3 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD BUY YOUR FISH WHOLE

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We’ll get to the fish bacon part in a sec, but if you like to eat fish, then this week’s posts is all about how you can level up your fish consumption.

Reason 1: Whole Fish is Cheaper

I’ve talked about this a bunch on my YouTube channel, but the upshot of this idea is that when you buy fish fillets you’re paying for the labor of someone breaking down the fish into parts.

Fair enough. Breaking down a fish may not be your thing, but if you’re into saving about 30% on the fish you consume, you should think about learning the skill of becoming your own fish monger.

Ever since moving to Michigan in 2022, and catching lake trout in Lake Michigan, I’ve been obsessed with these cold water native fish relatives. They are fun to catch, are incredibly gorgeous inside and out, and available year-round in the Great Lakes region.

The price difference between buying lake trout fillets and buying a whole lake trout is $7/pound at Whole Foods. The same for a more popular species like halibut, which is a really fun fish to fillet.

Getting to know your local fish monger is a worthwhile relationship to cultivate. Every single one I’ve met has always been super excited with me as a customer who processes at home.

The tools and skills you need to save money mongering at home are within reach and rewards are multiple in number. Start with this free FISH PROCESSING GUIDE, and the content referenced in this post!

Reason 2: It’s More Sustainable

Ask anyone living in the U.S. about food waste in this country and most will tell you we do a lot of it as a nation. Food waste is nearly 40% of all food produced to the tune of nearly half a trillion dollars thrown away! It’s a problem, but, at least when it comes to fish, it doesn’t have to be.

One of the things I love about working with wild and whole foods is the control over the bodies you consume. Most USians who consume fish eat only eat the fillets, or the body muscle of this fish. And with good reason. Fish fillets are probably the easiest portion of this fish to cook with. Boneless and skinless (if you want) high protein slabs of yumminess.

But there are other delicious parts of a fish that often times go to waste by large-scale processors or at home fish mongers. Fish heads, collars, and bellies are some of the most flavor-packed and nutritious parts of the animal that many people don’t even know about.

Buying whole puts those often discarded parts of the fish right in front of you and forces you to deal with them. And chances are if you paid for those parts, you’ll be more inclined to use them rather than throw them away.

What’s the point of saving 30% on the cost of fish to just throw away that 30% when you process it at home.

GRILLED FISH HEADS AND RAMEN PICS

When you bring the whole fish home, you’re more inclined to use the whole animal and thus take more care with the life that was taken to nourish yours. At the end of the day, I believe the overconsumption problem we have in this society stems from a lack of good relations with our food.

A society that primarily interacts with their food in parts rather than the whole animal will ultimately find it easier to commodify and exploit said relatives rather than treat their existence with respect and a desire for sustained relations.

Fish Bacon

All bacon comes from the belly of animals where there’s this beautifully delicious combination of belly fat and abdominal muscle. Add a little salt and smoke and you’ve got something truly heavenly.

Most people have only had bacon from a pig, myself included, though I dabble in bacon of the turkey and once had bear bacon. But last year I had a brainwave after catching lake trout for the first time; these fish are like the pigs of the Great Lakes. Just absolutely full of fat, which makes sense given these fish spend the majority of their lives in deep cold water.

So when I bought some lake trout from Whole Foods, I thought it’d might be good to freeze the bellies separately and make a meal of them later, but I didn’t know what kind of meal you make with fish bellies. A YouTube search doesn’t yield much other than battered and fried fish bellies, but I was looking for something with a little more flare.

Holy sh*t was that a good idea!

Whenever trying out a new food I’ve found it’s best to cook said ingredient simply. This way, you get a clear sense of what the new food you’re using actually tastes like. Plus, you can almost never go wrong with cooking animals over charcoal.

So took the bellies out of the freezer, salt and peppered them and fired up the grill. The result was something so close to pork bacon it made my knees buckle. I could feel the omega-3 fats coursing through my veins like I had just swallowed an entire bottle of cod live oil pills. I mean that in a good way.

Grilled fish bacon has all the qualities of pork bacon; crispy, salty, chewy, fatty, smoky. Four good sized bellies are a meal all on their own, but I had plans for my new favorite part of the fish, Onigiri!

You ever watch the show Nailed It! where contestants try to recreate intricate cakes and ultimately fail because they’re not good at baking or decorating? Well, I’m a pretty good cook, but my trout belly onigiri did not turn out as good as Taku’s monkey-faced eel onigiri here in this episode of Outdoor Chef Life.

Still, my onigiri were delicious. The crispy, chewy, salty, fattiness of the grilled bellies played so well with the sticky, starchy, slightly sweet taste and texture of the sushi rice. I need to tweak the stickiness of my rice to get this dish right, but it will happen I’m sure.

If you do decide to make fish bacon, do so outdoors. I wouldn’t attempt cooking lake trout bellies on anything other than charcoal. There’s going to be a lot of fat flying, so unless being outside really helps minimize the collateral damage of cooking fatty foods at a high heat.

The texture, taste, and mouthfeel of charcoal grilled lake trout bellies is incredible and something you should definitely try. If you don’t have access to lake trout, you can do the same with any salmon species or salmonid. But you’ve got to buy the whole fish to get the bacon.

MORE OTJ CONTENT

One Year as a Content Creator

If you read newsletter post from two weeks ago then you know some of this story, but I talk about some elements of my year on YouTube in more detail in this week’s video. This first year on YouTube has flow by and I’ve learned so much. Thank you all for your continued support

WILD KITCHEN UPDATE

Tomatoes!

Did you know tomatoes are native to Turtle Island? For a food so synonymous with some European foods — namely Italian food — I was surprised to learn this a number of years ago. The fruit caught on quick in other places to the point where many cultures consider tomatoes a staple crop.

If you’re looking for a great variety of delicious heirloom tomatoes to grow in your garden, check out TWO SEEDS IN A POD. Mehmet and Amy have an incredible variety of plants you can grow, including one of the most delicious and prolific tomato varieties I’ve ever had, THE WEST VIRGINIA PEPPER PASTE TOMATO.

CONSIDER THIS

The Only Charcoal Grill You Should Buy

At some point I’d like to own a big fancy ceramic grill like THE BIG GREEN EGG, but until then, give me a WEBER GRILL over everything else. I’ve spent money on all sorts of other charcoal grills and a basic Weber is hands down the best out there. It’s simple, it’s affordable, it just works. If you’re in the market for a charcoal grill, buying a non-weber grill is a waste of money in my mind.

BUSINESS FOCUS

New Product on OTJ!

If you’re thinking about creating video content for your own YouTube channel then one of the things that helped me tremendously was having an episode template. The purpose of a template is to help reduce the work your brain needs to do when creating. Humans are really good at creativity and detailed structure, but most of us can’t do both at the same time; not at a high level at least.

Having a template for whatever repeated work we engage in is so helpful because we don’t have to keep track of the structure, we just have to fill in the creative content.

You can download my YouTube Episode Template for free and take a look at how I create episodes for my channel and perhaps use my structure to start your own channel.

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan