Cornbread summarized this nicely several years ago....
Tonight I was cleaning some perch my GF and I caught earlier in the day and as I was cleaning them I noticed that the way I clean perch means their roe sacks come out fully intact.
“Those kind of look tasty” I said to myself thinking back to salmon roe I have eaten in the past. “I wonder if they are edible?” So I sat down and Googled perch roe recipes and sure enough people said they are good but are “an acquired taste”. I am OK with fishy taste, and I have a really, really, really strong stomach. I can keep pretty much anything down, including bear steak where the bear has been eating fish, which most people can’t even touch without gagging.
So I figured I was a pretty good candidate for acquiring the taste for my new found delicacy. So from what I read they are best deep fried fresh until fully cooked all the way through. So I figured “why not? I’ll toss a few in a pot of hot oil and let them fry while I clean the others and then try them”.
I figured I would try four since they are small, and really what kind of man can’t bolt down four such tiny morsels even if they end up not tasting good, right?
I let them fry for a good long time until they were a deep golden brown. I took the first one out and sliced it in half. The consistency inside looked a bit like cooked pork sausage where the pork is finely ground. I blew on it a little, sniffed it and then popped it in my mouth.
Here were my initial thoughts:
Oh my!.....Oh yes!........I do believe……..yes, I’m positive…….this tastes exactly like the battalion bathrooms smelled after our entire platoon hit them after 60 days in the field during the Gulf War……only fishier.
Well I hate waste so I now was faced with 3.5 more of what can only be described as the culinary equivalent of a swift kick to nuts. Something so foul, it is actually painful to eat.
“I know” I thought “I’ll cover it in good Dijon mustard, that will hide the taste”. I quickly discovered two things. “A”, no it won’t, and “B”, it didn’t. It simply tasted like freeze dried exhaust fumes with Dijon mustard on them. Mmmmmmm Yummy!
Only three more to go.
The next one I tried putting a bunch of salt and pepper on because they kind of look like Chinese wontons so maybe I could fool my taste buds in to thinking they were salt and pepper wontons. Apparently my taste buds don’t care what a deep fried fish turd looks like; they still taste it as a salt and peppery fried fish turd.
Two more to go.
Well maybe if I roll this one in spicy Chinese mustard it will over power my taste buds and I won’t taste the liquid fish butt of the roe? This unexpectedly sort of worked, but I had to use so much hot mustard I was banging the table and crying “sweet love of petunias that stings” as my nose hairs fell out on the table. After the initial blast of mustard crying hotness….yep there it was……the unmistakable taste of that weapon of mass destruction known as perch roe.
One to go.
“How can anything so small, taste so awful?” I thought to myself as I stared down the final piece of fish death waiting quietly on my plate. “I mean those people on the internet who said it was tasty must have liked it……….oh wait”. And then it hit me, those people were probably old Norwegians.
You see I am Norwegian and I come from a background where at Christmas every year when I was little my older relatives would encourage me to “have just a little piece of Lutefisk” because they were sure “I would like it”. Every year, it was the exact same, it still tasted like somebody threw up in my mouth for me, then had me eat it, after they had, had fish earlier that day. I came to realize that my older relatives had gone through something I refer to affectionately as “Tastebudelpause” this is where you become so old that your taste buds no longer work at all. They have simply given up and died ahead of time and are just waiting for the rest of you to follow suit. This is the only possible explanation for how they can eat and enjoy Lutefisk. It must have been these same elderly Norwegians who had posted those perch roe recipes on the internet. Either that or it was somebody playing a really cruel joke on the rest of the internet world.
It is still there, looking at me, defying me to eat it. My stomach is sweating internally in silent encouragement for me to simply toss it in the garbage. No, I will not sink so low, I cooked it, I will eat it!
You know in the fishing regulations where it says “only inedible portions of game fish may be used for bait” or something along those lines? People are always saying “which parts are the inedible portions?”. I’m here to tell you folks, it is the roe of perch they are talking about, only it is so horrible tasting they cannot bring themselves to print those words or people will know they actually tried it once.
It is still there.
“OK Marine!” I say to myself “Time for you to just woof it down boot camp style and get this behind you”. So I do “Oh sweet spawn of all things dark and hideous” I think as the awful, thick taste of liquid fish butt once again passes over my taste buds and in to my stomach, which at this point thinks it has done something terribly wrong and is being punished for it. I try and assure it that no, it has done nothing wrong, because to deserve this level of punishment it would have had to have committed war crimes or something equally awful, no, this is simply a culinary trial gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Then mercifully it is all over, the final one has been consumed. I feel a sense of accomplishment; I too have eaten perch roe!!!! I feel like I should call someone and tell them I have done such an amazing thing, but no, I have a better idea……
………I am off to post a five star review on some of those perch roe recipes so others can enjoy them too
