In The Field — Gigging for Suckers

Just as the birch syrup season is winding down, in the days that precede the turkey season, there’s a wild food opportunity lurking in the shallow water inlets where snow-melt swollen brooks feed into freshly thawed lakes and ponds.

Weighing between 2 - 6 lbs, Catostomus commersonii, the white sucker fish, feeds on “periphyton” — a complex mix of freshwater organisms clinging to plants, rocks and other objects — as well as invertebrates, algae, and plant matter. These bottom-feeders have fleshy, papillose lips, and no teeth. They essentially vacuum up their food — hence their common name; suckers.

In this Taste of WildFed video, catch a teaser from Season 2 — Daniel gigging for sucker fish.

There’s a tradition of “gigging” them in early spring — spearing them with a long pole tipped with barbed tines — when they congregate to spawn in the shallow pools at the mouth of brooks that feed into larger bodies of still water. Many people use them as garden fertilizer, burying them at the base of plants, though some folks eat them too. Each spring I’ve tried to make them into a food I could look forward to, but it's been a struggle, due to two factors. A distinctly “lake bottom” flavor, and the presence of annoying “Y-bones” situated between their otherwise flakey white flesh.

I’ve had a suspicion that these off-putting tasting notes stemmed from the dark maroon fat of the fishes midline, between the skin and the fillet. This year I skinned the fillet, trimmed off all of the red fat, then cut the fillet into roughly 1” cubes. These were liberally coated in salt and pepper, dredged in corn flour and fried in ghee. The small size of the cubes allowed the heat to break down bones and the resulting fried fish was finally free of the murky, muddy flavor that’s relegated so many suckers to the garden rather than the dinner plate.

These fried fish cubes were paired with a citrus coleslaw and wrapped in a maize and acorn flour tortilla. Now, each spring, we have an annual taco dinner to look forward to just after pulling our birch taps and just before we dust off the turkey decoys. While suckers aren’t a fish I want to stock my freezers with — I’ll stick to saltwater species for that — it's a wild food that deserves another look.