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Anyone else eat these?

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6.6K views 100 replies 40 participants last post by  eyeFISH  
#1 ·
Caught a couple fish today. My grandparents gave me hell when I told them I eat the hearts, livers, and milt sacks of all the salmon and steelhead I catch.
Surely I’m not the only one who eats the organs from salmon?
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#3 ·
I tried a milt sack once cut it up and sauteed in garlic butter. it was okay, nothing to write home about. If I had a tried and true recipe that made them delicious I would probably save them myself. Good job by you for making good use of all of the fish. I'm sure there are ways to make them taste really good.🤔 so how do you like to cook them?
 
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#4 ·
I’m with you. I just pan fry them and make a sauce to dip them in. They are by no means my favorite part of the fish. But, I always feel strong and energetic the day after I eat them, so I always keep them.

I will admit, I started getting grossed out by it this fall when I was catching a lot of coho, just from eating too much of it.

I heard once that if you slice thin and bread and fry them they are just like fried oysters. Tried it, wasn’t even close.

I'm hoping someone will share a good recipe.
 
#17 ·
Not my cup of tea, but if you like em, more power to you!

I like utilizing everything I can out of the animals I kill, I smoke the bellies and bones, and I am frequently appalled at how wasteful people are with wild caught fish. When I look in the dumpster, I am disgusted by the lack of skill, care and efficiency that people process fish and game with.

I save the livers, hearts and gizzards out of the birds I shoot, share em with the dog or grind em into sausage. Fish offal is not something I have explored, maybe I will.

Benthic fish like rockfish and halibut almost always have anasakis on their liver and in their abdominal cavity. Salmon can have anasakis, although I have never seen it all over their liver like a halibut. The interwebs say the pic below is from a chum salmon liver.

Image

I am not super interested in a roundworm infection, so I would be very careful about cooking everything pretty thoroughly before I ate any.
 
#19 ·
I usually make new folks eat the raw still beating heart out of a salmon the first time they fish on my boat. We remove the intestines etc. out of salmon right after catching before they go in the cooler. This presents the opportunity to heat the still beating heart which will continue to beat for about 60-90 seconds after removing from the salmon. I'd post a video if I knew how.
 

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#25 ·
I eat salmon liver and hearts. I do it Venitian-style, thin-sliced, cooked with onions (lots) and vinager. (Venitian liver is generally veal fwiw). It's pretty good, but better if the pan is mostly onions honestly. I'm careful to cut the gall bladder (green bubble) off without piercing it when I remove the liver from the fish. The hearts go in the pan too, but they are smaller, tougher, and don't add much compared to the size of the livers. A chinook liver from a 20+ fish can go maybe 1/2 pound? That's a lot of nutrition to waste IMHO.
 
#28 ·
Never tried the liver of a fish but why not if it is big enough to make it worth while. Cod liver oil is mostly shark liver oil. I do eat the roe as caviar (marinated in salt brine for a couple of hours) and have on occasion cooked up the milt sacks but they are nothing special. The fat on a fish is where all the toxins tend to collect.

Do use caution in eating the roe and milt of some fish. Cabezon milt and roe are toxic. Most other rock fish are fine.

  • Symptoms of cabezon egg poisoning, also known as ichthyootoxism, include abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, intense thirst, bitter taste, trouble swallowing, cold sweats, rapid irregular weak pulse, and dilated pupils. In severe cases, symptoms include muscular cramps, convulsions, and coma.


 
#33 ·
Fair enough. By the end of the season this year the organs were starting to gross me out by themselves, since I was eating a pile of them every time I caught a fish.

I need more recipes for milt. I have cooked sea urchin gonads into pasta sauce before and it came out great… maybe salmon milt would be good that way too.
 
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