All season I've been catching pinks, cleaning them and icing immediately, then giving them away and personally eating the kings and silvers. Everyone I've given a pink to has said they tastes great. What is everyone doing with thier pinks?

Eat 'em. I think people who say they're bad are either catching darkies up river or letting their catch sit in the sun all day.

We did blind taste tests twice now between pinks/silvers and pinks/chinook and about half of the people actually preferred the pinks over silvers and most of the people preferred both pink and silver to chinook.

We clean and ice them immediately and eat them the same day. We had a pretty bad experience freezing them.

They also smoke up really well.

If you want to get rid of the slime on the slimmies, put them in the freezer just long enough to freeze the skin. When the skin thaws you can wash off the slime and it dosn't come back. I learned this by accident when the frig temp was set too low.

I don't eat a lot of fish anyway. I give to the guys at work anf they love them. I do try to clean them and get them on ice right away.

I like them some. My wife loves every type of salmon. So most of what I catch goes to her and my daughters.

I barbecue my fresh caught pinks(ginger/teriyaki). Putting them on ice immediately after being caught helps. If I freeze them, I use a Foodsaver vacuum sealer then smoke them later.

I only grill a fish caught same day, but I'll freeze them if I plan on doing some smoking.

That said, since I fish the rivers about 99.9% of the time, I only keep about 1 out of every 5 fish I catch.

I do the same thing with them as other salmon.....catch them, bleed them, keep them cool, BBQ or smoke. I know several people who prefer pinks to other salmon because of their very mild flavor. This is the first year I've actually vacuum packed some filets so will have to see how they turn out when thawed.

I set my cleaned fish on the grass and then hose them down with a gargen hose. The zillions of scales literally fly off and land right on the compost heap!!!!

Well I hope your kids like them. The Alaska senators just rammed through legislation requiring the Government to buy 3.6 milliom pounds of canned pinks to feed our school kids. The reason they did this is there is a huge glut of canned salmon.

I can think of worse things served in school cafeterias... :p

What could possibly be worse than canned pinks?

Hmmm, canned Mackeral...

Matt:

You got me there. I guess there's no accounting for taste. But it does piss me off that my tax dollars are going to bail out commercial fishermen who apparently aren't willing to stop fihing, even when there's no market for their catch.

surecatch, are we going to be spending more money on this canned catfood than other school lunch items? It can't (or shouldn't) be too expensive, given that they're getting less than a dime a lb. for them.

It's not like they're decimating the runs of pinks up there either. Frankly at those prices that's not a bad way to get protein in the diet for cheap.

Check this URL out:

http://www.cf.adfg.state.ak.us/geninfo/finfish/salmon/catchval/history/pink1878.htm

I would have preferred canned pink to Scandinavian Tuna Wiggle when i was in school.

Though the Tuna Wiggle did exhibit some amazing aerodynamic qualities.

Skywalker:
Who said it was cheap? Yes the price paid to the commercials for pinks this year was as low as .02 per lb. But that's not what our government paid to buy it from huge Seattle based fish processors. My point is why fish for something no one wants, then ask the government to buy the unwanted fish. Sounds like welfare for fishermen to me.

Even if the protien is cheap, its of little value when o no one eats it. My guess is damn few yuppie high scholl kids will touch the stuff. I suspect it will go in the garbage with the canned spinach.

wonder if it was one of the gordon (slate) family firms?

I've got to say,Humpies are low on my list of fish to eat. We caught a few at Sekiu a couple weeks back. Even when cleaned ASAP,and packed in ice they still aren't real tasty IMO.