Take Care of Your Catch
By Joe Malat

Bluefish, pompano and spot. Joe Malat photo

I often practice catch and release, but I’m also a strong advocate of catch and eat. I love seafood, and enjoy the flavor of very fresh, just-caught fish.

Unfortunately, every year during the summer, I see visitors who plan to take their recent catch back to their rental cottage and cook a dinner of “fresh” fish. But many of them will be disappointed. The fish they caught may have been swimming only hours before it appeared on the dinner table, but I can guarantee when the fish was served it wasn’t fresh. After sitting under the summer sun in a bucket of water, on the deck of a pier, or a sandy beach for a couple of hours, any fish would not be fit to eat. As soon as a fish dies, it starts to deteriorate, and heat only accelerates the process. .

To insure the peak of freshness in both taste and quality, it’s very important to take good care of that fish as soon as it comes out of the water. Put the fish into an iced cooler immediately. When I catch a fish from the beach I drop it into a bucket of ocean water for a few minutes, to rinse off the sand and then to the cooler while it is still alive. I try not to let the fish die in the water.

If crabbing is your favorite way of getting dinner, don’t put the crustaceans into a bucket of water when you catch them, thinking they will stay alive. They won’t. Instead, put them in a bucket or basket with a loose fitting lid, and put the bucket in the shade if possible. If kept cool, crabs will live for several hours out of the water. Cool is the key. When it comes time to cook your crabs, cull through them and discard the dead ones.

Make sure the fish cooler has an adequate amount of ice, enough to completely surround your fish, and periodically drain the water from your cooler so the fish will not be submerged in fresh water. Some anglers use a quick way to super chill fish by adding a quantity of salt water to the crushed ice, to form a super cold slurry. This is especially effective for larger fish, and is often done by boaters, but you need a large quantity of ice for it to be effective, and the water is drained as soon as the fish become chilled.

With very oily fish, such as large bluefish, the flavor may be improved if you bleed the fish immediately by making a deep cut on the underside of the fish, just behind the gills. The fish will die immediately.

Clean fish as soon as possible, but wait until they are cold throughout. The cool, firm meat will be much easier to clean than a fish that just came out of 70-degree water. Rinse fish to remove scales and slime, but be careful that you don’t overdo it and only use cold water. Avoid soaking the fish in water, especially fillets.

Fish that have been headed and gutted can be stored directly on ice, but I always put my cleaned fish or fillets in a plastic bag before I ice them. There are several schools of thought on freezing fish. I try to avoid it, but if it is necessary I package them in serving size amounts, that will be enough for one meal for the number of folks I plan to feed.

I use heavy-duty plastic zipper-type bags, and before I seal the bag, I roll and press all of the air out of the bag. If I think the fish will be stored for a few months, I might put the bagged fish in a larger bag, and fill it with water, then freeze the whole rig, encasing the fish in ice to seal out the air, but not letting the ice (water) come in contact with the fish.

To me there is nothing like the taste of a really fresh fish and by doing a handful of things between the catching and cooking process, you enjoy and appreciate your catch to the fullest.