Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Spoonbill Recipes?

Just moved to MO last summer so this is our first experience catching them. The first time we fried them. Not so great. But this time we boiled it in crab boil then dipped in clarified butter and or cocktail sauce. That was a hit! Anybody got any more recipes we might try?

smoke it!

Make caviar out of the eggs. All I ever ate was during the winter and was fried, and good. Later in the year they will taste mossy. miles

I dont have recipe, but I would like to know the area you caught the spoonbill in. MO is my next assignment (FLW).

thanks

SUGV1-I'm pretty sure they catch a lot of spoonbill at Lake of the Ozarks and Tablerock, probably many other places if I were to guess.

I need to run down to the Neosho river dam in Miami, Oklahoma and see if they're running there. When they are, every redneck in a 100 mile radius will be there, shoulder to shoulder almost trying to snag one. Quite entertaining.

My wife worked for the local university until our son was born last December. The engineering school put on an 'end of year luau' and one of the items a student brought was smoked spoonbill. She had started eating before I got my food, I sat down and asked her how she liked her spoonbill, as the filet was half eaten and her mouth was full of it. Her reply as she kind of let it fall to her plate and she spit it out "I thought it was pork".

Oklahoma's wildlife and parks (or whatever they call them down there) put in a spoonbill cleaning station at Miami. You snag one, bring it in and donate it, they trade you out the appropriate amount of meat from fishthat was brought in earlier. The catch being, they keep the eggs and sell as caviar overseas. I read an article in the Joplin paper last year, something on the order of several hundred thousand dollars they'd made doing that. I'm not 100% sure, but I think (in Oklahoma at least) its illegal to sell spoonbill eggs (unless you're the state).

Osceola, MO....this one was a male. The females get a LOT bigger. This one was just big enough to keep. They got a late start this year, due to weather, but are starting to run now. Someone said they tasted like pork. We thought they had that feel in the mouth. In fact, I am thinking of making green chili with it next.

I used to fish the river at Osceola, MO for spoonbill before the Truman Dam was built. One year five of us fished for 1/2 a day there and never hit a fish. Then in 2 hrs we caught nine fish, seven of them ran from 42# to 62#.

They are a strange prehistoric type fish. For those that don't know it, they have absolutely no bones. We deepfat fried them.

We only saved the white meat.