re: What's Your Favorite "Trash Fish" to Eat?

For me the definition of a trash fish is one where there is not a legal commercial market for them. These are some off of the top of my head.

Gafftop catfish
Hardhead catfish
Bonita (although asians do eat them)
oil fish (look like an escolar but is supposed to be poisounous)

Some fish that I consider to not be that good but there is still a market for them:

Hardtail/Blue Runners (Asians love oily fish)
Spanish Mackeral
Mullet (bigger market for them in Florida-here they are bought for their eggs)
Garfish (always had a market for garfish, mostly sold in central to north Louisiana, we used to clean tons of these, some nasty smelling fish for sure)
Blacktip shark

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Almaco, wormy trout

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Jack Crevalle

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Yep.

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Almaco, wormy trout

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Almaco Jacks?

We used to buy a lot of them and fillet them up for the restaurants all the time. Similar to amberjack. Not all of them were bad with worms.

And while the blackened craze hammered redfish stocks, let's give Paul his due credit for shining the spotlight on South Louisiana cuisine , thrusting that style of food to the forefront of the American palate, where it remains today.

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When was this?

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I guess what is a trash fish and what isn't a trash fish is all relative to the people. When I was a child fishing Lake P I came across a couple of guys who from a distance I could see throwing fish in the ice box. I went in for a closer look and found them throwing out a sparkplug with a treble hook attached to it. They would throw the plug past a school of mullet and real it in fast across the school and foul hook them. I ask if it was crab bait and they told me it was dinner. Later that night my dad taught me a new term for trash fish.

Sure people have been eating redfish down here for hundreds of years in dishes like court bouillon. But what people in LA consider food is a little different then what people in the rest of the country consider food. The blackened method made the fish very popular. Shortly there after restrictions on both commercial and recreational fishing were put in place to allow the species to rebuild. Looks to me liked it worked.

some of my favorite memories as a kid was watching my cajun grandmother cleaning a goo on the back porch to cook in her red gravy.

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I guess what is a trash fish and what isn't a trash fish is all relative to the people.

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True. People in Florida like mullet where we think of it as trash fish. Same with shark on the east coast.

I still come across some people from Louisiana who think redfish is trash fish. They only keep speckle trout. They say they don't like redfish, drum, or sheephead. Who knows if they are telling the truth. I've even had people tell me they don't fish redfish because they are too easy to catch or they only fish for fish with brains like trout, flounder,etc.

I mean that it isn't commonly sold in seafood markets or in non-ethnic restaurants in the south Louisiana (because that's what I'm familiar with but some of those articles were national) .

sheepshead


Guy I would go boating with would call them (banned word)-fish.

I like Puppy Drum though.