How To Properly Care For Your Fish - Well Trout & Salmon Anyway

[thirdeye]

I put my thoughts together on caring for fish for a blog post about a year ago, and thought it may be a good article to share here. I'm more of a trout, steelhead and salmon kind of guy, but some things I mention apply to all fish. My philosophy is certainly not the only or best way, but the point is... a little care when fishing will make for a better meal later on.

Feel free to add your tips, tricks etc., I'm looking forward to them.

I’ve been a fisherman my entire life. My earliest memories are fishing in Corpus Christi Bay, the Gulf of Mexico off Mustang and Padre Islands, as well as the Laguna Madre (an intracoastal waterway between Padre Island and the Texas mainland). I learned to fly fish in Colorado and Wyoming in the late 60’s, and have fished the Rocky Mountain streams, rivers and lakes for over 40 years.

This article is not about catching fish, I know many anglers that can out fish me any day of the week. I am, however, a serious fisherman and have no qualms in choosing a fly, a lure, a worm, a minnow, or some kind of engineered dough-ball bait to get a fish to bite my line. And I also enjoy keeping a few fish to eat or share with others…. So, this article is about caring for your catch, even if the only fishing you do is at Safeway.

ICE - Caring for your fish begins before you drive to your favorite fishin’ hole, or before you stop by Safeway. The first thing you need is a cooler and plenty of ice. On a fishing trip, take one pound of ice for every pound of fish you plan on harvesting. Two pounds of ice for every one pound of fish you expect to hold is even better. This does not count the ice in your lunch cooler, or beer cooler, you need a separate fish cooler (or a big cooler capable of holding your fish, your beer and more ice than you think you will need). There is much more on chilling your catch later in the article.

STORE BOUGHT FISH - If you are shopping at Safeway for fresh fish, at least take an insulated shopping bag or soft cooler and a couple of Blue Ice packs (the plastic re-useable containers of goop that you freeze at home and use for keeping stuff cold). I like to select fish that is firm (when you press it with your finger, the indentation should disappear in just a few seconds). Next, I look for the following: good color, shiny appearance, clear eyes, and no milky liquid on the surface or in the package. If possible, ask to smell the fish…. It should not be fishy or have a disinfectant odor. Purchase your fish right before checking out, then place it into your cooler before leaving the parking lot. Get your fish into your refrigerator as soon as possible, keeping the Blue Ice under the fish for a couple of hours is a good idea. Cold is good for fish.

STRINGERS AND LIVEWELLS - Trout are NOT a stringer fish. I don’t recommend using a stringer at any time. My experience with a livewell is limited, so I can’t make any comments on them.

FIELD DRESSING & HANDLING ~ BLEED / CLEAN / COOL - Fish should be de-slimed, bled, field dressed, and put on ice immediately after landing. I don’t even re-bait my hook until I have taken care of a fish I plan to eat. First off, your fish has been stressed out during the fight. Once landed and field dressed, enzymes and bacteria go to work which can rob your fish of flavor, and affect the texture.

Dispatch (kill) your fish, using whatever method you like. Popular methods are the “head bonk”, “cutting the lateral line behind the head”, “the spine snap”, “boring them to death by reading passages of The Complete Angler by Issac Walton”, or “shooting them”. The first three are recommended, the forth one takes some time, and the last one should only be used in self defense.

Bleed the fish by lifting the gill plate, inserting a knife over the gill cluster and cutting out the gills. The fish can be bled out in a bucket of cold water or onto the ground. De-sliming is not applicable to all fish, but a hand brush will remove quite a bit of slime pretty quick. Next, make a slit along the belly and remove the intestines, then make a cut along the membrane covering the kidney (the dark streak along the backbone) and scrape out the kidney. This is a chief source of flavor destroying enzymes, so get it really clean. I use my fingernail or a toothbrush in this area. Removing the head is optional at this time. I usually rinse my fish in the stream or lake, but you could carry a water jug for this if you prefer.

Now it’s time to chill out…. not you!! the fish. Get your fish in the cooler. I use large plastic bags so I can spread my fish out on ice, then add a layer of ice atop the fish (or a few Blue Ice packs), then cover with a towel, and close the cooler.

A few observations on ice: The best ice for cooling seafood is crushed ice. It’s easier to pack around fish or to layer in between fish. (All the professional fisherman use crushed ice on the boats if they are not freezing their catch. Fish markets also use crushed ice for holding their fish). Your next choice would be the store bought ice in smaller cubes. Block ice does not work very well. When ice is made, a huge amount of heat is removed from water in order for it to freeze. As ice turns back into water it absorbs the same amount of heat it gave up. Now, you probably are saying “cheap ice melts too fast!”. And you are correct, but that is what you want. You want your ice to steal the heat from your fish quickly, and the heat pulled out of the fish is what melts the ice. Seeing your ice melting in the cooler is telling you that it’s chilling the fish quickly. From a practical point of view, chipped ice is tough to maintain at the lake, and it takes a lot of it. Store bought ice in small cubes is the best value. Block ice it too big to pack around the fish and it will not cool the fish down as fast as the other choices. Use block ice in your food cooler to keep the lunchmeat cool. Think about a hand crank ice cream maker. The cream mixture in a center canister is warm, and ice is packed into an outer canister. The ice absorbs heat from the cream causing it to freeze, the absorbed heat causes the ice to melt, which is why you have to keep adding ice... Rock salt is usually added to the ice which lowers the melting point of the ice which draws heat out of the cream faster. Rock salt added to the ice in a beer cooler will chill the beer faster. Rock salt is used on sidewalks and streets to force the ice to melt at a lower temperature.

RIGOR, aka RIGOR MORTIS – When a fish is killed its muscles are relaxed for awhile because they are using up stored energy. Sometimes fish will still twitch for a few minutes because of this stored up energy. Anyway, when the energy is exhausted, the muscles contract and stiffen. You might have noticed stiff fish at the end of the day in a cooler…. This is rigor.

The colder you keep your fish, the longer it takes for rigor to occur. Then after a while in rigor, the muscles relax again and stay that way. Don’t ever use force to straighten out a fish in rigor, just keep them cold and allow the muscles to relax on their own. This might take a few hours, maybe overnight, or a full day or two if you have large salmon or steelhead. Just transfer the fish from your cooler to a tray in the fridge, put an ice pack on top and let the rigor pass. Commercial producers might ice fish down for 2 or 3 days before filleting.

Temperatures above 65° will induce “heat rigor”, this is sometimes seen in the summer when fish are in shallow water on a stringer. Heat rigor is harsh and really damaging on flavor and texture because the temperature allows rigor to come on really fast.…. Don’t use a stringer unless you have absolutely no other choice.

If you freeze fish before rigor sets in, it will take a month or two in the freezer for rigor to set in, then pass. If you thaw a fish before the rigor has passed, it might be a little tougher than normal. A slow thaw in the refrigerator might be all it takes to allow the rigor to pass.

When to fillet or de-bone a fish – You can fillet your fish following field dressing (and before rigor sets in) to save room in the cooler and to cool the fish down faster. This will work just fine. Salmon, trout and steelhead have small pin bones in the forward end of the fillet which are usually plucked out with a pair of needle nose pliers. These will come out easier after rigor has passed. Never try to fillet a fish in rigor or you will damage the flesh. If you have ever seen a fillet that is ragged looking and has “gaps” in the flesh, chances are it was not properly cooled or was filleted and de-boned while still in rigor. If you smoke a bad fillet like this it will be noticeably drier and more chewy.

HOLDING IN THE REFRIGERATOR –

FREEZING – If you look at a commercial freezer you will notice two important things: The refrigeration unit produces really cold temperatures, like -30°. And commercial freezers have fans driving the cold air across the food, or have super cold plates on each side of the food. Because of this, a commercial freezer freezes food quickly. Commercially frozen fish is a good value, has good flavor and moisture and has a decent “freezer life” once you get it home. Often fishing vessels can process and freeze their catch on board for maximum freshness and efficiency.

Home freezing is a different story. Everyone assumes freezing food at home is easy….. it’s not. And when freezing meat or fish at home you really have to pay attention. The reason is simple, a home freezer (upright or chest model) is not designed to freeze things, they are designed to keep frozen things frozen. Most home freezers operate around 0° to -5° and have circulation coils on the walls or the top. Some refrigerator freezers have a small fan to push cold air into the refrigerator. As you will see later, this small fan will come in very handy.

Remember how I explained that ice in your cooler steals the heat from just caught fish in order to cool it down, and that in the process the ice melts a little? Well, guess what, the same thing happens in your home freezer. When you put fish into your freezer, the already frozen food begins to steal heat from the fish. In the process the frozen food gains heat while the fish looses heat and eventually freezes. Without air circulation, the process of freezing a fish takes some time. Trying to freeze several fish takes more time. Then it takes some time for coils to steal the heat from the frozen food (the same heat that it stole from the fish). Eventually, all the food in the freezer settles out at the same temperature. Until a new batch of fresh food enters the freezer, then the cycle starts over again.

How much fresh food does it take at one time to harm the already frozen food in your freezer? I can’t say for sure. How many times can I freeze fresh food before the number of temperature cycles in the already frozen food begin to show up as a loss of quality? I can’t answer that one either.

The point I’m really making is that we want to freeze fish as quickly as possible to slow down and stop the damaging actions from enzymes in the fish…. and a home freezer is not the best equipment for doing that. In fact, the freezer in your refrigerator might be better suited for freezing fish because of the circulation fan. The movement of cold air often helps freeze things faster. Then the frozen packages can be moved to your chest or upright freezer.

Some adaptation and planning on our part can speed up the freezing process, and give us a better product when thawed. If we fillet (or steak) a fish, there is less mass to freeze. Small packages of fillets (or individual steaks) will freeze easier than large dense packages. Arranging packages throughout the freezer until they are frozen is better than stacking them all on one shelf. Here is a real shocker… one of the oldest methods for freezing fish might be one of the worst methods. I’m talking about freezing fillets in a milk carton filled with water. It might take 10 hours for the already frozen food to steal enough heat from a 4 X 4 X 8 container of water and fish to freeze it, then many more hours for the freezer to steal that heat from the other frozen food. I would like my fish well on the way to frozen in 2 or 3 hours.

PACKAGING FOR FRESHNESS – All the effort you’ve applied so far won’t mean a thing if you don’t package your fish correctly. You need to protect your fish from air, and if you catch fatty fish like trout, salmon or catfish, packaging is really important as air reacts with fat and can make the flesh go rancid. Proper packaging also helps with moisture retention, because when any fish looses moisture it will freezer burn.

A tight wrap in a “cling” type of stretch plastic wrap followed by an overwrap in freezer paper or aluminum foil is one method many folks use. Zipper bags come in many sizes, some are heavy duty just for freezing. Be sure to force as much air as possible out of the bags before sealing. Vacuum bagging systems are my favorite. The bags are heavy duty and the machine sucks out almost all the air. If you partially freeze fillets before vacuum sealing you can get a really good vacuum on the bag.

Be sure and label your packages and include the date. I like to eat frozen fish within 3 months of the catch date.

[Jim Almquist]

STRINGERS AND LIVEWELLS - Trout are NOT a stringer fish. I don’t recommend using a stringer at any time. My experience with a livewell is limited, so I can’t make any comments on them.

When we fish Lake Superior we find the livewell works great if the water is below 45 degrees. Anything warmer then that will take its toll on Salmon/Trout. We find it is better to just have a cooler filled with ice and bleed the fish in the livewell and then throw them on ice.

Plan to get out this weekend and see if the Salmon are still biting.

[lispeej]

Nice write up. You should write a book. Don't forget to include all of your recipes too. Just a thought.

Thanks for sharing.

[BRULEDRIFTER]

Nice!

[harvey lee]

Thanks for sharing!

[delcecchi]

When we fish Lake Superior we find the livewell works great if the water is below 45 degrees. Anything warmer then that will take its toll on Salmon/Trout. We find it is better to just have a cooler filled with ice and bleed the fish in the livewell and then throw them on ice.

Plan to get out this weekend and see if the Salmon are still biting.

When we are in Quetico they go on the stringer. No livewell, no ice in a canoe in the bush. But we try not to keep ones we catch in the morning. But a trout will live quite a while in cold water on a stringer if you are not dragging them all over the place.