Fresh trout

The other day my wife and I went to a nearby town to get some fresh trout. We bought it from the farmer who supplies the blackberries for our jams. He has a small, lovely, highly productive farm on the slope of an oak-forested sacred mountain. There are many springs that run from the mountain through his farm, and he has created little ponds along some of them to raise trout.

When we got to the farm, our farmer friend threw a weighted net into the water to gather up trout a few at a time, then drew the net from the water and threw as many fish as we wanted into a burlap sack. The small ones he threw back into the pond. He then took the fish to his concrete laundry basin, where he rinsed and kneaded the by-now dead fish to get rid of the natural mucous coating on their skin. It creates a lot of foam! Finally he tapped them one by one on the head with the back of a knife to make sure they were dead, and gutted them, throwing some of the insides to his assortment of cats and dogs, and keeping the rest to feed to his hogs. The farmer's mother treated us to a glass of blackberry juice made with fruit and milk straight from the farm, and then we weighed the fish and paid the farmer before heading off. We bought 13 fish, for ourselves and some friends who wanted them too. Sort of an incipient CSA or at least a bulk-buying group!

The whole thing was a delightful experience. We forgot to bring the camera, but the next time we stock up we'll be sure to take photos of the whole process. For now I can only offer a picture of the finished dish after my wife had oven-baked it with onions, garlic, curry, potatoes, and lemon wedges stuck into the skin. It was the first fish-cooking experience for both of us, and went surprisingly well.





These were rainbow trout, native to the US's west coast but farmed in temperate areas throughout the world. They are harder to raise than the typical tropical farm fish, carp, tilapia, and cachama--trout are carnivorous, so their feed costs more, and they're more finicky as to water quality, oxygen, etc. In fact, while our rainbow trout were all dead after just a few minutes out of the water, the farmer told us that species like tilapia survive much longer, and if you put them in a bucket of stagnant water, they'll last almost a day! But here in the high plains, warm-water fish can't survive, so trout is the go-to option.

In their native and introduced habitat (rainbow trout are regularly stocked in the Great Lakes and other parts of the world) they can reach 20 or 30 lbs., but farmed trout here in Colombia are harvested at 8 or 9 months, when they weigh a half pound dressed. This is a good size for an eater. Unlike in the States, where we usually eat filets or other already-processed fish morsels, here in Colombia you usually eat an entire fish. So a 30 pounder would not really work!

Rainbow trout is related to salmon, and has a similar life cycle of birth in rivers, adulthood in the sea, and spawning in the rivers they were born in. Unlike salmon, rainbow trout live for more than one spawning. Their flesh is pinkish semi-fatty, full of wonderful Omega 3 acids. I'm not a huge fish eater, but you can see that I'm excited by our direct-from-the-farm trout. Our plan is that next time we go to my father-in-law's farm, which is in a tropical climate area, we'll pick up some trout on the way to take to him, and when we come back we'll stock up on tilapia and cachama from his area.