Catch and Eat Best Practices?

I found this out by accident this spring, you can scale a fish using your garden hose and a fine stream nozzle.  I was blasting out the body cavity when I hit the outside of the fish and bang there went a bunch of scales, since then I've used it on striped bass to 22 inches and found with a little care it's quicker, cleaner and more complete than a knife or scaler.

Just lay the fish (before gutting) on a non slip surface, (I use my lawn, water conservation) then hose the scales off, takes a while to get the distance and angle but it works.  And you get to keep clean (more or less).

great tip!

I was told to never scale the fish, unless your going to cook it right away.  Something about how it helps protect the fish from bacteria?  If I'm not eating them that day, I have been gutting/cleaning the inside, then covering with crushed ice and storing in the fridge over night.  When ready to cook, just been using the back side of a knife to scale them, fillet if not whole, and then off to the pan or grill they go.

Oh no ... fresh water on salt water fish is a no no.  A quick rinse is fine, never soak. 

I agree that soaking is bad. however...

If you leave the skin on, press slabs flesh to flesh, and you have a good freezer, my experience is that this works quite well, at least with rockfish. we are not talking a lot of water, and it freezes quite quickly.

when thawing, make sure the ice drains off so that the slabs don't sit in water.

skin and trim after thawing.

I would like to get a vacuum packer, but this is very easy and cheap.

John

Al, I think the fish slime is bacteria breeding ground.  Scaling helps remove slime.

J, get a vacuum packer.  You won't be disappointed.

-Allen

To store any food in a freezer for more than a few weeks, you really need a deep freeze, not a 'frost free' fridge freezer.  Frost free freezers regularly thaw out a little bit and circulate warm air to remove frost.  This doesn't differentiate between your freezer wall and your fish fillets, so any un-sealed things will get horrendous freezerburn, and even sealed packages will have their texture annihilated by the regular freezing and thawing.

Chest freezers are generally colder too, around 0'F, whereas fridge ones are usually around 20'.  The chest is sufficient to kill parasites while the fridge is not, also the colder food is kept in the freezer, the less it will change over time.

Chest freezers freeze the food faster too, which results in smaller ice crystals that do less damage to the texture of the meat. 

Try to spread the bounty thinly around the freezer to freeze, then consolidate later.  That freezes it faster than piling vacuum bagged stuff 8 layers deep.  Frozen fish for sushi is generally flash frozen with cryogenic apparatus - that's the gold standard.