When I want things really easy, I season a fillet with salt and lots of pepper and wrap it in a foil pack with a squeeze of lemon or splash of wine and a bit of butter or olive oil, then cook it outside on a moderate grill.īlues stand up to assertive flavors.
#Bluefish recipes skin
It’s a fish that can be enjoyed in so many ways: grilled, broiled, or smoked, and you can even fry the skin into crisp chips. But sidestepping the sensible “it’s-good-for-you” bit, they’re also rich, and, as cooks know, fat equals flavor. Smith tells of one late delivery after a slow day - when he pulled in at Hatch’s, he says, “There was a line out the door and folks started clapping!”īluefish are high in omega-3 fatty acids, something we need to eat more of. His methods are a big reason people on the Outer Cape seek out the blues when they’re in season. The proof is in the fish case: the flesh is firm and translucent steely blue and smells sea sweet - nothing fishy about it.
Smith is committed to delivering the freshest fish, so he drives directly from the boat to the markets - no middleman. “By the time we got them off the boat and filleted them, the flesh was like mashed potatoes.” “We would catch beauties, but just toss them into coolers without ice,” Smith recalls. This is a game changer from his old charter days. The fish are dispatched immediately - he bleeds them with a cut to the throat - then they’re gutted and cleaned and slipped into a slurry of ice water within minutes. Then he guides his boat to set the net in a large circle, while the crew makes a racket to drive the fish into the net. He starts the season fishing near Chatham, not far from his home port in Hyannis, and follows the fish, so that by July he’s fishing just outside Provincetown Harbor.īlues are eating machines, Smith says: “You want to see a feeding frenzy before a set.” He looks for a slick on the water and sniffs the air for “a watermelon-like aroma” that confirms they’re at it. Smith came back home to focus on fishing for blues here in 1981. He calls it strike netting as opposed to gillnetting, because the fish are pulled up and removed from the netting right away.
Over the years, he has refined a technique he first saw practiced in Florida, where he worked on crews for several years right after he graduated from Cape Cod Tech. He no longer catches blues with a rod and reel, except when testing whether the fish are biting. His family moved to Orleans from Connecticut when he was 10 years old and he got his first fishing job when he was 12, working part time on Stu Finlay’s charter boat, the Empress, out of Rock Harbor. Smith has spent the past four decades fishing for blues. They “strike like a blacksmith hammer,” wrote John Hersey in his 1988 classic, Blues. They’ll put up a fight that anglers love. Also, the fishery is primarily recreational, with only 20 percent of the catch landed commercially.īlues are feisty, with nasty knife-like teeth and voracious appetites (even for their own kind). (Photo David Hills)įreshness rules when it comes to blues, which is why they don’t have wide distribution off Cape. Tom Smith harvesting bluefish on his F/V Sea Wolf. His blues were “stiff as a board,” not from freezing, he explained, but in rigor, a true mark of fastidious handling. The fish inside were magnificent, with vibrant golden eyes, ruby gills, and shimmering sea green-indigo skin.
Bluefish, as his T-shirt tagged him, jumped into his flatbed and opened an oversize blue cooler. When I asked him about the catch, Smith, a.k.a. He is the fisherman who has been feeding my love of bluefish for over two decades.
Behind the wheel was Tom Smith, captain of the F/V Sea Wolf. On a recent trip I knew the season was on when I saw a truck emblazoned with a familiar logo. In high summer, I make a near-daily pilgrimage to Hatch’s, behind Wellfleet’s town hall. What we know is that, handled right, bluefish are extremely fine eating. Detractors there moan about them being “too oily” or “fishy.” But Cape Codders wait hungrily for this season. Bluefish are misunderstood on the mainland.
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