I don’t mind trout but much prefer Arctic Char , closely related and only freshwater as they are stuck in lakes. Not common in The UK, I’ve mainly had it in Scandinavia.
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I love Arctic char. I didn’t k own it was a freshwater fish. It’s fabulous grilled 
Char lives in Lake Windermere. It’s a relative of the Artic Char and you occasionally see it in local restaurants. I know I’ve eaten it but its so long back I’ve no recollection of how it tastes.
Can’t eat them at all but will make an exception for Arctic char, the kind that really lives in the (high/sub) Arctic, in pristine alpine lakes. They are the least swampy tasting fish, and delicious.
Ate it in Spitzbergen and Churchill. Would consider travelling to a destination where I could eat it again, every day.
Doing a reasonable amount of trout lately through my fish subscription service. I grew up in Central MA, so we would catch a lot of blue gills that my dad would clean and cook for us. I don’t really remember what they tasted like other than they were very boney. I liked the occasional large mouth bass one of us would get better (if only because the fish being larger meant that I wouldn’t encounter the bones quite as quickly in the eating).
Other freshwater critters I like:
-freshwater eel (Maine)
-crawfish
-Artic char (don’t have that often though)
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Growing up the best eating fish was walleye, but I didn’t too often get to go to where they could be found. The “ol’ fishin’ hole” lakes of my youth had crappie and blue gill that were large enough to bother cleaning and were always tasty.
The largemouth bass were good for fighting but not really much in terms of eating, although we did keep and eat sometimes. River fishing, gar was great for a fight, too.
I think my favorite, though, is catfish. I like to eat it and it’s such a hardy fish that it’d still be kicking when we put it in a basin after dangling from a stringer for a 15 minute bicycle ride home.
After I got married and my wife and I moved in together, we lived about a mile from a small county park with a fishing pond. Well, that pond sucked for fishing but wandering around I found a decent sized creek over a rise, behind the park. I’d put out a couple of bank lines on high-test nylon twine each evening and go over the next morning and have a couple of nice channel or blue cats, usually right about the 3 pound range.
My wife left for work a couple of hours before I did so I’d use that time to clean them. I’d put the dish drainer bottom platform down on the kitchen floor, whack a fish in the head with a hammer a few times to kill him, then start cleaning.
One time my wife came back because she’d forgotten something and walked back to find me kneeling on the floor, wailing away at a catfish with blood spattering the cabinets.
Oops. She must have wondered if she’d accidentally married an axe murder.
I saved up a lot of the fish and eventually had about 25 pounds frozen and we invited 15 family and friends over for an “almost 4th of July” fish fry at out new apartment (it was the Sunday before the 4th). Came back from church to the apartment over 80 degrees and the AC not working. Landlord came over to try to figure it out but couldn’t, so the dear guy ran off to a big box store and came back with a monster window unit for us, just in time to get the place cooled down a bit for the party. I’ve never really had a “bad” landlord, but this guy was a real gem.
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depending on sub-species, arctic char spawn in fresh water, but migrate to the ocean. some stay / are land locked in fresh water.
same with steelhead - which are genetically identical to fresh water rainbow trout, but migrate to salt water. they also get mega-bigger than rainbow trout…
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If I didn’t say walleye a crowd with pitchforks and torches would assemble out front.
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I love northern pike. You needn’t filet along the Ybone. I cook the whole thing. Whole trick is getting that slim off of it.
Walleye probably #1, for me, but I eat tons of bluegills and crappies, too. Going to northern WI in a week. crappies are great out of cold water. I go up there with 25-40 other Milwaukeeans, and we take over a resort for a week. Best week of my year, usually. First year, we had a bet, where we all threw in $5 for the person who’d catch the biggest musky. I caught a 17 inch baby and took home the money. JK, I blew it on rounds at the bar. Many years, though, we have great luck and gobble up fresh fish all week. Smallmouths have taken over the rivers in the Flambeau watershed, so we make sure to keep and eat those. In cold, fast water, they’re pretty good. The best is when you’re floating down the Flambeau river and a sturgeon make a jump for it. They come straight up like a vertical torpedo, then go straight back down. Schloop!
I’m blessed to have the Kickapoo river at my fingertips. Brook trout are probably the best tasting fish; but you have to limit your take to 2 per day. Wanna keep them around.
The best fish is the first one a little kid catches. I live for that.
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Dolly Varden, fresh from a British Columbia river. Mr. BR was the fisherman, I would sit on the bank and do crosswords.
Your crowd and my crowd oughtta get together and go bowlin’. My bud, Keith will go out on the Mississippi and he WON’T come home without his limit. I endured a terrible cold, rainy night with him. We will catch our limit. I’m not so die hard.
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Nice catch.
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All my life I’ve wanted to catch a Muskie. I would be out there working the lake like Santiago with the worst kind of unlucky. At least he caught his. I never got mine.
Trout Lappland at the Three Small Rooms restaurant in the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto in 1970. One of the best fish entrees I’ve ever had.
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Unfortunately, the current restaurant in the Windsor Arms is horrible. If you visit TO, eat elsewhere.
Three Small Rooms was legendary and before my time.
I’m a big fan of rainbow trout too, as well as arctic char. But just to throw in something different, grass carp is commonly eaten in Asian cuisine and it happens to be an ingredient in one of my favorite Hong Kong foods - fresh sliced fish congee. It has a light, delicate sweetness to the meat that is delicious when cooked gently.
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I grew up in backwoods America–the upper peninsula of Michigan–with almost unlimited lakes and streams. The most memorable by far for me is stream fishing for brook trout–cleaning and eating them with family at the stream.
Whitefish very difficult except spearing them in the spring–but similar to Halibut. It’s a different story in Lake Superior.
I did similar trout fishing in upstate NY, but much more controlled. At Yellowstone National Park, I caught and feasted on my limit of two large cutthroat trout.
Easiest panfish to prepare are perch–used to know how to get as many as we needed so could eat within an hour of catching.
Whether sea or fresh water, it’s pretty much the same. Catch them and eat them ASAP cooked simply.
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Hands down, Arctic Grayling. I first caught and ate them while on a motorhome trip with my then-boyfriend (later, husband) and his parents in Canada’s Yukon Territory. I’ve had a few more opportunities to catch and eat them waaaay up North over the subsequent few decades; on one two-week trip, half our dinners were grayling, simply dusted with seasoned flour and pan-fried. Fishing for them is a lot like trout fishing. They’ll readily take a lure, and they fight like hell. Their dorsal fins are very large–they’re like gorgeous, miniature sailfish–and this gives them a lot of resistance to being reeled in. Inhabitants of clear, cold, often quickly-moving water, they’re very muscular, clean-tasting (with a sort of nutty flavor) and firm-fleshed, SO good. Their Latin name is Thymallus arcticus, “thymallus” referring to the fact that freshly-caught grayling smell like the herb thyme! My favorite memory of fishing for them: I was working a section of stream within sight of two tourists from Germany; these guys were fishing with lures, like me, but they had tied their lures onto steel pike leader. As diplomatically as I could, I suggested they lose the leader and fish with the lightest gear possible. They nodded impatiently and ignored me, and kept on flogging the water unsuccessfully, while I pulled out one fish after another. They didn’t look happy…but they didn’t change their fishing technique!
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People who don’t clean fish can’t appreciate the beauty of brook trout. That skin is great.
Agreed on the perch. We are very fortunate to still have ample in the Mississippi.
The beauty is in the simplicity of prep. I know of no fancy recipes for any of these fish. Even by the ocean, red snapper is generally prepared simply. My favorite ocean fish.
I live by a a mess of cranberry bogs. I always wonder why they wouldn’t try to raise crawfish in there. Northern mud bugs would be great.
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