We call them mountain carp, they are for tourists and never kept. The few I have eaten years ago were seasoned and fried in oil. Lemon pepper, garlic, salt you name it, doesn't really matter. Roll them in flour or pancake mix then fry.
I've had them out of a mountain stream, and they are still underwhelming. Trout must taste better to some when they are really hungry or exhausted on a camping or hiking trip.
About the only way I've found to make them palatable is to smoke them which is hard to do right to get all the bones to release together and slip out. I've smoked it then canned it to see if that helped. It didn't. They aren't gross tasting per se, but they aren't good either. Good luck
Let me guess: rainbow trout, 10-11" long, from a stream that's stocked regularly? Just about every stocker I've eaten has tasted muddy, which is not surprising because they eat Purina Trout Chow.
Wild trout are a different animal altogether.
Best recipe I've had was cooked in foil in the campfire coals. We didn't have butter or oil so we wrapped them in thin sliced salami, which cooked up real crisp and was delicious. These were wild cutthroats out of a mountain lake.
