known to be a risk for ciguatera poisoning. But when doing some research I found out that that is not the case in Europe and Canary Islands. So I have tried it. And again, this is a fish that smells a bit. Very easy to prepare though. I only found three rib bones and no other bones when preparing the fillets. The meat tastes very good. I fried it in butter and lemon.

Cheers, Rickard

PoD: Bream on its way to the oven.