Article by Capt. Mark Sampson
Last week, a friend gave me a few fish for dinner and I couldn’t wait to bring home and let my wife work her magic on. The next day, I finally had the chance to sit behind a plate of the fish spread out over a bed of spinach. Boy was it ever good! As we ate, we both questioned, as we always do whenever we eat this type of fish, why so many folks turn their noses up at it. “What’s not to like?” I asked as I helped myself to a second portion.
Anyway, I’m not going to go into what kind of fish they were, at least not now, but I did want to use the incident as a segue to get started talking about a few of the fish we have tooling around our waters that for one reason or the other, have more than just a few myths, misunderstandings, and misconceptions about their edibility.
At the top of the list are the rays, which would mostly include the stingrays and the skates. Roughtail rays, southern stingrays, cownosed rays and clearnosed skates are the species most often “accidentally” caught by anglers in this area. I know that whenever we have an encounter with one of these critters I can pretty much count on someone aboard saying, “I hear they punch the wings out of those rays with cookie cutters to make scallops!” I’m guessing most of you have heard similar comments as well.
OK folks, let’s get this straight once and for all. Nobody ever has - or ever will use a cookie cutter to punch a scallop-like piece of meat out of the wing of a ray! If you’ve ever cut into a ray to see what the meat is like, you’d know that it is way too firm to push a cookie cutter through. Someone once told me a slight variation of the myth claiming to have heard that “they” sharpen the ends of metal pipes and pound them through the meat to make the scallops. I could see that process possibly working to produce a plug-like chunk of ray meat, but I’m pretty sure that you’d have to be from some other planet to be fooled into thinking that the end product could be compared to a scallop in anything but shape. For those who have never seen either; scallops have a very fine grain that runs vertically through an all white and very tender meat, while the thick grains of ray meat run horizontally and are separated by strands of tough fibrous tissue, the meat of some rays is comprised of alternating streaks of red and white mussel. Ray meat doesn’t look like, chew like or taste like scallops – period!
I will not dispute that rays can be eaten and I’m sure there are plenty of people who have great recipes for the winged members of the saltwater world. However, if anyone tries to tell you that they’ve heard that “they” make scallops out of ray wings, please find out who “they” are and forward that information off to me so I can visit them and perhaps learn for myself how to perform such a culinary miracle!
To the extent that rays are not necessarily all they’re cracked up to be, the lowly sea robin is just the opposite. Sea robins, with their broad wing-like pectoral fins and leg-like appendages, are certainly odd enough in appearance that it’s understandable why most folks would not look at them as a source of food when they are hanging from a hook that was intended for flounder or sea bass. Pretty much every bottom fisherman I know rates them in the trash fish category and release them as fast as they can get their hook out of the big, bony head. But as goofy as this sounds, sea robins are really not bad eating at all!
The first time I ate sea robin it was just an experiment. We were catching a lot of big ones on an offshore structure and I remembered how an “old-timer” use to claim that they would eat them. So I brought some home for dinner and was pleasantly surprised that they tasted somewhat like croaker. From then on I’ve never shied away from throwing a sea robin in the cooler if it’s big enough. Note: when I say “big enough” that doesn’t mean there is a size limit on sea robins because there is not, but most of them we usually catch are just too small to provide much meat so we wait until we get a couple that are worth the effort of cleaning and cooking.
If anyone is brave enough to take the sea robin challenge, be aware that when you pull these fish out of the cooler they will likely be covered with a layer of slime that apparently comes out of their skin when they’ve been chilled. While this undoubtedly makes them all the less appealing, when they are filleted and skinned the slime will go away with the rest of the unwanted parts leaving a nice fillet ready for the grill or broiler.
There has been a bunch of shark fishing going on over the last few weeks and anglers have caught and released a lot of blue sharks. But if you’ve taken notice, there hasn’t been many, if any, blue sharks brought back to the dock. That’s because it’s mostly understood that blues are an inedible species of shark. Or should I say an “unpalatable” species, suggesting that you can eat them - but you’re not going to like it much! Well, well, well, there’s nothing I like better than busting myths about sharks, and I think it’s time that the inedibility myth about blue sharks gets fractured a bit. Blue sharks “are” edible and are really quite good as long as you know how to handle and prepare the meat properly.
The meat from a blue shark is different from other sharks that anglers might keep for dinner in that it holds a lot of moisture in the tissue. This moisture does not create a poor taste but it will provide for a meat that ends up being very “mushy” if it’s prepped and cooked the same way as one might for other species of shark. To counter the moisture problem, anglers should start by cutting blue shark steaks half as thick as they normally would for other sharks - like about a half inch. Prior to cooking the steaks, they should spend the night in the refrigerator on a bed of paper towels that will help to draw out some of the moisture. The steaks can then be sprinkled with some kind of spice like Old Bay, lemon pepper, Montreal Steak Seasoning or Cajon seasoning and cooked on a hot grill. Sauces, oils or marinades should not be added to the meat until after the fish has been cooked because the idea is to get the moisture out of it, not add more. Once it’s cooked through, you can add anything you want to it and “enjoy” because it’s really quite good!
Blue shark on the grill, sea robin sandwiches and skate on a stick, all sounds like dinner to me. And by the way, the fish I brought home last week that my wife and I enjoyed so much was a couple of good old bluefish. And since I’m about as tired of hearing folks bash the taste of bluefish as everyone is probably tired of me writing about how good they are, maybe we should just leave of at that!
Capt. Mark Sampson is an outdoor writer and captain of the charter boat, “Fish Finder”, docked at the Ocean City Fishing Center.
