Thread: Anyone Smoke Spoonbill???

I used to bake fillets with lots of butter, garlic, salt , pepper, and lemon. Makes good fish sandwiches. Fried ,I thought they taste like mud.:rolleyes:

I snag a lot in Missouri and only eat fish from certain bodies of water. We do most of our snagging on Tablerock, but those fish taste "fishy". Every now and then you'll clean a small male that has pretty white meat and it will taste fine. I prefer the smaller fish from the lower Osage River. I'm not sure if it's a size thing or what but those fish never have the nasty taste to them.

Anymore I give most of my spoonbill away because other people I know are nuts over them. One thing I am going to try this spring when I get some more is boiling chunks of meat in some cajun water like we do with shrimp and see how they turn out.

Naw, they flap to hard and keep putting my match out. Sorry I couldn't resist.

Pondhopper: there is one in every crowd. lol.

I do not care for fried spoonbill either. I have smoked it and it turned out really good. I used alder wood and smoked it at 175 degrees. I only put smoke to it for an hour and a half or so then wrapped it in foil to finish it off. Good Luck!

Like any other large fish, I've found that paddlefish/spoonbill has to be trimmed of the gray and red meat to be any good. Same works for large catfish. I trim away all the gray "fat" next to the skin, and the white firm meat left is perfect for frying, baking, etc. On a large paddlefish, like the last one I got on the Missouri River upstream from Ft. Peck Lake in Montana, a lot of gray meat has to be trimmed away. I probably cut away 40% of the fillets, but the meat left was white, sweet, not fishy tasting.

Hey smoking it my be the ticket ive tried every other way and it was really bad. I will ty that. Thanks for the idea.