{"id":20,"date":"2006-09-08T19:12:54","date_gmt":"2006-09-08T23:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/fish-guts-and-cod-tongues\/"},"modified":"2006-09-18T02:51:26","modified_gmt":"2006-09-18T06:51:26","slug":"fish-guts-and-cod-tongues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/biologist\/fish-guts-and-cod-tongues\/","title":{"rendered":"Fish guts and cod tongues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been busy with school administrative stuff and field work in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cape_Breton_Island\">Cape Breton<\/a> recently. Luckily, I did have the opportunity to go halibut longline fishing with one of the guys up here. That should really be &#8216;halibut&#8217; fishing. We only saw one (undersize) the whole trip. It was quite a change from fishing on the west coast where even research  boats can catch <a href=\"\/images\/Work\/halibut_catch.html\">thousands of pounds of halibut<\/a> a day.<\/p>\r\n<!--more-->\r\n<p>So my halibut trip ended up being more of an Atlantic cod, hake, and haddock trip but that was still pretty interesting because I had never seen them up close before. This gave me the &#8216;opportunity&#8217; to gut a couple thousand pounds of these groundfish. I had never noticed before how different similar species can smell. They each had their own distinctive smell and I could tell from across the boat whenever someone opened up a haddock. This made me wonder how I had never noticed any smells when I was up observing in Alaska. I realized the only fish anyone ever gutted was halibut so I missed out on the olfactory differentiation of the guts of the Alaskan fishes. Or maybe I was just too cold, hurried, stinking of fish and tired to notice. If I&#8217;m ever up that way again I&#8217;ll have take the time to appreciate the bouquets.<\/p>\r\n<p>Anyway since I had just been out for the ride and had managed to help out slightly more than I had gotten in the way (and since they&#8217;re really nice guys), the fishermen offered me some of their prized cod tongues. I had never realized anyone ate cod tongue before. But here in Nova Scotia and, I gather Newfoundland, all the fishermen take extra time to cut out each cod&#8217;s tongue and save it in a special bucket for themselves. This is a little odd since it takes about as much time to gut a fish as it does to cut out its tongue. I gather they really look forward to eating the tongues.<\/p>\r\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"center\" title=\"Raw cod tongues\" alt=\"Raw cod tongues\" src=\"\/images\/Personal\/Food\/Cod_Tongues\/codtongues.jpg\" \/><\/p>\r\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Frying cod tongues\" alt=\"Frying cod tongues\" class=\"left\" src=\"\/images\/Personal\/Food\/Cod_Tongues\/codtonguescook.jpg\" \/><\/p>\r\n<p>So I took my bag of cod tongues and set out to taste the culinary delights of Cape Breton. If you ever find yourself in possession of a mess of cod tongues and want to fry them up, you&#8217;ll need:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>Bisquick (or flour)<\/li>\r\n<li>Pepper<\/li>\r\n<li>Salt<\/li>\r\n<li>Egg<\/li>\r\n<li>Cod tongues, of course<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>After dipping the tongues in egg and covering with Bisquick, salt, and pepper, I fried them until they were white all the way through, about 7 minutes if I remember correctly. Now all I had to do was take the plunge and give them a try.<\/p>\r\n<p>It turns out cod tongues are pretty tasty. To me they tasted a bit different from the rest of the cod although the girlfriend was not convinced. The texture certainly was different. Half of the tongue is like jelly. This is a texture I am not at all used to having fish flavored and after the novelty started to wear off, I have to admit I didn&#8217;t really care for this part of the tongue. I learned later that this part is called, unsurprisingly, the jelly and most of the fishermen don&#8217;t like it all that much themselves. The non-jelly part was definitely tasty and had a nice texture so I definitely would recommend trying cod tongues if the opportunity ever arose.<\/p>\r\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"center\" title=\"Fried cod tongues\" alt=\"Fried cod tongues\" src=\"\/images\/Personal\/Food\/Cod_Tongues\/friedcodtongues.jpg\" \/>\r\n<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I&#8217;ve been busy with school administrative stuff and field work in Cape Breton recently. Luckily, I did have the opportunity to go halibut longline fishing with one of the guys up here. That should really be &#8216;halibut&#8217; fishing. We only saw one (undersize) the whole trip. It was quite a change from fishing on the [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[50,49,539,517,45,707,46,47,48,25,674,549],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}