I was given a fresh-caught a couple days ago, and promptly sliced up some steaks and fried it. Lovely! Kingfish is a mackerel, one of the larger ones. The offer a nice fight, and if properly handled and prepared, a tasty meal.

However, being a rather oily fish, they tend to go bad quickly if mishandled or left too long. If you’ve eaten kingfish and it tasty strong or fishy, my bet is that it was NOT fresh or wasn’t handled well when it was caught.

After eating my fill of kingfish, I had several pounds left over. Wanting to try something new, I opted to try drying it in my Excalibur dehydrator.

Here is the process I used.

• Catch a fish. Put it on ice immediately. Clean it while it is FRESH!
• Slice the fish into boneless chunks, no thicker than 1/2 and inch. Skin optional. Mine was skinless.
• Make a brine of 1 tbs of non-iodized salt per cup of water
• Soak the fish slices in the brine for 2 – 4 hours. (I screwed this part up, see results below)
• Place in the dehydrator on “High” for 6-8 hours.
• Start to test consistency after 5 hours, and when it is dry with little flexibility left, you are done. If you like a little more snap to it, let it dry another few hours. I like mine D!R!Y!

As to choices of fish, less oily is better for long term storage. If you are like me, it doesn’t matter much, dried foods like fish and meats tend to be short-term snacks with a required shelf life of days, if not hours. I just eat it up!

The end result? Well, it tastes like salty fish…or maybe fishy salt. Not horrible, but not a lot of variety of flavor. It will probably work great at making a fish stock, though. (I screwed up when I brined the fish, forgetting about it for about 12 hours. The end result was simply too much salt. So be sure to watch the clock while brining fish!)

That’s the “bad” news – it is just not that flavorful. The good news is that I made this batch as a test run to see how feasible it was was to make an edible product out of a readily available local protein source.

I’ll be making another batch soon, and I’ll be kicking it up a notch, as Emeril would say. Lemon pepper would be a great combo for this. Or cayenne and lime.  An hour or two in a smoker would also add to the flavor, though I could cheat and use some liquid smoke as part of the brine. Whatever I do, I’ll continue to try out things to improve on the flavors. The product itself, and the process, is sound.

Peace,
db

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