Eat Like A Fish - Week 4: One Fish, Two Fish, Grilled Fish, Whole Fish


Well it took until week four, but for the first time in the study I was pushed outside my comfort zone, and I'm glad it happened.

I started out this week full of bluefish and behind on the blogging. I was hoping to be able to come up with one of my new species quickly and have time to cook it up and eat it before the weekend. While I wasn't as lucky as I'd hoped, I'm pretty excited with how the week turned out. Come Monday morning, my week four species were...
  • Summer flounder/Fluke (Paralichthys dentatus)
  • Mahi Mahi (Coryphaena hippurus)
  • Blue Crab (Callinectes sapidus)
  • Butterfish (Poronotus triacanthus)
As any of you that are actually reading this (is it even anybody?) may be getting a sense of by now, this is where I state my expectations of what would be easy to find this week, what I wouldn't find anywhere, and what I'd likely end up eating. Well my immediate assumption was that, although still a bit early in the year for it, my easy find of the four this week would be fluke. We've been pulling in a minimum of 2-3 per trawl in our nets at work in the mouth of the Thames River for the past couple weeks. Only a couple during that time have been keepers (over 19" in CT) but already we've had a doormat or two. While mahi mahi do make their way into New England waters during the summer, it is still a bit early to be finding any that are locally landed. I had zero luck, as expected, two weeks ago finding any blue crab that were from New England and not from Maryland, and I didn't expect two weeks time to change that much. Lastly, while I've seen a couple butterfish in our nets already I've not yet seen them in markets locally, and this is small species that I rarely see for sale anyways (except as bait). However I thought I'd read at least one Eat Like a Fish citizen scientist further north than me having success with this species, so there was a chance here.

I found myself on the Monday of Week 4 in the local Stop & Shop getting my grocery shopping done for the week. As I made my way past the seafood section, I decided to give it a shot. I can't think of a single time I've purchased seafood from a major grocery store other than live lobsters. I don't necessarily know what has instilled it in me, but I have a STRONG bias against buying seafood in the grocery store. I just have this innate feeling that the seafood isn't as fresh, that the employees aren't as knowledgable about their fare (since it's likely not their specialty), and that the awareness about location of origin and steps taken to get this point are lost.

When I approached the display, I started browsing what was available, and the only species of my four that I saw for sale was the mahi mahi. I asked the employee behind the counter (an older woman) if she knew where the mahi was from, which off the top of her head she did not, but she was happy to go back to check for me. After waiting a minute or two, she came back out and told me that she wasn't able to find out where the mahi was from. I explained to her that as a part of a study that I am participating in I could only purchase a fish if it was landed locally. I loved this little old woman for trying, because she began to assure me that all her fish was from a distributor in Naugatuck, CT.... so that meant it had to be local, right? I didn't have much time to get into it, so I said "thank you" and finished off my shopping.

Tuesday I stopped back in at the old reliable Flanders Fish Market in East Lyme, which will continue to be a frequent stop for me as it's both a pretty solid source of seafood, and located conveniently between work and home. After a quick look over their display, it was clear none of what I needed was here either. However, Flanders has a pretty extensive selection of seafood that they regularly have available to them, they just don't often stock. But with a simple request, these species are available to anyone that may be looking for them; lucky for me, butterfish is one of these species. I placed my order, and by Thursday my special order of a half a dozen butterfish were ready for pick up. It turns out that the market has to place a minimum order of anything to special order it, which in the case of butterfish is more than my six fish I asked for weighing in at 1 1/4 lbs. When I left the store they still had a significant number in a bowl for sale, and my only hope is that my special order will result in somebody else trying butterfish for the first time

Everything required for Sunday night's Week 4 dinner

Sunday night I brought the fish, along with still more leftover Wellfleet oysters, over to a friend's house to make dinner for the two of us. This was my first foray into the preparation and consumption of whole fish, so I decided to keep it pretty simple. The fish I covered in olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and gave the same preparation to some more scallions I'd be grilling and also to some asparagus I'd be roasting. The fish grilled relatively quickly, maybe only 4-5 minutes necessary on each side on a pretty hot grill. I also found out that if you leave the organs in, it's pretty common for them to get soft and mushy and drop right out on the body as they grill (not ideal to have loose in your grill). The butterfish are pretty delicate once they're cooked and were difficult to move on the grill without them falling apart and leaving parts behind.

Butterfish on the grill after their flip. Take extra care

The butterfish with scallions and lemon off the grill

Dinner is served. Grilled butterfish, roasted asparagus, and porcini risotto

No dinner is complete without Wellfleet oysters
As I mentioned a moment ago, once cooked the butterfish are extremely delicate, so when eating the meat flakes right off the skeleton. No scales means go ahead and eat the skin, just watch out for dorsal fin, pectorals, etc. Also there are a lot of tiny bones, but by fish number two I had become pretty adept at peeling the meat from the bones with a fork without subjecting myself to eating any of the tiny ossified splinters that were the fish vertebrae. Make sure to steer clear of the highly vascularized dark meat that surrounds the guy cavity, as it is INCREDIBLY fishy, while the rest of the fish is nowhere near the oily, fishy display that I was expecting. I was pleasantly surprised by the butterfish, and while they do have a bit more of a fish flavor to them than I would typically prefer, I would eat them 10 out of 10 times if I was given the choice of butterfish or trout.

Picked clean
As I said at to start this post out, this was the first week where I truly felt out of my comfort zone and had a real novel experience in respect to both preparation as well as when it came time to eat. Whole fish was a new experience for me, but one that I thoroughly enjoyed. I immediately began to think about all the different species that we catch at work throughout the year which I currently regard as something to toss back but could be worth giving a try as something for the plate. And then I thought back to the extra butterfish left behind, and hoped that someone had as much fun with them as I did.

Extra butterfish left behind at Flanders Fish Market

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