FishwithJD

The web's best fishing magazine

  • Start Here
  • Guided Trips With JD
  • Catch Steelhead
  • Store
  • JD’s Gear
    • Steelhead
    • Kokanee
    • River Salmon Trolling
    • Plug Fishing for Salmon
    • Light Tackle Surf Perch
  • Techniques
    • Bass
    • Boats & Boating
    • Cooking
    • Fly Fishing
    • Salmon
    • Saltwater
    • Shad
    • Steelhead
    • Stripers
    • Sturgeon
    • Trout & Kokanee

FishWithJD TV Episode 2: Scott “The Sporting Chef” Leysath

April 4, 2020 By JD Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Cooking, FishWithJD TV Tagged With: cooking fish, cooking game, dead meat, dead meat tv, fishing, how to make gravlax, hunting, scott leysath, the sporting chef

How to Cook a Suckerfish

March 19, 2020 By JD 11 Comments

“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…

Filed Under: Cooking, Humor Tagged With: Cooking, dead meat, how to cook fish, scott leysath, sucker, Suckerfish

Stuffed Salmon with Crabmeat

January 23, 2018 By JD Leave a Comment

Okay here are two great tastes that taste great together! From my buddy Scott Leysath’s TV show The Sporting Chef, here’s another friend, Tiffany Haugen showing you how to make crab stuffed salmon. Yum!

Filed Under: Cooking, Techniques Tagged With: crab, recipe, Salmon, scott leysath

Pan-Grilled Halibut with Brown Butter: So Good & Super Easy!

June 18, 2015 By JD 4 Comments

How to make the best and easiest halibut

Catching halibut is fun, but eating them is even better. Especially with brown butter!!

If you are look for a super easy and amazingly delicious way to prepare halibut, this is it!

Pangrilled halibut with a brown butter drizzle is off-the-charts good and even a slightly trained monkey like myself can do it…and come out looking like Wolfgang Puck in the process!

My good pal and TV show host Scott “The Sporting Chef” Leysath (www.thesportingchef.com) turned me onto this and I can’t thank him enough for showing me the light. My only regret is I lived so many years without ever knowing the joys of brown butter!

Anyway, all you need is some salt, pepper, flour, butter, oil and fresh halibut fillets. Here’s how to do it:

Start by completely patting the fish dry with paper towels, and then salt and pepper both sides of the fillets to taste. Next lightly coat the fillets in flour and shake off the excess.

Put a couple tablespoons of olive oil and the same amount of butter into a pan, let the oil heat up over medium heat and then cook the fish until both sides are golden brown…

How to make the best and easiest halibut recipe

Fillets in the Pan!

When the fish is done, put it on a platter in the oven on low heat just to keep it warm. Now it’s time to make the oh so yummy brown butter! Since I’m usually only cooking for family of three, I use a half a stick of butter but if you have a larger group you may need the entire thing.

Cut the stick into even thickness pads and place them flat down the bottom of a small pan. You’re going to want to use a silver or light colored pan so you can see how things are going over the next few steps. Avoid using dark-colored pans…

How to make brown butter halibut

Brown Butter Time!

Over medium-high heat start cooking the butter, stirring frequently…


Soon the butter will start to foam. Keep stirring rapidly…

How to make brown butter halibut

Bubbling Butter

Don’t walk away, stay focused and keep stirring. Pretty  soon, the butter will start to turn a brownish root beer color…

How to make brown butter halibut

Brown Butter Halibut

At this point, you should start to smell the amazing nutty aroma of the butter…SO GOOD! What’s happening here is the water is boiling away and you are basically frying the milk solids in their own juices. Keep stirring. You’ll see little specks (the milk solids) at the bottom of the pan start to brown. Take a few more strokes and then remove the pan from the heat. You can easily burn the solids at this point, turning heaven on earth into something that tastes like an ashtray, so be careful. A few more turns of the wooden spoon and then pour the liquid into a serving dish…

How to make brown butter halibut

Brown Butter almost Done

The brown nectar of the gods…

 

How to make brown butter halibut

Done!

How to make brown butter halibut

YUM!!!!

Careful here, the brown butter will be as hot as molten lava! Take your fish out of the oven and onto plates and then immediately drizzle the fillets with brown butter. A word of caution here: Once you go down this path there’s no turning back. Brown butter will become a regular part of your culinary life!

By the way, this recipe works great on all white fish. I’ve done it a bunch with surf perch too! (Lean how to catch perch HERE). My wife proved that brown butter is also amazing when used for baking. From experience, I can say brown butter chocolate chip cookies are so good they should be illegal!

For other halibut recipes try: HALIBUT & SHRIMP CAKES

Filed Under: Cooking, Techniques Tagged With: brown butter, grill, halibut, recipe, scott leysath

Halibut & Shrimp Cakes!

August 22, 2011 By JD 1 Comment

Halibut & shrimp: Two great tastes that taste great together!

The halibut fishing from Alaska to California’s Channel Islands has been good this year. While the firm, white flesh of both Pacific and California halibut take well to just about any cooking style, here’s a fun way to make some good grub with your left-overs: Halibut & Shrimp Cakes.

This one comes from our pal Scott “The Sporting Chef” Leysath, inter-galactic wild game cooking stud and co-host of the popular TV show, Hunt Fish Cook.

“This recipe works just as well with uncooked fish as it does with cooked leftovers, although the cooked fish is a bit easier to work with,” he says. “Treat the cooked, flaky halibut as you would crab meat. Make sure that it’s thoroughly dry, not soggy, before you start assembling the cakes or they will fall apart when cooked. If the fish is uncooked, finely dice with a knife or flake with the tines of a fork.”Click here to read more…

Filed Under: Cooking, Techniques Tagged With: Cooking, halibut, scott leysath

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

JD’s Top Gear Picks

  • Steelhead
  • Kokanee
  • River Salmon Trolling
  • Plug Fishing for Salmon
  • Light Tackle Surf Perch

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions

Copyright © 2025 Richey Sportfishing