the Walnut Diary

Tony’s sister Sharon turned up from British Columbia this week with the fillets of a 20 pound spring salmon caught that day.

When asked to cook a fish from the salmon family, I throw it on a hot grill, baste with unsalted butter while turning frequently, and try to get the skin off the fillet as soon as it comes loose to allow further basting.  With this fish I realized the butter wasn’t necessary.  Spring salmon’s oil, while plentiful, is sweet and tasty, and the flesh promised to be light and delicious.  The problem was that in thickness the fillet ranged from a quarter inch to almost two inches.  How could I get it to cook evenly?

I cut it into thick pieces and thin pieces.  The thin pieces went to the table as soon as they were ready, and the thick chunks arrived as seconds.  Everyone had seconds and bickered over thirds until the meat was gone.  It was great.

Tony was a bit apprehensive about taking his sister fishing.  Where Sharon lives they normally haul in sturgeon over 100 pounds, and eat salmon from the river several months of the year.  How would she take to bass fishing on Newboro Lake?

By all reports Sharon is a match for her big brother’s considerable fishing skills.  What’s more, she loved to eat the local product.  This came as a surprise, but I guess bass have a distinctive texture and flavour, and are worth seeking out as a meal.  I suppose Tony may have picked up a trick or two at the grill over the years, as well.

In this area everybody and his dog knows how to cook bass, but after fifty years of practice I have hit on two methods I’ll pass along, anyway:

The Cast Iron Barbecue Method

Take your best cast-iron frying pan.  Dump in a generous pinch of coarse salt.  Add enough olive oil to cover the bottom to a depth of 1/8”.  Place the pan inside a hot barbecue and allow it to heat until the oil boils from the odd drop of water dripping from wherever.

Cover the bottom of the pan with fillets.  Close the lid on the grill until you turn them, using two, good-quality lifters.  My wife has an expensive fish spatula which works very well, but I wish she had two.  Keep turning the fillets at short intervals until they start to break apart.  Immediately transfer them to a platter where they will continue to cook until cool.  They will not have browned.  If you want brown fillets, use another recipe.  These will taste good.

Add a bit more oil and more fillets if you have them, because your guests will likely eat the first bunch from the platter.  That’s when they taste best, not after they have dried out on a plate waiting for the broccoli to cook.

Boiled Bass Fillets

Boil a pan of water, with salt added.  Drop in fresh or frozen bass fillets.  Control the flame enough that the whole thing doesn’t boil over.  Remove the fillets when they start to break apart.  Serve.  Eat like boiled potatoes, dipping each forkful in a bit of butter at the side of your plate.  This may not sound elegant, but it tastes great.

Selecting the bass to eat

Smallmouths live in deep water and eat minnows.  Shallow water largemouths eat crayfish.  I prefer largemouths.  You can legally keep a 12” bass, but we generally let them go up to nearly 14”, just because fish of that size make a better fillet.  On the other hand we don’t keep any fish over three pounds, as they are more likely to be loaded with pesticides and shouldn’t be eaten by kids or women of childbearing age.  More practically, the large bass are much more successful spawners than the younger fish, and it just makes sense to let them go.

If you caught a trophy bass and feel you must eat it

Yes, you can make it delicious.  Look up Mme. Jeanne Benoit’s The Canadiana Cookbook and get her instructions for roasting large fish.  These involve removing the gill cage and gutting the fish, a major task with a large bass (use side cutters or a hacksaw).  Then stuff the cavity with chicken stuffing and sew it up, leaving head, tail and scales in place.  Wrap in foil and bake at 450 for ten minutes per inch of thickness.  This usually works out to about 35 minutes for a large bass.

The end result tastes a lot like scallops.  It’s really good, but you shouldn’t eat large bass that often, and don’t let the kids have any.  The last time Bet did this it was a 7 lb. 4 oz bass I caught off the dock at Indian Lake Marina.  We took it as our contribution to the Annual Pot-luck Dinner, where everybody in the Marina brings his or her best dish and tempts the other guests to sample it.  The fish was gone, every last crumb, before the first ten people had gone through the lineup.