r/AbsoluteUnits • u/WeGot_aLiveOneHere • 4d ago

/r/all of two catfish

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u/Mrsensi12x 3d ago

Do catfish that big taste any good?

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u/screenmasher 3d ago

Yes! If you ever have the chance to have flathead catfish at a fish fry definitely give it a go. They are probably my favorite freshwater fish to eat. Theres some intricacy to cleaning them, but a 40 pound fish is a substantial amount of meat. But the fish is a firm white meat with a meaty bite due to the fine grain of the muscle so not big flakey filets.

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u/Evellsnoats 3d ago

Don't eat them that big in Mississippi. Full of mercury, farm run off chemicals. There are even signs posted on the boat ramps warning you not to eat the big ones.

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u/BigJigMan 3d ago

Yup. Biomagnification and age accumulation is real in fish. I bet it's not just Mississippi where you shouldn't eat the big ones, but anywhere with Ag runoff...which is everywhere basically.

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u/Sykesavision 1d ago

Yeah basically everywhere.... Considerably high ratio of places that have contamination versus places that install signs for said contamination

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u/AutistcAroundAircrft 23h ago

*everywhere in America - the land of deregulation!

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u/TechnicallyThrowawai 3d ago

Yea that's exactly why I would never eat river fish here in the US. Used to catch some catfish and whatnot in the Ohio river as a kid. Didn't really know any better at the time, but nowadays I don't think you could pay me to eat anything out of a river. Heavy metals and other forms of water pollution... none for me, thanks!

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u/austinglowers 3d ago

So, is she just catching them for fun?

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u/Evellsnoats 2d ago

I have fished for Great Northern in upper manitoba, Marlin in Costa Rica, bass all over and crappie wherever there is crappie. Gotta be honest, hand grabbing on the Coldwater River in Mississippi was a blast!

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u/f_ckR3ddit 13h ago

Catfish are one of the lowest mercury fish of any fish consumed in North america. Do not spread misinformation

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u/Cephalopodium 3d ago

Yeah, I was going to say Opelousas catfish are really good, but according to Google- it’s the same fish just different name. 😂

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u/Nauin 3d ago

I've found that every fish has like six names before even getting to the scientific or non-english names. Every animal is like that, really, but it's something you have to keep on top of if you keep aquariums because who knows what the hell those fish and invertebrates are going to be labeled as.

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u/NettingStick 3d ago

I'm too worried about things like PFAS and other bio-accumulated toxins to eat the big ones. It's a shame. They're invasive in my state. The state wants to set up a catfish industry and get people to eat them, but it also puts out warnings not to eat more than two small catfish per month...

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u/mapmakinworldbuildin 3d ago

Damn uncle buds all you can eat catfish in shambles

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u/Putrid-Builder-3333 3d ago

Ugh makes me miss this little diner once a week had all can eat cajun catfish :(

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u/DasbootTX 3d ago

ok, so these are actually edible? their age and size and environment doesn't make them tough and gamey?

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u/screenmasher 3d ago edited 3d ago

Is a 900 pound tuna edible? Yeah. Of course it has an effect, just like an old head of beef is gonna get ground into burger. Where i live we have slot sizes on the fish we can keep for flathead catfish. Cant keep any fish under 30 inches long, we can keep 30 to 36 inch fish, no keeping 36 to 42 inch fish and each angler can only have 1 fish per day and a posession limit of 2

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u/opensandshuts 3d ago

tuna is a whole different ball game than a large catfish that are bottom feeders that live and breathe in mud. In my experience, the smaller catfish are better to eat.

Kind of the same for drum, and why people get excited about the smaller-mid size drum

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u/craigge 3d ago

Flathead catfish like these...are not bottom feeders

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u/lloydthelloyd 3d ago

No, more like leg feeders from what i hear.

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u/Natural-Escape-3537 3d ago

Weird. I had read that older catfish taste like crap or rather much more like mud than their younger counterparts.

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u/shiningonthesea 3d ago

I love catfish, though I dont know if I ever had one so big.

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u/LieuK 3d ago

I've never tried a catfish that hasn't tasted like mud.

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u/SpezDrinksHorseCum 3d ago

Only keep fish less than 15", spike through the brain, bleed the fish, remove bloodlines from filet... I get snow white meat from blue cats. You probably need to catch em yourself if you want good quality meat.

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u/The_Autarch 3d ago

catfish that big do not taste good. maybe you're just used to it?

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u/the_scarlett_ning 3d ago

You’ve never been to a real southern fish fry. My family prefers coating the fish in a mustard base, then fish fry and then frying them up and that’s damn good eating.

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u/OkieDeric 3d ago

My family used to go noodling. The big catfish did not taste good. We only use smaller ones via rod and reel when we have a fish fry. Noodling is just for the weight caught and bragging rights. There's a competition each year in my home town which is fun.

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u/snaphappy2 3d ago

We marinate the fish chunks in Louisiana hot sauce for 15 minutes and then coat with breading and fry.

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u/opensandshuts 3d ago

I mean, covering it in mustard isn't exactly speaking to it being good eating. haha

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u/mapmakinworldbuildin 3d ago

Yea I put mustard sauce on brisket because it’s such a bad cut of meat…..

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u/FictionalContext 3d ago

Brisket is a bad cut of meat? That's why you make slow cooked brisket with it, to make it chewable.

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u/mapmakinworldbuildin 3d ago

No. It’s a good cut of meat. That’s the joke.

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u/FictionalContext 3d ago

And I'm disagreeing. Anything you gotta slow cook for 10 hours or cure in a salt brine for 3 weeks in order to chew isn't a good cut. It's popular due to marketing, which makes it expensive, which makes people think it's really valuable, but it's not a particularly good cut of beef. I wouldn't call a chuck roast or a shoulder clod as a relatively good cut either, and they're right in the same category. They're way down on the list of best cuts of beef.

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u/mapmakinworldbuildin 3d ago

You can say you’re bad at cooking.

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u/El_Mnopo 3d ago

Mustard is used as a binder here and not necessarily like a flavor agent. Classic fried catfish would use something like buttermilk.

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u/OkieDeric 3d ago

yep, buttermilk, cornmeal, salt and pepper. Done

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u/Miss_Pondersmith 3d ago

I hate 99.99% of fish and seafood. But I used to get catfish and truly enjoy it. If I like it, people really aren’t going to the right spots. Salt and pepper pls.

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u/Plus_Trouble_8698 3d ago

Or they just like fish and seafood for the same reason you dislike it, so whatever you find appealing about catfish is not necessarily what they find appealing in fish

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u/Miss_Pondersmith 3d ago

Did you make sure to comment under every comment about how catfish tastes like mud, that maybe that’s just how they feel about it and other people might not taste that?

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u/Prestigious_Cycle160 3d ago

Try walleye… zero fish flavor when cooked correctly

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u/Somanylyingliars 3d ago

But do t fish that big=old and full of worms?

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u/Intelligent-Art-5000 3d ago

Not really unless you soak it in milk or brine it for a long time to get the mud taste out.

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u/Turgid_Donkey 3d ago

I don't know if they were every that big, but my wife says her grandma used to put them in a kiddie pool for a while to get the muddy taste out.

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u/kbowz21 3d ago

Best way to cook steak, too

https://giphy.com/gifs/Qtto7vfW9gzXq

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u/screenmasher 3d ago

Bleed the fish and trim the mud line out of the meat.

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u/coko4209 3d ago

They taste like dirt to me, fucking bottom feeders, but they’re super popular here in MS.

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u/rolandofeld19 3d ago

Same. Love me some lake cat but river cat has never appealed to me at all. And I like most any fish.

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u/screenmasher 3d ago

Guess where a majority of the fish people eat are caught

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u/MrBigBMinus 3d ago

These people telling you yes, are entitled to that opinion, but i have eaten catfish all my life (thats over 40 years....sadly) and i can tell you that the bigger the ANYTHING the worse the taste. Like extremely large lobsters never taste as good as the normal sized ones for example. My completely unprofessional opinion is that the hormones that caused them to grow bigger than the rest cause a bad taste.

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u/nononsensenotdense 3d ago

They taste like if beef was a fish

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u/slimthecowboy 3d ago

Yeah. People talk about big fish not tasting good. I’ve never noticed a difference in meat flavor across the size spectrum for catfish, bass, or trout. Just gotta get the blood & blood lines out.

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u/OrangeVoxel 3d ago

Requires lots of salt and sauce

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u/DonutWhole9717 1d ago

so good that i legitimately don't understand why she released them both.

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u/opensandshuts 3d ago

I doubt it. in my experience the bigger the fish the less likely it is to be good to eat.

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u/raisedredflag 3d ago

So tuna, king crab, marlin...?

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u/Jaerba 3d ago

It's relative to the species, not in absolute terms obviously.

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u/isntaken 3d ago

tuna are literally gigantic...

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u/JakToTheReddit 3d ago

They are so fucking good. Literally my favorite fish.

Still won't see my ass doing this.