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Smoking up trout (this will work for salmon as well) is super easy with this recipe and the results are AMAZING! It’s so simple that a trained monkey can pull it off (as evidenced by the fact that I can do it!).
Watch the vid and I’ll show you step-by-step instructions on how to do it!
I use a Camp Chef WoodWind pellet grill but this works with any kind of smoker.
Take a very close look at that ugly infected finger…my finger… in the above photo. Nasty right? Well, that thing ended up getting worse before it got better and at one point, I had red veins going up my arm and there was concern that I could lose the digit, my arm…or even my life! The crazy thing is this whole situation started as a tiny, seemingly innocuous line cut and then things went haywire.
My spooky run-in with a serious infection far from medical attention has inspired me to share what I learned from the experience. Hopefully, you can avoid going down the same path with some simple preventative steps.
So, let me back up here. Last summer, I was guiding on Alaska’s Togiak River, where the coho fishing was nothing short of sublime. Of course, when you’re dealing with dozens and dozens of fish per day, line burns from grabbing leaders and unhooking salmon beside the boat are part of the game. Trust me, your fingers also suffer plenty of nicks from fish teeth, gill rakers and hook points too.
It was the same deal over on the nearby Nushagak River, where I previously guided for seven seasons: Dealing with tons of kings, your hands and, especially, fingers get pretty beat up.
Line burns are the worst. They’re like paper cuts on steroids and when you have a bunch of them on your fingers, they can make tying knots and other basic fishing tasks difficult. So, for eons, I’ve been dousing my cuts with hydrogen peroxide and then covering them with liquid bandage.
That program has worked for decades and I have never once had a cut that got infected. In fact, I have joked many times over the years that I’m a blood brother with the salmon, often inadvertently mixing their blood with mine — and then rinsing in river water.
Well, back in Togiak, my system failed me. Over the course of a couple days, a nearly microscopic line cut turned into that grotesquely swollen (and extremely painful) finger in the photo. The next day, it was purple and a day later, I had red lines going up my arm — a sign of very dangerous blood poisoning.
The incident forced me home early and cost me a week of work — but luckily that was all it cost me. Left unchecked, an infection like that can result in lost limbs or even death.
I was put on a daily dose close to 4,000 mg worth of antibiotics and had three different varieties pumping through me for 10 days. We caught it in time and the drugs did their thing but it was a rugged week and I felt like crud with all that stuff inside me — but I survived.
So, I learned a few things from all of this and will share them with you here.
First off, don’t ever use that paint-on liquid bandage stuff! What ended up happening was I sealed some bacteria inside my hand when I used it. Apparently, I didn’t get all the “bad guys” out with the peroxide, and by painting over the cut, there was no way for my body to flush it out. A salmon stream has tons of bacteria in it – from rotting fish carcasses, animal poop and the like – and when you don’t give it a way to get out of your system, bad things can happen fast!
And speaking of hydrogen peroxide, the nurse who worked on me told me to stop using it as a wound flush. Apparently, that burn you feel when you pour it on a cut – which I always thought was the telltale sign that it was working — is actually the peroxide eating your tissue! No bueno!
When you do get a minor fishing cut, the best thing to do is soak it in a bowl or cup of warm Epsom salt water. The bacteria can’t live in the salt and the warm water helps send white blood cells to the injury and help it heal. The warmth also localizes the infection.
After a soaking, apply some antiseptic cream to the cut and cover it with a loose bandage.
If you develop an infection, pay close attention to it and watch for red streaks. If you see streaks, the infection growing or you feel sick and run a fever of about 100.5, it’s time to get to a doctor immediately!
Infections are no joke and it was a real eye opener for me to watch a seemingly innocuous little cut progress rapidly to a potential life-threatening situation.
To help reduce the risk of line burns and small cuts, try wearing rubber (nitrile) gloves. When fishing in the heat, however, that’s not an option. So when going “commando” with bare hands, you can also try covering your potential hot spots with tape or, better yet, go with Fishermen’s Stretch Wrap (available at Fishermen’s Marine and Outdoor).
If you missed it live, you can catch Episode 2 of FishWithJD TV right here. This time around, I welcomed the country’s foremost wild game chef to the program, Scott Leysath, host of the popular TV shows The Sporting Chef and Dead Meat, which can be seen on the sportsman Channel.
Scott has been a lot of “quarantine cooking” lately and shares with us all sorts of cool ways to prepare fish chowder, ducks and geese, gravlax, squirrel and more!
Watch Episode 1 HERE with award-winning rod designer, Fred Contaoi of Douglas Outdoors.
Can’t fish? Well, you might as well read about it! Since you are probably stuck at home these days, now’s a great time to catch up on your fishing techniques.
Here’s my catalog of how-to titles, available through Amazon.
The Ultimate Guide to Steelhead Bank Fishing: (263 pages, $11.99 Digital Copy)
Jam packed with all the how-to info you need become a proficient bank angler: reading the water, curing bait rigging diagrams and tons of other stuff — it’s all in here
Light Tackle Surf Perch: (52 pages, $2.99 Digital Copy)
Thanks to detailed diagrams, photos and descriptive text, you’ll learn how to identify likely looking perch hang outs like troughs, holes, rips and more. Richey also shares secrets he’s learned from commercial perch anglers and other top beach fishermen and passes them on to you so you can be successful.
Plug Fishing For River Fishing: (69 pages, $2.99 Digital Copy)
In this, the most comprehensive guide of its kind ever assembled, JD covers everything you need to know to consistently catch river salmon on wobbling plugs like FlatFish and Kwikfish.
Packed with full color photographs and diagrams, the book covers everything from the basics to sophisticated tricks used by pro guides.
Light Tackle Delta Striper Secrets: (58 pages, $2.99 Digital Copy)
In this book, JD shares the pro tips you need to catch striped bass in the Delta. Packed with photos and insightful diagrams, Richey shows you how to locate stripers, what to look for in a spot, how to work the tide to you advantage… and how to get bit using light tackle techniques like topwater, swimbaits and jigging.
Side Drifting for Steelhead: (Paperback, $14.53 Digital Copy)
In this book, JD shares everything you need to know to become a successful side-drifter. Best describe ed as a family of techniques, side-drifting includes three methods–freedrifting, side gliding, boondogging. Each method is explained in depth and includes the basic gear you’ll need.
“You want to cook a what?” There’s a long pause and then some crazy, high-pitched laughter like pack of hyenas has just made a kill. I sort of expected a little grief from my buddy Pete, who’s a professional chef at a local seafood restaurant, when I called him for a recipe for suckerfish but not to this extent.
Eventually, Pete takes a deep breath and tries to collect himself. “Okay, I think I’ve got one for you – this should work,” he says. I grab a note pad and pen and start to write as he rattles off the recipe for cedar-planked suckfish.
“Soak a cedar plank in red wine for several hours and then get the coals nice and hot,” he says. “Sprinkle some sea salt on the board. Cook it until the wood just starts to smoke. Throw away the fish and eat the board…Ha Ha Ha Ha!”
More howling laughter ensues until I hang up.
Next, I give another friend, Scott “The Sporting Chef” Leysath, a call. He’s a nationally known wild game chef and the host of the awesome TV show, Dead Meat on the Sportsmen’s Channel. I figure he can help and I ask him the same simple, straightforward question that I ran by Pete: How do you cook a suckerfish?
“You don’t,” he says and then asks if I’m feeling okay.
How this all came about…
I guess I had better back up and give you a little backstory, here. This whole quest to see what a sucker tastes like started when a fishing client of mine caught one while steelhead fishing. As I pulled the hook from the brown and yellow beast’s rubbery lip and tossed it back over the side, he inquired about the sucker’s value as table fare.
“I’d rather eat a week-old cow patty,” I tell him.
“That bad, huh?”
“Nauseating,” I say. “Loathsome.”
“You ever actually try eating one?” he asks.
And he’s got me there. I can’t say that I have ever even considered eating a suckerfish. Heck, I try not to even touch them or let them drip into the boat when we catch one incidentally. After my confession, my client gives me a little look that says:
And just what else do you proclaim to be an expert at but haven’t actually done?
Damn, I’m feeling like my credibility has been eroded but you can’t blame me for taking a wild guess. I figure that if suckers taste half as bad as they look, I can’t be too far off base with my assessment of their flavor. Of course, you could argue that, by using those criteria, nobody would have ever discovered the sublime taste of lingcod, which sport one of the ugliest mugs in the entire ocean.
I also based my appraisal of the sucker’s merits as a food fish on the fact that we humans seem to have figured out a long time ago what tastes good and what doesn’t. If suckers were delicious, I argue, people would be out fishing for them in droves. When a fish is tasty, we seem to be able to get over the fact that it’s ugly or not all that sporty.
Exhibit A: the walleye. Those things are so incredibly good when cooked in hot oil that nobody seems to mind the fact that they fight like a wet gym sock.
My client’s not buying any of this.
“How can you have such strong feelings about a fish you’ve never eaten?” he asks with a smile. He’s got me and starts to crank up the heat under my feat. “Maybe you’re missing something here. After all, the carp is a highly regarded food fish in some countries. Perhaps suckers are just getting a bum rap here.”
I tell him there’s no way I’m wrong about this but he says I’m just talking out my you-know-what because I’ve never eaten a sucker. He’s starting to enjoy this a little too much, so I decide to step up to the…er…“plate,” in hopes of putting an end to this whole thing.
“Okay, fine, if we get another one today I’m taking it home and cooking it,” I say.
Actually, my plan is to switch up from drifting bait to running jigs under floats. I figure that if we fish in a fashion that would virtually guarantee that no suckers would be caught, I’d be off the hook in the end.
Well, what’s that saying about the best-laid plans of mice and men? Let’s just say the impossible happens. I’ll never understand why a sucker ate that pink jig, but he did and that’s what brings me to the whole hunt for a recipe portion of this tale.
How they do it in Georgia
With my chef buddies absolutely no help, I decide to turn to the information super highway for a sucker recipe. You know you’re looking for something obscure when you Google it and you get anything less than 750,000 results. In the case of sucker recipes I got exactly one…
It came from something called the Flint River Suckerfish Festival, which takes place in Bainbridge, Georgia. Apparently, they have a “sport” gill net fishery there on the Flint and, once they’ve got a big ol’ mess of fish, they cook ‘em up.
This is a direct quote from the webpage. Honestly, I couldn’t make this up:
“Netting sucker fish from the Flint River, gashing them and stirring up some swamp gravy for a good meal has long been a tradition in Southwest Georgia….”
I will not, under any circumstances, be making any swamp gravy.
After exhausting the all my resources, I come to the conclusion that I’m on my own. The idea of planting the suckerfish in the garden and just saying that I ate it is starting to sound like the best course of action. Yet I feel as if I must see this to it’s hideous, gagging end.
Captain’s Platter
Then it hits me. I’ll bread it and deep fry the thing into oblivion. Ever have one of those giant Captain’s Platters at seafood restaurant? You know, the ones that have a bunch of different types of fish all fried beyond recognition. That’s the answer! I will beer batter my suckerfish and drop it into hot oil until the flavor goes away. After all, I could fry an old flip-flop and make it taste okay. Brilliant!
As I’m preparing my little meal, my wife informs me that the family just called and is making an unexpected stop by the house for dinner. Perfect! Now I have some guinea pigs. Hopefully, eating a little sucker will teach them to come over without an invitation!
I mix up a good breading with some beer and Panko breadcrumbs and get the oil going. My first clue that things aren’t going well is that the cat leaves the kitchen when I pull the sucker fillets out of the fridge. Not a good sign…
I’m committed now, so I ignore the cat. Snotty, ungrateful beast. I should have left it to rot at the pound! I dip the fillets into the mixture and then into the boiling oil they go. Family arrives as I’m cooking and I hear my mother ask my wife if something died under the house. I stick to my guns and keep cooking.
“Your septic tank backed up?” my stepfather asks as he pokes his head into the kitchen.
“No, I think everything’s fine, why do you ask?”
“I don’t know, something just smells bad,” he replies.
This is not going well, but I’m going to see this thing out. In 10 minutes, I have the oily sucker chunks on platter and deliver it out to the dining room.
Moments later, we’re in the car headed for the local pizza joint…