How To CATCH, CLEAN, and COOK Northern Pike. (Ice Out Ontario Pike)

What's up guys? We're back in the boat. It's just, it's an exciting time of year. Lakes are starting to open up. There still is a lot of ice out on Lake of the Woods. It will still be probably a week or two till it completely clears off. But smaller lakes are open, parts of Lake of the Woods are open, and we're back on the water. And today I want to do something a little bit different. Ice out pike is an activity I love to do. One of those fish that are just ready to go as soon as the ice comes off. But I want to do a catch and cook, a pike catch and cook, because I think a lot of people have in their mind that pike aren't good to eat. They're like, no, I just, I just eat walleye. I don't like eating pike. It's like, well, I'm willing to wager that if you're blindfolded, you probably couldn't tell the difference. I don't, I don't think I can tell the difference. Maybe a slight consistency change, but if northern pike are caught out of nice cold water and they're prepared properly, it is amazing table fare. And they can sometimes be a lot easier to catch than walleye. So today we're casting a swim bait. We might catch some walleye. We've got a heavy fluoro leader here. This is a three, three and a half inch swim bait made myself with my do it molds, um, five, eight ounce jig. We're using an eight foot swim bait rod. This is a G Loomis IMX pro. I don't even know what this reel is. This is a Revo with 40 pound braid. That's, that's pretty much it for gear talk. We're, uh, we're using heavier fluoro. So there's a chance we get bit off by pike, but I kind of want to have a chance to maybe catch some walleye today, since it is the last day of walleye season. But the goal is to catch an eater size pike. And I'm because, uh, some of the lodges I've worked at, that's mainly what we ate was pike and not walleye and people love it. So I want to, I want to share with you guys a little bit of how to catch them, but more importantly, how to clean them and some ways that I like to cook them. So we're pretty shallow here. We're in like five feet of water, six feet of water. So I'm kind of just swimming it halfway up the water column might bump it off the bottom. I was, I was getting quite a bit of weeds when I was hitting off the bottom, but right now we're just searching. This is a big mud flat at the mouth of a spawning bay. And I think the fish are going to kind of be trafficking through. Oh, here we go. First bite on the swim bait. Oh, and it is a beautiful Northern pike and it's gone. All the pike are in the bays. Let it be known. Ooh, right out in the middle, feeling pikey. Another little guy. Hey, not even, not even bringing that one up to the camera for you guys, but that is two fish and two casts. This is my search bait. This is what I'm starting with. And this is a little three inch, beautiful, delectable Jay Siemens, Jay's jig special. Oh, Oh, that's a little better. We might be switching over to full pike here shortly. A little bit bigger. Don't want to put too much weight on it. Cause as I mentioned, I don't have a leader on this, just like 30 pound fluoro. But that is our first real pike. Sorry, guys, my camera died there, but we got our first Northern pike. This is perfect eating size, probably like a 22 incher. We're bringing this guy back with us. 27 and a quarter. All right, guys, just so you know, you cannot keep pike in this zone over 75 centimeters, which is like 29 and a half inches. That fish was like 27. So perfect eater. So the thing about pike more than a lot of other species is often you're doing some fan casting, which is just casting these big areas. It's not, you know, when they're on weed beds, they definitely can relate to very specific edges or spots, but sometimes early in the year it's, it's warm water. It's these muddy bays and they can be kind of anywhere within this huge flat. So you're, you're just covering water. Essentially. You're trying to pick it apart and, you know, cut it into pieces and try to hit as many angles as possible and different, different pieces. So, you know, I'm casting off the nose here. I'm casting to the right towards shore. There definitely can be pockets holding more fish, but overall you're just trying to, you know, cover that water. Oh, just got crushed. I'm just going to slow down a bit. So often pike will still follow. So I took my foot off the pedal. I'm just going to give it lots of pauses and oh, I saw him there. Got him. Maybe that's why I missed him the first time. Wow. Why are we catching so many small pike? My buddy John Hoyer says pike are minus one point. So I'm minus quite a few right now. Come on another. What is this? This nursery? Well, we've hammered a lot of little ones. We do have one perfect eater. So I know the focus of this is catch, clean, cook, pike, because I think that's something everyone should learn how to do. But we did have a big, we did just have a big pike follow. So I think I'm going to try something bigger, something with a little more, a little more oomph. Well guys, you've probably heard me talk about Headbanger, Swedish lure company that I've been doing a bunch of work with over the last couple of years, helping shoot some of their promo stuff. And they got a new bait. Which one do we want? We want fire tiger. Look at that. This is called the fire tail. Really cool bait. I think it's the perfect size for what we're doing here. So it's got this cool little harness here. This is going to screw into the nose. All right. Then we're going to pin these hooks back inside here. There you go. I am using the bigger size harness and the smaller size bait. Let's see how that looks in the water. Unreal. Unreal. I'll overlay some underwater footage of this. All right. We've caught lunch. We're now looking to upgrade. We're using the fire tail and we may catch the first pike in North America on it if we're lucky. It's new. I think it's coming out starting May. Probably could have picked a slightly heavier rod for this, but I think it's going to work pretty good. Oh, that's better. That's better. Oh, he's swimming towards me. I can barely keep up to him. He's still swimming towards me. Oh baby. Oh baby. That's more like it. Yes. This is my first pike on the fire tail and it's a good one. I'm going to net him. Come on baby. That's what we're talking about. Right there on the fire tiger fire tail. We got a beautiful fat ice out pike. I got my pliers right here. That'll be easy to pop. All right. That fish is going right back. Look how fat that fish is. So good. All right. So as you saw me put together the harness before these hooks can actually break away from the entire rig and that's what makes it pretty neat. And that was my first pike on the fire tail. There we go. Look how that rig just breaks away. And look at that lump on his stomach. That's not healthy. There's no way that's look how square that is. Wow. I think what a lot of people don't realize is a lot of the time when pike are in the shallow bays, they're actually metabolizing after eating out deeper. That's why sometimes you see, you know, tail sticking out of their mouths. You see like a burbot tail or a Cisco tail. They're not finding that bait in the back of it. Oh, oh, nice, nice fish. They're not finding that bait in the back of the bay. They're going out deeper to feed for it. Wow. These fish are fat out here. Not that long, but definitely average size has gone up since I switched from this small swim bait and a beautiful pike that fell victim to the new fire tail. So cool. I'm loving it. Oh, what do we got? Are you swimming towards me? Oh, oh, that's bigger than I thought. That's a nice pike. We'll bring him around this way. Wow. They're all fat. Another nice Northwest Ontario jackfish slew snake pike. She's gone. I'd rather let go of her than rip off her gills trying to hold on. Guys, I got a level with you. I've had some, some technical difficulties today. We had the mic die. And then I realized the mic was on my jacket for the other part of it. So I apologize if there were some issues. If you hear like really loud music and not much talking, it means that the audio is junk. There's some water on the lens there too, but we've caught some pike and I apologize for the technical difficulties. I will do better, but we got like half an hour left. Maybe catch a couple more and then we're going to the kitchen, Sam's kitchen. The bites have just been so good on this big bait on the fire tail. Ooh, they're still biting. Man. I love how the hooks pull out of this bait. It's like a European thing. A lot of their soft plastics there have that, have that sort of system. This pike is nasty. Look at this adipose fin. That is nasty. This pike has had a rough life. We're going to get them back quick. All right, baby, be free. That feels good. I was about to call last cast. Oh, come on, baby. Be the one. Not the one. That's okay though. We've had a fantastic afternoon of piking. I will give the fire tail my stamp of approval. A great day, a good size pikes. Thank you guys for following along. Audio issues and all. Next time we will see you in the kitchen. Welcome back to the shop. Here's our pike, beautiful 27 incher. This is like perfect eating size. Yeah, I think a lot of people are intimidated by pike. There's really only one extra step for flaying them. It is taking out the Y bones, but we were going to start by slitting down the middle and or just slabbing them is, I guess, the term that I've heard before. I'll try to do my best to keep this accessible so you guys can see what's going on. I cut a lot of pike in my time guiding up north, but I don't claim to be any sort of expert. They do have an extra step. I'm going to flip them here. We'll start this way. We are now going to cut behind the gill plate down until you hit that spine. Now we're going to run along the spine all the way to the tail. Shout out to my grandpa, Abe Taves, for teaching me how to cut pike, how to cut walleye. I will never be as good as him, but I will keep trying. As you can see, you get a lot of meat off of a 27 inch pike. Look at that. That's just one half of it. Isn't that beautiful? We're going to flip it over here. Look what he's been eating. There's a minnow that looks like the tail of a Cisco maybe or something. Now we're slitting down the other side. I don't know. I think there will be one side when you cut fish that you will be better at. What I try to do now is not cut through the spine because if you cut through the spine, it is tough to finish that fish off. All right. There's the other half. As you can see, I did medium. I'd give that a six, seven out of 10 maybe. You can see there's a little more meat maybe in the back I could have kept, but overall, pretty good. A couple of things that I'm going to want to trim. This belly meat, I can trim. I can trim around that fin. You could eat some of that belly meat if you want, but let's start by taking out the ribs. That is the edge of the ribs right there. That's the piece we're taking out. We're trying to get the knife to go down and then to scoop underneath it. If you cut straight down, you're going to lose all that meat underneath the ribs. We are going to try. Less is more when you're doing this. I'm trying to get underneath it. Then I'm just trying to run that knife right along this. I know, guys, there's lots of people much better at cutting fish than me. I know pike can be intimidating. The best way to do it is just start doing it. Now I'm curling my knife up and trying to get underneath the ribs. You can see right there, I'm just getting underneath it. That's where the ribs end. The ribs are out. Now, as you can see, there's still a fin and some belly meat, so I'm just going to cut that out. We are so close to done, guys. This is the step that people have to learn. This is where it gets different from pike to walleye. I'm going to hold it close to the camera here. See those little white spots right there? That's part of the Y bone. That is the part that is the toughest to take out. The Y bones go down and then hook underneath. I'm going to cut on this side of the Y bone. I'm going to cut down until it hits it. Then I'm going to against them. Then I'm going to cut on this side of the Y bone. I'm going to cut down and then scoop underneath it, kind of like the ribs. I'm starting at the top and I'm getting as close as I can to that Y bone. I'm just running it down. You can hear it. Listen to this. You hear that? That's the knife hitting the edge of the Y bone. I'm going to keep running it down. The Y bones go until pretty close to the tail section right there. This is where you're going to lose meat. This is going to get difficult. Now, I'm going to turn the knife. I'm going to run my knife kind of flat along it. Right now, I made a little opening. You can fold it open and you can see those Y bones. I can run my finger on them. Those are the Y bones that you're taking out. This meat is all going to get saved on top here. Now, the next step is I'm going on the bottom edge of the Y bone there. I'm running down. Now, I'm going to scoop underneath it and I'm going to connect to that other cut right there. I'm going to scoop underneath and I'm turning the and trying to save as much meat as possible. It's okay if you cut all the way. Right now, at this point, you can see that flap right there that I have. That is the Y bone. That's the part that scares people from eating pike. It's really not that scary. The other thing you can do right now, if you did a really good job of cutting it, you might be able to cut it out or you can just cut down from the top where those two cuts connected. Now, it will basically just pull out. Look at that. You might have to help it at the end there a little bit. Boom. There you go. As you can see, just so you guys can see there once it focuses, I made a little flap on the top to get those bones out. Now, it is boneless all the way through. The tail section, you might find a couple depending on how far you go. You're going to want to play it safe and go pretty close to the tail. There you have a boneless pike filet. We are going to skin it and we are going to cube it because we are going to make some sweet chili pike bites. One thing about pike meat is it's definitely a firmer meat. It's better suited for a stir fry, for doing these little bites, that sort of thing. It just holds together a little bit better. I like to grab that skin and just hold that knife flat and just wiggle the skin back and forth. There you go. I'm actually happy with how that turned out. As you can see, I left a little bit of meat on there, but pretty good overall. Once again, always just take that second to feel the meat. Make sure you didn't leave any bones. Feel the edge of the ribs. Right down here near the anal fin, there's a little bit of tougher meat, so we're just going to cut that out. That's a good piece of meat. I don't think you ever need to keep a pike over ... Well, you can't even keep a pike over, I think it's 29 and a half inches in Ontario, but really a 25 to 27 inch pike is pretty perfect. All right, we're going to cut this other one and we're going to head to the kitchen. Not perfect, but boneless. There we go. That one pike has given us a good bounty of meat. We're going to wash it off, cube it up, and we'll meet you guys in the kitchen. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Sam's Kitchen. We're cooking the pike I caught. As you can see, we got a fair amount of meat. We are going to cube it up. We're going to deep fry it. We're going to toss some sweet chili sauce, and then are you adding a stir fry component to this? A little bit, yeah. Sam's adding some veggies, some greens. Originally, this is just going to be sweet chili tossed pike, but Sam's upping it a little bit. Anyways, first thing we're going to do is cube up the pike and we're going to toss half of it in catch and cook spicy for me and half of it in catch and cook original for Sam. That's the size I'm going for right there. Check it out, guys. That's perfect size little cubes there. We're only going to do this in one coat. We're not going to double coat it today, so it won't be quite as spicy. Obviously, if you want it spicier, you could double coat it, but we're going to get these little chunks wet, roll them around in the spicy, and then we're going to set them aside. All right, now we're doing some original. You took way more time and care with your pieces. How come I don't get that? Boom. Spicy, not spicy. All right, we're doing the original first. Boom. Oh, yeah. It cooks so fast. We just completely fogged the lens and by we, I mean me. I love doing the toss in different sauces because I like the small chunks. They're like boneless wings. Look at that. Oh, that's good. All right, we're going to put this next batch in quickly. That's the spicy. The spicy is ready. The nice thing about catch and cook, I know this sounds like a sales pitch, but it doesn't completely fall apart in the oil. Some stuff that's like bigger chunks will just completely disintegrate, which it's just part of it, but more of a flour base, which catch and cook is. Keep your oil fresh a little bit longer. All right, let's go inside. We're starting with the original. I'm going to dump the fish in the pan. We'll have a little heat. Typically, you would toss it in probably the same pan that you cook the fish in if you're doing a short lunch type thing. So I'm just going to wait till the pan is a little bit hotter. We're going to add some sweet Thai chili sauce. That's what's going to make our sweet Thai chili pike bites. Is that too much? Saucy. I should have done this. No, no, no. We're doing the flip. Okay. Do you know what? I've just decided. I have just decided this is my fish. You film. I want to cook my own. You cook your own fish. You're just okay. You're not doing no style points for you. No, I don't want style points. I want a light, light dosing of sweet chili. I want mine just covered in sauce. I believe that and I understand. No, I don't understand, but I believe it. Okay, now it's heating up and I'm just about done here. All right. All right. We added some more sweet chili sauce. We're not going to dump all this fish in. That would just be, I'm not going to eat all this. We'll eat maybe half now. It's all. Oh, this isn't tossing at all. There's supposed to be this epic, like fish flipping in the air, but it ain't happening. I, I blame this on the sweet chili sauce. We just got to do the manual stir. All right. I think we'll just put this right into my dish. Do you want to, you, you, this is, this is, you're doing all this other stuff. Let's, let's get, let's get the real chef to talk about this. All right. Let's see. Let's see the presentation. So what I was going to do in here, I put some broccoli, yellow pepper, and pineapple, just like that. Then we take our far cake, crunchy noodles, and then I have a little bit of carrots with a tiny, tiny, tiny smidgen of lemon juice. Nice. That piece to resist off some catch cook. Ooh, that looks good, Sam. Wow. We're actually gonna take a photo of this. This is, this is like, this is good. Good job. Thank you. And then the only difference for Jay's fish was that there will be rice underneath and the spicy fish. All right. The taste test. Is that good? I put mine on rice. Sam's on the crunchy noodles. This is good. I will take credit for the pike. Sam can take the credit for everything else. We are going to say grace and dig into some delicious ice out pike. Thank you guys for following along. Don't be intimidated by pike. They're not that tough to clean and they taste so good. And they get overlooked by so many people. Thank you guys for watching. Don't forget to wear your life jacket and where are we at now? I don't know. Pick up your trash. See you guys.