There's an old American joke that I've heard a million times about carp. When a new fisherman asks the older fisherman for a good carp recipe, the older fisherman responds with something to the effect of this:"Take a nice thick carp filet and place it on a piece of cardboard. Cover it on both sides with melted butter and scatter it with carmelized onions. Sprinkle the carp with plenty of salt and pepper. Bake it in the oven for 25 minutes at 350 degrees. Remove it from the oven, throw away the carp, and eat the cardboard."
Then they both have a chuckle and jointly conclude that nobody should ever bother with eating a carp. The young fisherman will file that little joke away in his mind and pull it out at the first opportunity to lecture another fisherman about the folly of trying to eat carp. At no point will he ever bother trying to actually eat the stuff himself. The story is passed around and a whole society of fishermen comes to despise carp and yet none of them actually have any idea what they are talking about.
I have eaten carp. Grass carp, common carp and silver carp. They're all pretty good. But can you throw them in the bottom of the boat for a few hours, fillet them exactly like a bass or catfish, and expect them to make a good meal? No.
The big problem with carp as food is that they have an unusual set of floating 'Y' shaped bones in the fillets. I have found these bones in every member of the Cyprinidae family that I have eaten. Just this very evening I cooked a couple of large river chub (a type of very large minnow, minnows being closely related to carps) and found a set of tiny floating bones exactly like those of the silver carp. They were simple to deal with. I just picked them out and continued eating. By the way, here is the recipe that I came up with. I've used this for fillets of common and silver carp and now for whole river chub:
Smoked River Chub
Ingredients:
A pair of whole, gutted and scaled river chub.
A quarter cup of salt
2 Tablespoons of brown sugar
1 teaspoon of ground black pepper
1 bay leaf
A quart of water
Place all ingredients except for the fish in a small pot and boil for five minutes. Allow the mixture to cool. Place the whole fish into the brine and allow it to soak for at least two hours.
Build a hardwood fire in a smoker or a Weber-type grill. If you are using a Weber grill rather than a proper smoker then place a can of hot water on top of the grill to produce steam and keep the fish from drying out. If you own a real smoker then you probably already know what you're doing. Apple, hickory or oak all work well for the fire. Don't use any type of pine. Keep the lid on and let the fish smoke at low to medium heat for at least an hour. Check it regularly to make sure that it isn't drying out or burning.
The result is a couple of smoked fish that can be eaten on their own (its easy to work around the bones with a fork) or you can remove the flesh and serve it on bagels, use it in salads, etc.
At no point is it necessary to eat a piece of cardboard.
Last month I spent a few days in Columbia, Missouri fishing for carp with the help of some good people from the Missouri Department of Conservation. This was for my forthcoming book, 'Eating Aliens.' Biologist Vince Travnichek let me in on a couple of local Missouri secrets for dealing with the bones in carp and buffalo (the fish, not the bovid).
Understand that this is not really a bony fish in the way that, say, shad are bony (I've been experimenting with cooking gizzard shad lately and its not going well). The bones are few but awkwardly placed. With a smaller fish having narrow floating bones, Vince's solution is to score the pieces of fish meat cross-wise against the bones and then fry the breaded fish in hot oil. That hot oil transmits heat so efficiently that the bones are fully dissolved. When I ate carp that had been prepared this way I could not feel a single bone in my mouth.
This method should work well for river chub, too. I have a few fillets from the Rivanna river that will be getting that treatment tomorrow.
Larger carp have thicker bones that are not going to dissolve in the hot oil. The Missouri solution is to embrace the bones instead of fighting them. Vince prepared 'carp ribs.' After cutting the fillets he sliced them into strips along the length of the floating bones, such that each strip contained between one and three ribs. The ends of the ribs were visible. We fried the strips and ate them while holding the ribs like toothpicks. Properly butchered, the ribs turn carp into finger food.
I duplicated this method at a small gathering back home in Virginia with my friend Steve Friedman of Slow Food Virginia acting as chef. I think he used panko for the breading, though I wouldn't swear to it. What I am very certain of is that the peanut sauce that he put out to dip the carp ribs in was absolutely perfect. I will be chasing the recipe down from him to include in 'Eating Aliens.'
Carp meat tastes very much like cod, cusk, flounder or any of several other common types of white fish. Firm, clean, and inoffensive. It isn't as delicious as lionfish but its a perfectly good medium for cooking and a great source of Omega 3 fatty acids.
The things that can make it taste bad (bones aside) are time and inattentive cutting.
Carp tend to spoil very quickly. I had a long conversation with Cliff Rost, a commercial fisherman who nets carp on the Missouri River. He told me that he keeps several very large livewells on the boat and transports them all back to his small processing facility while they are still alive. Anything that is dead before its time is thrown out. Most other fish that we eat can be left dead and ungutted for a little while, especially in cooler weather. American fishermen are used to being able to wait a few hours after killing a fish before processing it. This is risky with carp. They spoil quickly.
An easy solution is to bring a cooler with some ice or cold packs with you when you go fishing. There's no harm in fileting the carp as soon as you've landed it. There is no need to gut the fish at all if you fillet it immediately.
When you are filleting the fish you will notice that most of the meat is white while some is red. Carve off all of the red or darkly colored meat and discard it. That is where the funky, 'fishy' flavor is. The white meat is good stuff and if you keep the red stuff out then it has a very clean taste.
As for how to go about catching carp, I will leave that topic for another article.
[Photograph Copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved. That is a silver carp from a tributary of the Missouri river, shortly before being filleted and cooked.]
0 comments:
Post a Comment