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| Photo copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers. Yes, this is shad. |
I catch gizzard shad regularly with my cast net. The big ones can be pretty substantial fish. I've caught specimens of over 18 inches and it seemed like a real waste to use so much meat just for catfish bait.
Seeing as how gizzard shad are in the herring family I figured that they would probably be pretty good smoked. A few days ago I took most of a big shad (the front end was used for bait before I decided to eat the rest) and treated it like I would any other fish. I gutted it, scaled it and put it on ice with the rest of my catch.
Back home I prepared a simple brine for the shad. I boiled about a quart of water with plenty of salt, some allspice, pepper, and a spoon full of brown sugar. After letting the brine cool down I poured it into a ceramic container with the shad (never brine in a metal container) and let it soak in the fridge overnight.
In the morning I got the smoker heated up with homemade oak and hickory charcoal. When the shad came off it looked as fine to eat as any other fish I have ever smoked.
Yes, shad is a bony fish. Personally, I think that Americans have become way too fussy about our fish. Fish have bones in them. Deal with it the way that humans have dealt with it for thousands of years. The woods have mosquitoes, fish have bones, the sky has rain. The world is as we find it.
The awkward thing about shad bones is that many of them are branched. The trick to getting them out of the cooked fish is to pull them in clusters from the trunk rather than the branch end.
Helenah Swedberg and myself worked the shad over and managed to get most of the meat off without choking on any bones. The best system seemed to be to lift the meat carefully off of the ribs with a fork and then pull out all of the branched bones, making a pile of shad meat on the plate to eat all at once. It was a lot like picking crab meat.
The side of the fish that had been on top in the smoker was very firm, while the bottom side was a bit mushy. Probably I should have scored the skin of the bottom side in order to allow the liquid to drain out while smoking.
We were both pleasantly surprised at the taste of the shad. It was a mixture of light and dark meat and the dark meat tasted no different from the light meat. Smoked shad is delicious and I would be happy to eat it for breakfast any morning. I liked it spread on crackers with a few drops of lemon juice. Helanah preferred it without the lemon.
Our verdict is that this fish has been unfairly maligned as food. I believe that people have judged the potential of gizzard shad mostly based on what it looks and smells like when handled as cut bait. If you handled trout or bass the way that gizzard shad are handled then those fish would look and smell like crap as well.
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| Gizzard shad look similar to their sea- going cousins, herring. Photo copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers. |
What You'll Need
A net. Because shad feed very low on the food chain (they mostly eat zooplankton), they won't bite a hook. Throwing a cast net is the most practical way of getting shad. There is no daily limit on the taking of gizzard shad in Virginia and many other states have similarly liberal rules, so you can bring home a whole lot of food. Cast nets come in various sizes. Beginners should use a five foot net or smaller since larger nets are harder to throw properly. The five foot Tyzac model by Betts worked very well for me for two years.
A smoker. My Brinkmann smoker grill has been good to me. At $68 its a good deal and is a great way of making use of cuts of meat and fish that you wouldn't otherwise eat. In a pinch you can smoke fish in a standard charcoal grill but its awkward to keep feeding the fire without a door.
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