Strangely Cooked up Mendo Striper--Any Ideas?

I had a weird outcome when I cooked up some Mendo Striper yesterday and I'm wondering if anyone has an explanation:

I caught a 28" and 22" striper around 7to 9 AM Sunday morning.  I kept them alive, lip--hooked until just before I came in around 11 AM, when I bled them (while still alive).  I gutted and iced the fish quickly in a large cooler of ice that had dry ice layered on the bottom.  The fish were not up against the dry ice and did not freeze.  When we got home I filleted the two and I decided to fry up the small one as we wanted to enjoy freshly caught striper that night.  I just seasoned the fillets and lighly breaded it with corn starch and fried under medium heat.  When they were slightly brown I  checked them inside but they looked strangely soft translucent and watery, inside, and didn't flake like I'd expect.  Well, I thought they just must need more cooking time so I put them back on and kept cooking them, but even the thin tail section just wouldn't get the usual opaque white color with the firmer texture.  Finally took them off to eat but what a disappointment!  They were tasteless, soft and mushy, and still watery, almost a bit slimy in texture.  The consistency was... the closest I can compare it to wast the texture of serf perch.  I even took a piece and microwaved it even longer to see if it would ever firm up but it didn't.

I just never had a striper cook up this way and wondered if someone has any explanation for it.  I can understand if they were improperly cooled down or stored too long, but these were cooked up even sooner than a lot of the other stripers I've gotten at Mendo and DV.

ya, I hear ya...

 I just cooked up some @ the FireHouse,

 Heavy Butter, lemon, pepper, salt garlic, dill, italion seasoning and HEAVY Flame ...

 it came out Good,

 But there was a Bland taste to it .......... Danglin

I had the same thing happen to some rockfish fillets I tried to cook a day after a Ft. Ross trip.

They were on ice two hours after being caught up until a few minutes before I tried to pan fry them. Only thing I could think of was that the fillets were too cold when I threw 'em in the pan?

Many of the fish were definitely snakey, so I would expect the fat content to be lower than normal.  Unfortunately fat=yummy.

I had the same thing happen to some rockfish fillets]I had the same thing happen to some rockfish fillets

I wouldn't have been as surprised with rockfish because they tend to cook up a bit more translucent and less firm than striper.  I wouldn't have even been surprised if the fish just didn't taste good or was bland, since you can probably get a "bad" fish from time to time and, as Sean said, the fat content surely affects the taste of the meat.  But what surprised me was that this fish meat would not firm up or get relatively dry as fish tends to do when you over cook it.  But this fish stayed soft, translucent and mushy, even when the very thin tail end of the fillet was fried.

It seems to me that this should reflect more the direct physical reaction of the heat on the proteins of the fish, and therefore should firm up irrespective of the fat content or end taste of the fish.  Anyway, I just thought I'd ask since there are so many fish biologist around.

Fortunately, the fish I cooked up tonight was "normal" and tasted great, so hopefully that other fish, or the processing was just a fluke event.

Doug -

Funny that you should mention that. Two things I noticed with my BAM stripers...
1. Even though they were long 26 and 28 inches they were fairly thin and difficult to fillet properly. I have never spent so much time working on a fillet. Felt like I was doing surgery. BTW, on stripers I cut off about 1 inch of the tail section since it is fibrous and tends to over cook. I also fillet out the belly meat.
2. I cooked the fillets on grilled indirect heat for 15 minutes and thought they looked underdone even though the cooking time was more than adequate for a 1 inch fillet. They tasted OK marinated in lemmon, olive oil and garlic with a basil garlic butter topping however I kept thinking if it were rockfish I would have cooked it more to kill the worms.  I agree that the texture was odd and the taste was a little bland however I kept thinking it might be that we have been eating nothing but rockfish for 5 months and our palates have been dulled. Or maybe we are used to eating stripers wich come seasoned with a more heavy metals and toxins. 

Good seeing you and your wife.

Scott

Interesting that you also mentioned the difficulty filleting your stripers Scott.  I also had trouble with mine and didn't recall having such a problem with the Mendo and De Valle stripers I got last year.  I even posted Erik asking for some tips because I thought I must be doing something wrong.  I wonder what it is about the fish that could change the taste, cooked texture and even impede filleting them?  It was dissappointing that my 28 incher tasted so strange that I actually threw away half of what I cooked up.  That's really not something I would typically do--especially after investing so much effort in catching him. Again, it was nice to know that I wasn't the only one to have these issues.

These Mendo stripers were definitely on the skinny side.  A 28" striper only had about as much meat as fat 20" vermillion.  They're probably better beer batter and deep fried... but then again what isn't.