That is a lost art that few know how to do anymore. If someone trusts you enough to eat a sucker you've cleaned and cooked for them, then you know what you're doing.
Personally, I'll only eat one if I cleaned it. Too many people think they can do it until they spit out a mouthful of bones.
Most people don't know how to clean/cook a jack or a sucker...I was brought up running nets for suckers. Nothing beats them cooked on the bank of the river by a fire. I've had every fish mentioned above except paddlefish, **including walleye from the north GA mountain lakes**, and none compare.
That is a lost art that few know how to do anymore. If someone trusts you enough to eat a sucker you've cleaned and cooked for them, then you know what you're doing.
Personally, I'll only eat one if I cleaned it. Too many people think they can do it until they spit out a mouthful of bones.
You're correct about people not knowing how to gash suckers and jacks. When I was doing a lot of netting, my boys were very young I'd give them suckers that I'd gashed and never had a problem.
When gashing, I keep my knife shaving sharp and would touch it up on a butcher's steel when I started feeling the bones as I gashed the fillets.
From looking at the pic, Nic knows what he's doing.
A lot of fish can be good that you would not expect. Blue cats that chase shad in the turbulent water in tailraces are generally quite good. As with anything, it depends on what they have been eating and the water quality where they're caught.
Bass are ok.
Specks (crappie - not speckled trout) are good but on the small side.
Most if not all of the trout are very good but pink fleshed.
Walleye are very good.
Sauger are very good.
The entire perch family are good but usually small.
You are doing something wrong, then, because catfish don't have an aftertaste. They taste like a flounder fillet if done right. You are either eating nasty farm-raised catfish, or you aren't cleaning them. Get anything red or yellow off there, down to the clean white meat. Remove all the skin and gunk under it. Steaks off a 50-lb flathead taste just like Chilean sea bass or halibut if they're handled right.
could be because so many bass fishermen practice "catch & release" it would seem like nobody wants to keep & eat them. I keep one now & then, especially if they are hooked deep, bleeding & otherwise torn up from being caught. But the small lake I'm fishing at tomorrow for example is overpopulated with small, skinny bass so I'd be doing the lake a favor by keeping a few.
That is a lost art that few know how to do anymore. If someone trusts you enough to eat a sucker you've cleaned and cooked for them, then you know what you're doing.
Personally, I'll only eat one if I cleaned it. Too many people think they can do it until they spit out a mouthful of bones.
Suckers wood smoked are great. In Wisconsin we could legally net them when they spawned in creeks. They were a different kind of sucker (maybe white sucker) but I would think redhorse would be about the same.
Just so everyone knows we have an endangered species of sucker, the Robust Redhorse. If you plan to keep any suckers make sure you know how to identify them correctly.