Fishing For Sockeye Salmon | The Alaskan Grocery Store

All right, it's 5.15 in the morning, we're going fishing. All right, we got our ice, we're going to head down to Seward. We're going on our first salmon fishing trip of the season. We're going after sockeyes. All right, guys, 11 in the morning, we've made it to Seward. We're going to get all geared up, get our waders on, get our poles ready. All right, it is packed here, no surprise, since the fishing is supposed to be pretty good. We're going to head out there and see what we can do. So it's an absolutely beautiful area, as you can probably tell behind me, not the most glorious day. And we've been here before, there's quite a few areas to fish. A lot of people are spread out, I'm not sure where we're going to be fishing, but we do know that we are here to snag sockeyes, which is the second run up here, the Chinook coming in first, and then the sockeyes, and the sockeyes are absolutely delicious. Okay, well, the goal today is to catch our limit. The limit here is six fish each, six in possession. So we can't wait till tomorrow and catch another six. So all in all, perfect day, we'd walk away with 12 sockeye salmon. We're going to go to a creek over there, I think that's where we're going to start fishing. All right, it looks like there's some action up here, a bunch of people are pulling fish up on shore. A lot of the times they'll come through in like little schools, and people will just wait until other people start catching them, and then they'll start casting their lines in and you can catch a fish. Very nice gentleman out here, just gave us a bigger hook. We got the number eights, this is the number 10, he was saying that these do a little better out here. So we've got another hook we can try. Okay, we've got our first one, beautiful fish. Five more to go for me. Here, I got the club for you. There, like that. Oh my God, this one's a shark. Action was good for a little while, but we haven't had anything in about 20 minutes, and we got these three, nice looking fish. We're going to head over to that other creek over there, looks like there's some fish starting to show up over there. It's a stick, it's a stick. Oh, the white one. Nice job. Thanks, Eric. Can you get it to shore? Not on the fin. Oh, I had him pretty good. You had him on all three, but it was coming out. Had to work for that one. I lost one out there. I'm going to get back out there, see if I can get another. There we go, there we go. So we're down to one pole because one of them is not working properly. So Eric's fishing, he's going to get his limit pretty soon, I think, and then I'm going to hop in there. I just want to show you a closeup of these fish. They're absolutely beautiful when they come out, and then they kind of darken up a little bit once they've been sitting, but they're a good fish. Sockeye is one of our favorites. You going to take him out to shore? All righty. Fishing's hot. They're coming in. They're coming in good out there. Okay, well, I had good luck out here. I got my six fish. We ended up really far from the truck, so it's taken a long time to lug these all the way back to the cooler, and I'm just using this piece of barricade, so it's digging into my hands. I'm trying to drag them up the river. We're going to go back to the truck. We're going to take a little break. Let the dogs out. We've got to eat something. It's exhausting fishing out here. Snagging, just jerking this big weight back. Throwing it out there again. Jerking it back. All right. So we're going to go take a little break, and hopefully Errol will have a little better luck next time we go out. All righty. Eating good out here. Homemade bagels and egg salad. Gentle. All right. We are refueled and refreshed, and we are heading back out there to catch my fish. Are you okay? Yeah. Okay. We did it. I caught my limit as big as yours, but that's okay. Not for me. Beautiful. Okay. That's it. That's a wrap. I don't even know what time it is, but I don't think it's that late. Got really lucky today, and a lot of people are doing really good out here. So we're going to head back. We're going to get to go home today. I'm so excited. Well, we're just kind of basking, taking things in. I guess that's a better word for this situation. It's really, really fun out here, but it's a lot of work. It's extremely hard. I mean, you're just casting, casting, casting, and you don't give up. Sometimes it's not as easy as this. We came, and I think we've been here under five hours, but I mean, we've definitely done a lot longer than that before to get our fish. We came around high tide, so it worked out really well for us. And again, it's just, it's a lot of work. We only lost one hook, my fault, and everything else went really good. I think we only had, I don't think I had any get off. I think Eric maybe had two get off. A lot of people come out here, as I'm sure you can see, and it gets a little tricky. It's called combat fishing. This isn't the worst in the world, but that's why we always have glasses on, because, you know, we've got these huge troubles. And I mean, you can only imagine what that would feel like in your face. So we like to wear our glasses at all times out here. You just got to be patient and know that everyone's out here for the same thing. We all want to go home with some sockeyes. This guy's on his phone. Okay, that cooler is officially full of salmon. Do they fit? Barely fit, yeah. It barely fits. Well, that trip definitely worked out great for us. We left here about 5 in the morning. We drove 200 miles. We caught our fish. We drove 200 miles back. Didn't stop for a nap or anything this trip. We got home about 9 o'clock last night. Transferred the fish to a bigger ice chest, put two bags of ice on them. We got a couple laid out here on the table. We are going to get to work. We're going to fillet all of these fish. We got 12 of them to do. These are the first red salmon, the sockeyes that we've caught down in Seward. We've caught the silvers there, but never the sockeyes. These have beautiful red meat. This stuff looks delicious. Ariel's going to come in here. She's going to use the ice cream scraper. She's going to scrape off the remaining meat that I missed with the fillets. Look at that one. That's a big one. It's a beauty. The color of this salmon is absolutely phenomenal. It's like a vibrant salmon color, I guess. We probably all know that color. It's like a vibrant orange-red color. Very, very pretty. We've eaten sockeyes from different places that have traveled further upstream. This is probably the freshest sockeye we've gotten before. Eric's processed a lot of salmon, and they're super slippery. We finally ordered a fish mat that is on its way, so I hope that helps us in the future. These guys usually just slip all around on this stainless steel table. We discovered last season that we love to scrape them, scrape the carcass, and get this mush out of it. It makes really awesome patties or dip. You could probably make a lot of different things out of it. We like to use it for patties. I wanted to give one of these bad boys a go. It's definitely a little tricky to do. I haven't filleted that many salmon myself. These ones look really awesome. There's not really any worms. I think we found two, so that's really great for us. This particular fish was a lady. Eric's going to hop back in here because we have a lot more fish to process. Things are going good. Had to get back in the groove of filleting salmon. It's been eight months, nine months? Yeah, it's been a while. Probably going to end up with about a five-gallon bucket full, which is going to be great. We're going to do quite a few things. We're going to freeze a lot of them. These will be our fresh eating and freezing ones that we just pull out of the freezer and eat just as fish fillets. We're also going to make some sushi, which I've been looking forward to it since almost a year. Really excited to do that. What else are we doing? I'm probably going to try some of the eggs. I don't know what we're going to be doing exactly with them. We've done caviar, but I don't know. I may just want to try some of them. That's all. Ariel, she's scraping the meat. She's got a nice big bucket full of meat. This is what we call fish burger meat. We just freeze it like that in vacuum-sealed bags, and then we're ready to eat it. I thaw it out, and I'll kind of mince it up, and we'll form it into burgers, and it makes a really good fish burger. We're going to eat some of those, too. The extras this time around are going to be going to the chickens, since we don't really have a lot coming out of the garden right now for them. In the future, we'll probably use it for the dogs we're potentially composting. Like Eric said, I'm really excited to have these fresh salmon. In my opinion, once it's been in the freezer for a while, it starts to go downhill, even vacuum-sealed. But I think that we're going to be eating these in the next few months. That'll be perfect. Definitely. It's been a long time since we've had fresh salmon. Fresh salmon, yeah. We've been eating our canned salmon. Look at that. That's my best fillet yet. That's a beauty. That's a good-looking one. You know what's interesting is that was a really small, straight fish. We're going to be weighing this fish because... That's one of the bigger ones. Yeah. I'm thinking 9 pounds. Well, I always use my cat as a reference. 7 to 8. Really? Yeah. It's like small, peppy version. It's not as big as Hunter was. Yeah. Spot on. It's about 7. Almost 7 pounds, yeah. It doesn't feel as heather as pepper or cat. So that's what a 7-pound fish looks like. This is one of the bigger ones. We had a few small. Actually, this was the average size. There were some bigger. Maybe 2 feet long? Probably 24. Beautiful. Sakai and silvers are our favorites. And fishing, this happens every time we go fishing. We go on these long trips and then we're so tired. And then as soon as we get home, we're like, let's go fishing again. It's almost addictive. Yeah. It's kind of crazy because we're still recovering. We ended up with quite a bit. We have almost this 5-gallon bucket full. Errol scraped a ton of meat off all the salmon. We're going to go give some of the carcasses to the chickens and we're going to get these inside freezer bags. Well, it started to rain on us, but we're chugging right along. We got all of our salmon packaged. Actually surprised how much salmon that we got off of that fish. Those Sakais were the biggest we've caught. So it's going to be awesome having that for kind of just like sauteing, pan frying, just however you want to eat your salmon. Next, we're going to work on curing some salmon. Last year when we made our sushi, we made something called Gravelax and that used salt, sugar, herbs, and vodka. It was really good, but we're going to not use the vodka this time. We're kind of just going to do a cure. We're going to do salt, sugar. We're going to do some herbs. We've got dill and chives and then this is just going to sit in the fridge for a few days and we're going to flip it about every day and then we're going to be ready to make our sushi out of this. So this is extremely easy to do. You're just going to heavily coat it in the herbs and then we're going to heavily coat it in the salt and the sugar. And I'm going to lay the other piece on top and like I said, about every day we're going to go ahead and flip it so the bottom piece can kind of absorb some of that salt and sugar. As far as worms go, we did find a few worms in some of our other pieces. Not many at all. So I think what we're going to do with these is when we slice into them and use them for the sushi, we're just going to keep an eye out and hopefully don't see any worms in there. If we do, we're not going to eat that piece. Okay, piece of cake. Gravlax is done. This is going in the fridge. Packaged salmon is going in the freezer. Well, we were cooking outside to celebrate the salmon we caught, but it started raining on us. So we're back inside. We're still going to celebrate this salmon. We're going to make an awesome dinner. We're going to do salmon burgers or salmon patties. Basically, this is the stuff that Ariel scraped out of the salmon. I minced it up real fine. Salt and pepper, a little bit of chives. We're also going to try something new, and this is one of the collars off of the salmon. So we're pretty excited to try that. Getting some stuff from the garden, which is awesome. Some of the things that are ready out there, the Thai side, bok choy. We've got some mustard, so we're going to do a little stir fry. We've got some rice noodles over here. First thing we're going to do, get these shaped into burgers, and we're going to start cooking some salmon. So Ariel's the one that wanted to try the collar. We've heard about it. We just never have done it for some reason. So she went ahead and took one of those carcasses that we were going to give to the chickens and she cut the collar out of it. It looks pretty good. It's supposed to have a lot of good flavor in there. So we're just going to do a little salt and pepper on it. And we're going to cook these in olive oil. Alright, salmon's looking great. Let's get started on our stir fry. Okay, the salmon patties are done, the collar's done. That looks like it's going to be really good. The stir fry, we added some rice wine vinegar, some soy sauce, salt and pepper, cracked a couple eggs in there. That's just about done. We're getting close to dinner time. I wanted to also say that we made some caviar. Again, we've done this before. It is a little tedious to clean the eggs, but I felt like it was well worth it. I'm excited about salmon season. And it's really, really good. We only brined it for... Four minutes. Four minutes this time in some salt water. So you just clean the eggs in some hot water. It takes a while. You've got to shake them up a little bit. Strain them. Then you put them in the brine. And then they are ready to eat. I'm actually not going to be eating those, but you are. I am going to. I have some of this on my stir fry. This looks good. That patty is juicy. This is an awesome time of year. It's just fresh salmon, which we just don't get all the time in Alaska. There's a season for it. So, I'm very excited for this. How do you want to eat that? Do you want to cut it? Or like... Let's just pick at it real quick. Oh, there's a bone. I'm just going to pick a piece off and see what it tastes like. I think I was actually going to eat it like a chicken wing. What? When Eric processes the fish, he fillets them really well to not really waste a lot of this. But there's a little bit of... A little meat in there, yeah. A little meat. It's good. It just tastes like... It doesn't taste any different than the salmon. Yeah. It doesn't have much... I mean, it's delicious, but not like any different, right? No. Maybe a little more tender? I would say... Mm-hmm. It seems a little moister. A little moister. A little softer. No flavor difference at all. But it's good. Mm-hmm. We've caught sockeye salmon at various different places in Alaska. So, we're going to just compare this kind. Yep. This is the Seward Red Salmon. We love the patties. When we discovered the method of like scraping the salmon out, you just end up with like these shreds or chunks in a bag. And we started making burger patties out of them. They're just so good. And this is delicious. Oh my gosh. There's something about the fish when they start running and coming up the rivers. Their body's changing. As we all know, they're spawning. But they put on like... They get more of fat. Mm-hmm. They get more flavor, I feel like. I know. And although this is... It's delicious. I'm not downplaying this. I can tell the difference. It, to me, is more... It's reminding me of like the silver salmon. Less intense flavor. More... I don't know. To me, it tastes like... Plain? No? It doesn't taste as strong as sockeye salmon that we can, at least. Yeah. Well, I mean, it doesn't... Fresh salmon never usually tastes like fish. This doesn't taste like fish at all. To me, it tastes like a slightly salty meat. It's really good. I enjoy it. Yeah. Absolutely not fishy at all. It is good. We actually have a season that we call stir-fry season. It's really short. It's when all those mustards and Asian greens are growing out there. They will bolt soon, so two, three weeks max. We get some noodles for this special occasion for this time of the year. Yeah, we eat stir-fry like every night. We just pack a huge bowl full of greens in there, spinach. Kales will be ready pretty soon. And we just make stir-fries. And then next, it's lettuce season. Yep, we'll be eating a lot of salad. How's your caviar on there? It's delicious. Adds a little hint of salt. I really like this stir-fry. Well, I think we both agree that this meal was a really nice treat. Great way to start off the summer season. I'm telling you. We will see you guys two to three days when the cured salmon is done. We're ready to make our sushi. I like it. To me, I'm having that deja vu of when we first tried the silver salmon. And I was like, hmm. Hmm. I know that sounds weird, but it's so fresh. You talking about that or that? This, it's so fresh that it almost lacks. I'm not thinking that at all. To me, this just tastes like some of the best salmon I've had. See, I feel like I would really like those copper reds. Well, I don't know about you, but my favorite food is definitely sushi. This is the second time we've made it. And it looks just as good as we made it the first time. I'm really excited to try this. We let it cure for about two and a half days. We were a little impatient on that part because we wanted to eat this meal. And yeah, the cured, what did you think about it? Just like that. It's good. We ate it just like this. It's salty. It's delicious. It's fresh. You taste the herbs? I taste the herbs. I taste the dill a lot. It tastes like a dill sauce. It's really good. You could let it go longer, but it's good. It is on the saltier side. It's good. Good texture. And then to go along with the sushi, we have some seaweed on there. We made the sushi rice, which is just white rice. We do some rice wine vinegar there, salt, and sugar. And for dipping, soy sauce with a little bit of wasabi. And we got some of this caviar, cured salmon roe. Remove the eggs. Not yet. Too much. Too much in there. I should probably mix it up a little more. So good. Love it. That salmon's awesome. Just like last time. It's so good. It just, it just, it tastes like loxer. I mean, just, it's cured salmon. It's good. But it also has, it's reminiscent of sushi as well. Really, really good. Turned out excellent. The color too, of course, still there. Oh no. Last time we made this sushi, I made the mistake of not making enough sushi rice. So I had to whip up another batch and let it cool. This time I made double the amount so we have tons more rice. We got a whole nother filet and a half of salmon. So we're going to make a lot more sushi here tonight. Like Eric said, it's a very special treat for us. Very happy to have it. And just excited to have fresh salmon again. Yes. We will see you guys on the next video. See ya. Caviar and all these. I can't, I gotta be honest, I couldn't even taste the caviar. I couldn't even taste the caviar. Do you know why? Because I'm eating it. Oh no. It went swimming. Get it. Oh no. Okay. You gotta be light with them. Not everyone's a professional sushi eater. I really ruined that one, babe. The swab is in my nose. Oh no.