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Food and drink: Keeping your summer catch cool and fresh

When your fish doesn’t come in a stick

My absolute favourite picture of my granddad is one of him standing next to a wooden rowboat of no particular colour in the cool shallows of Amethyst Lake in the Rocky Mountains. He and my uncle had a nice ritual of packing in on horseback to the Tonquin Valley for a week every summer to fish.

Granddad went fishing until he was in his 80s, but this photo was taken much earlier than that. In it he's wearing rubbery brown hip waders held up by suspenders, three layers of shirts - two woolen plaid ones, brown-toned on top, red and green underneath, with a splash of his white wooly long johns showing at the neck.

He's relaxed but squinting into the sun while holding a gorgeous maybe three-pound rainbow trout he's just caught. No doubt they floured and salted and peppered it and fried it up for dinner in a ton of butter in the crusty, blackened old iron frying pan they'd pack in with all the other stuff.

Part of that included a couple of blocks of ice packed in sawdust they'd stick in the bottom of an old beat-up cooler. The ice might last and it might not, depending on the weather. For the fish they didn't eat they tried to save best they could to pack out and bring home to all the hungry little Albertans who loved their pan-fried trout, preferably cooked over a gently smoking campfire.

Of course, most of the fishing that goes on around this neck of the woods these days I'm happy to say is catch and release - or CPR, catch, photo and release. But I know there's more than one Whistler fisher out there who likes to take his or her catch - a rainbow, a cutthroat trout, a Dolly Varden - and slip it into a skillet.

If you catch within your limit, you can pack your precious little fishies home. By regulation, you need to leave on the head, tail and fins until you get there, but you should remove the gills and internal organs ASAP to keep the spoilage factor to a minimum. Also, by law, you cannot freeze your fish together in an unrecognizable block, at least until you get home, but why would you want to do that, anyway?

Unless you've got the facilities to flash freeze, and which of us do?, there are a number of ways to keep your fresh fish fresh once you're back near the plug-in appliances. Once you've gutted, cleaned and scaled your fish, my salty old fishmonger recommended freezing them in freezer-weight plastic bags of water, one piece per bag.

The small-sized freezer Ziploc bags work pretty well without much fuss - drop the steak or fillet in the bag, cover it with water, carefully seal it up and place them individually in the freezer until they are rock solid, then you can stack them. Double bag if you like. The ice around the fish keeps it nicer longer than it would otherwise.

The good people at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Centre for Home Food Preservation also have some good suggestions for freezing fish, For one, they suggest wrapping your iced fish blocks in freezer paper - something that resists moisture evaporation to help prevent dreaded freezer burn or that icky freezer taste.

Better yet, they recommend an ice glaze, but this method will take a little more time. Start by placing your entire, beautiful, unwrapped fish in the freezer to freeze - this, of course, after you have washed, cleaned and scaled it. As soon as it's frozen, dip your fish in near-freezing ice water. (I feel a Monty Python skit coming on here...)

Put your chilly fishy back in the freezer a few minutes to harden the glaze. Take it out, do it again, and again, and again, until you've got a nice uniform ice glaze all over your pretty fish. Wrap it up lovingly in that moisture-vapor resistant paper or stick it in freezer bags and pop it back in the freezer.

To control rancidity and flavour change, the centre also suggests a little trick of "pre-treating" the fish in a dip of ascorbic acid solution for fatty fish like salmon and trout (2 tablespoons ascorbic acid crystals to one quart water), or in a brine bath for lean fish (20 seconds in a brine of 1/4 cup salt to 1 quart of cold water to firm the fish). This I've never tried, but a lemon-gelatin glaze will eliminate the need for pre-treatment, and the idea is pretty appealing when you've got some time to muck about and you feel like doing your fish some righteous justice.

Mix 1/4 cup of lemon juice and 1 3/4 cups of water. Dissolve one packet of unflavored gelatin in 1/2 cup of the lemon juice/water mixture. Heat the remaining 1 1/2 cups of liquid to boiling. Stir the dissolved gelatin mixture into the boiling liquid and cool to room temperature. When cool, dip the cold fish into the lemon-gelatin glaze, drain it and wrap your fish in moisture-vapor resistant packaging, label and freeze.

After all this care and attention, how long will your frozen fish keep? I turned to Harold McGee's classic On Food and Cooking for an answer: Sure, they've found mammoth flesh that was frozen in Siberia for 15,000 years, but don't treat your freezer like a midden. At most you can keep frozen fish a few months as the freezing causes chemical changes that limit the storage life of all frozen meats. (Chicken also only lasts a few months in the freezer, pork about six months and beef one year, max).

You get that funky rancid taste in any meat or fish that's been stored too long in the freezer because when ice crystals form and remove liquid from the muscle fluids, salts and trace metals in the flesh are increasingly concentrated. These promote oxidation of the unsaturated fats, ergo the rancid taste.

As for that dreaded freezer burn, it's caused by water "sublimation" of the ice crystals on the meat's surface into the dry freezer air. Think of it as evaporation at below-freezing temperatures, ergo the need for those extra-thick plastic bags designed for freezing - doubling them is even better - and the use of moisture-vapor resistant paper.

All in all, not quite as charming as packing in blocks of ice in sawdust to keep your fish fresh, but ever so more effective.

Happy trails fishing, and play it safe!

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who's sister once caught a five-pounder with a safety pin for a hook tied to a stick with a piece of string.