Night of the Living Catfish

[DanaM]

Thats how I used to clean bullheads wayne, nail em to a post and peel em with pliers. Bullheads have pink flesh like a trout.
The channels we tried were 8-10 lbers and like I siad they tasted like mud Now a perch or walleye ya can't go wrong with.
Like I siad ifin I catch an cats this year I will try them again, they should spawn in May some time around here.

[Hillbilly]

Easiest way to clean a catfish is to just fillet it. Never understood people going to the trouble of nailing a fish to a tree, pulling its skin off with pliers, etc. Just fillet it, skin the fillets, cut off the belly meat, and you're done- doesn't take long at all. You can fillet a smaller cat in a couple minutes at most. Dana, channel cats here are delicious, as good as walleye and perch (and I love walleye and perch.) Never ate a bad catfish including big ones unless it was one that came from the store. Get all the skin off of them, as it sometimes has a muddy taste.

[servicebeary]

i too have seen some muddy tasting cats, and I fillet just like you said.  They were out of Lake tecumpsuh (bad spelling)  on a naval base in Virginia beach VA.  The water was a little brackish I think, (since it met the bay a mile or so away) and it had a mud bottom.  Big cats, gar, snapping turtles and tons of eels that would chew off all your bait really fast.  I guess we only ate one cat out of there it tasted so muddy.  Of coarse back then I might not have cut off the belly fat...?  who knows

[mullet]

 I've had some muddy tasting ones, also. Usually during the rainey season, and then Largemouth Bass and Bluegills taste muddy, too. And I'm like hillbilly, I fillet catfish. Must be a Southern thing .

[stickbender]

     I like to hold them and eat the meat off the bones.  I fillet some, but prefer them whole without the heads.  Just the way I ate them when I was a kid.  Eat the fried tails, and fins.  Same with pan fish.  I have had Specs that tasted muddy.  Like Eddie said, depends on the water quality, at the time you catch them.  Just put a little more Cajun seasoning, on them, and fry them up a little more crispy......   Used to be a little restaurant, down south of me on 441, west of Boca or Ft. Lauderdale, and on Friday nights, they would have all you could eat, catfish, from Lake Okeechobee.  Oh man, talk about good, and gluttony  ......I sure miss those days.
They would bring out a platter of those golden fried catfish, and you just started salivating  They were not filleted, but whole without the head.  That is generally the way you get them in the restaurants, but those are usually farm raised, and not much flavor to them.

                                                                                       Wayne

[DanaM]

Well will have to try em again, last time was about 30 years ago but I've learned to cook since then

[caveman2533]

A lot of guys fish off the bridge  at one of our hydrolelectric dams here in Pa and catch the channels on Rapala minnows jigged in the boils below the turbines.  Channels can be a very aggressive predators. its a lot of fun, haven't done that in a few years, usually bait fish the river banks now. Shrimp is an excellent bait.
Steve

[servicebeary]

speaking of really good bait...when I get to a river or pond or whatever, I look for crayfish.  If I find em, I will be catching some cats, every time.  If you can find a ripe dead one, the rottenest crayfish tails you can find, or fresh ones is the best bait that I've ever seen.  Some people even keep em and rot them at home specifically because the smell is so attractive that you often get a hit before your back hits bottom.  Guess a bobber set-up would be smart.  I can't keep fresh or rotten crayfish on the hook and I've used it in Ohio, N.C., and Idaho...give it a try, I'd like to hear about it

[mullet]

 A really good bait is, squid. It is tough and hard for them to get off the hook. It stays tough even after it sits in the Sun a couple of days.

[servicebeary]

does squid bring em in like lightning?  I'll have to give it a try.  Would be nice to have a bait that gives me more than one chance to set the hook.  Oh, I was meaning that by not being able to keep it on the hook that they chew it off rediculously fast, but yah, crawdads do tear off easy

[JW_Halverson]

The muddy taste is due to compounds with a stupid name geosmin, pronounced "gee-OZZ-oh-min".  Translates from latin meaning (earth smell), think of how mud smells or how the air smells after a rain.  It ends up in fish due mainly because of bluegreen algae and a few other bugs.  We had to deal with that in tilapia production.  The trick with tilapia (and farm raised fish in general, including cats) is to get them in cooler clearer water and don't feed 'em a few days in a row.  Then ya gotta make sure they ain't eatin' their own poop, either.  All fish have some of this in them and purging the live fish in fresh clean water flushes it out. 

Now if you can just get those catfish to come up to the pumphouse and drink lotsa fresh clean water before inhaling your stankbait....

[servicebeary]

so we can just throw em in the stock tank for a few days with an anti poop eating mesh setup keeping them away from the bottom?  good to know   If I lived where they were muddy, I'd have a tank with a bubbler for oxygen, and just put fresh water in it for the few days of decontamination.  Then go get a big batch, get em home with a cooler full of water and there you go.  As a kid I used to get em home alive with no water on cool evenings, but they only lived a couple days in tanks without any means of oxygen production whether it be algae or a bubbler.

[mullet]

 That's why I like to catch them in the river. The water is flowing and I wait till the rainy season is over.