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Flounder

    THE SCUTTLEBUTT

    Mild Days and No Wind, Keeper Bass and Nice Flounder

    A shark washes up in Orleans, and a sunfish is rescued in Provincetown

    By

    Slowly but surely the charter and party fishing boats are wrapping it up for the season.

    We had our last trip for the year on the Cee-Jay on Saturday and ended the season on a very high note, as many slot-size keeper bass were caught. Cee-Jay mate Tammy Rabbett went down to Barnstable to jump on the party fishing boat Starfish for its last trip of the year, and she reported some nice tautog and flounder were caught in the bay between East Dennis and Wellfleet. All of this in fantastic fall conditions of warm temperatures and no wind. After a rainy start, we really ended up with a season of mostly great weather and optimal fishing conditions.

    The Orleans Police Dept. responded to “not one of our typical calls” on Oct. 15, according to the social media account where they posted this picture. “You really never know what kind of call you’ll respond to on any given shift.” (Photo courtesy Orleans Police Dept.)

    The week also included a couple of odd happenings on the waterfronts. First, a very large great white shark washed up dead on Nauset Beach in Orleans. Experts at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy say they don’t yet have anything definitive on the cause of death. This particular shark had been identified by the conservancy two years ago. It was a mature male that they had named “Koala” in 2022 and was a little over 12 feet long.

    A necropsy by Mass. Div. of Marine Fisheries scientist Greg Skomal was undertaken on the white shark last Thursday morning. Tissue samples were taken, and maybe more can be learned about what went wrong for this animal. It seems that initial tests have not turned up anything conclusive.

    The excitement about the shark had barely died down before we heard that right off Commercial Street in Provincetown an ocean sunfish that had gotten caught up in an ebb tide was trapped in shallow water. The harbormaster’s crew, along with staff from the New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance, helped rescue the stranded animal. Using a rope, they towed it out of the harbor and past Long Point, giving it another opportunity to begin navigating out of Cape Cod Bay to warmer southern waters where it needs to be — and soon.

    Our waters will pretty much empty out now, as the bluefish have already gone south, and the bass are beginning to head to the Chesapeake. Humpback whales are on their way to the Caribbean, and sea turtles and ocean sunfish are also looking for warmer waters. Tuna will be around here through December, but the global market continues to be weak and there are only 118 metric tons left of the 2024 quota. With good weather, that will probably be reached next week.

    The Dolphin Fleet will have its last whale watch trips on the weekend of Oct. 26. They have had a great season with plenty of whales and dolphins close by for most of the summer. The Cape Cod seasons take another turn.

    COOK’S KITCHEN

    A Soleful Breakfast

    Fresh-caught flounder, sunny eggs, ripe tomatoes, and a good cup of coffee start a sailor’s weekend

    By

    Cooking with friends who also love to cook puts things right for me. It’s like when musicians jam — we play, become inspired, and riff on classics, and our payoff is eating very well. When we visit my dear friend and cookbook collaborator, Kathy Gunst, and her husband, John Rudolph, I can count on all our meals being wonderful.

    On a stay at their place in southern Maine, one breakfast made a lasting impression. In a pre-caffeinated state, I had followed the smell of deeply roasted coffee to find Kathy puttering around her kitchen. She pulled a shiny white paper bundle from the fridge, then pulled the paper back to reveal pristine fillets of sole. I thought, “Ahh, prepping something for lunch.” We are always thinking at least one meal ahead.

    A fillet gets a light dusting of flour before it’s browned in butter. (Photos by Robert S Johnson)

    She cracked farm eggs into her seasoned cast-iron skillet and dropped a healthy knob of butter in another. There was not a strip of bacon in sight. After seasoning the fish with a generous pinch of coarse salt and a turn of fresh pepper, she gave it a light dusting of flour and laid the fillets in the sizzling butter. The fish crackled, yolks shone in the black skillet, toast popped. Within minutes, golden sole slid onto our plates, right and cozy next to the sunny eggs.

    Of course, this wasn’t my first encounter with fish for breakfast. My mother was infamous for her reliance on morning cod or crab cakes. When we’re in New York City, smoked salmon or whitefish salad on a bagel is my everything. But this was different. The fish wasn’t smoked or fatty or fried into a bready puck. My fork pierced the yolk, and it ran to sauce the tender fish. This was subtle and light, fish forward, and a startling match with the eggs.

    “This was Dad’s sailor breakfast,” said John, who grew up fishing and sailing with his dad around Martha’s Vineyard. “We knew it was a good day fishing if there was flounder for dinner and the next day’s breakfast.”

    I was hooked.

    Flounder is a catch-all name for over 700 species of flat fish. When young, they have eyes on either side of their heads, but as flounder mature their eyes migrate to one side — they look up as they swim, camouflaged against the sandy bottom of the sea. Summer flounders are “left-eyed,” that is, facing left when seen from above, but there are “right-eyed” flounders, too.

    These side-swimmers have too many names. Reading a list of them is like reciting an angler’s limerick. Summer flounder are also called fluke, and gray sole goes by the name witch flounder.

    If cooking techniques had to pass the Marie Kondo test — “Does it spark joy?” — I’d put sautéing flat fish fillets at the top of my list. Cooking with restraint at the same time that you trust the hot pan is such a completely satisfying thing.

    The key is to cook the fillets mainly on one side. Then turn off the heat, flip the fish, and let them cruise to the finish in the skillet’s residual heat. Butter adds a lovely nuttiness and helps the fish brown beautifully. The flour can be optional if you use a well-seasoned or nonstick pan.

    Back home on Cape Cod, I am surrounded by tomatoes of every color, shape, and size in my kitchen. I tuck a few chunks of juicy tomato alongside a golden piece of just-caught flounder and one of the neighbor’s hens’ eggs, scatter it all with the last of our basil, and thank my far-away friends in Maine for the inspiration.

    Sailor Breakfast
    Serves 2

    Flounder fillets vary in size; you want 4 to 6 oz. per serving. If what you find are very thin sides of sole, go for a whole fish, two fillets per person. If they’re large, one fillet per person will be plenty.

    All-purpose flour
    2 to 4 sole, flounder, or fluke fillets, depending on size
    Kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepper
    About 2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
    Eggs, for frying
    Tomatoes, sliced or oven-dried

    Spread out some flour on a large plate. Heat two large skillets or a griddle over medium-high heat. Season the sole with salt and pepper. Lay the fish skin side up (the skin side has a herringbone pattern) in the flour to coat one side.

    Sunny-side-up yolks make a simple, rich “sauce” for the fresh fish and ripe tomatoes.

    Add a healthy knob of butter to the pan. Shake off excess flour from the fish. When the butter has melted, place the fish, coated side down, in the pan. (Take care not to crowd the pan; cook in batches if need be.) Raise the heat to high. Cook the fillets, without disturbing, until the edges turn brown and tail curls a bit, about 2 minutes. It helps to shake the pan slightly as you go, to keep the fish from sticking.

    Turn off the heat. With a wide spatula, flip the fillets. Drop bits of butter into the pan, and by the time butter melts, the fish is done. Transfer it to plates.

    Meanwhile, in the other skillet, melt a large knob of butter, crack the eggs into the pan, and season with salt and pepper. Cook until they just begin to set, for sunny-side-up eggs. If you prefer your eggs over easy, cover the pan with a lid and steam them until the top sets further.

    Serve fish with the eggs and sliced tomatoes — or, in winter, use oven-dried tomatoes.

    Oven-Dried Tomatoes

    I am partial to fresh in-season tomatoes. When they’re ripe, I eat, cook, and preserve them in abundance. I’d rather avoid off-season pretend tomatoes. But when I crave them, oven drying is a favorite way to coax sweet, tart, umami flavor even from store-bought tomatoes. The gentle heat concentrates it to an amazing intensity.

    1 lb. firm-ripe plum tomatoes
    Kosher salt
    Extra-virgin olive oil, optional
    Mixed fresh herbs, such as thyme, sage, oregano, rosemary, optional

    Heat oven to 250 degrees F. Halve the tomatoes and arrange cut side up on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Season generously with salt.

    Bake in the oven until the tomatoes shrivel and become firmer, about 2 to 3 hours.

    If desired, pack oven-dried tomatoes in a jar with herbs and extra virgin olive oil to cover. They will keep in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

    THE SCUTTLEBUTT

    The Bass Get Bigger, but the Bluefish Are Teasing Us

    Meanwhile, a new 3-fish bluefin tuna limit is a head-scratcher

    By

    Striped bass fishing took a serious turn for the better this week, as more bass starting showing up not only in the Race but all along the bayside to Wood End. There is a tremendous amount of bait around. Mackerel, sand eels, herring, and even some pogies (menhaden) have been showing up around the harbor. The striped bass are getting bigger, with many keepers of up to 35 inches being taken by all the charter boats.

    The fin whales that normally hang out between Herring Cove and the Race Point station have yet to discover the smorgasbord that is awaiting them right now.

    Flounder fishing remains very good in the south end of the bay, and many boats are reporting that they are catching the limit — five fish of at least 16.5 inches per person.

    A school of Atlantic mackerel. (Photo courtesy NOAA)

    Bluefish are still teasing us here. They are in the canal and along the backside down by Hyannis, but they have not shown up here yet. But that should change any day now, as long as the winds stay southerly to southwest and the water temperature keeps climbing. It was at 59 degrees over the weekend.

    The National Marine Fisheries Service, part of the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, often comes up with rules that make you say, “Huh?” Here’s one that’s a real head-scratcher; they are now allowing the commercial guys to take three Atlantic bluefin tuna a day instead of one. This raises many questions, the first being why you would allow more fish to be caught when at the same time you are telling us it is a highly endangered species.

    Second, the market is already saturated with product, which has driven the price downward. This is due in part to the gross misrepresentation of tuna fishing portrayed by the very popular Wicked Tuna “reality” TV show. Because of the show, the number of guys trying to fish tuna commercially has gone up exponentially in the last few years.

    The new tuna rule also very much favors the harpoon guys, because it is much easier to land three fish harpooning than it is rod-and-reeling.

    It remains to be seen if Fisheries will adjust the daily catch limit after July 1, when the fish start to get fat and become more valuable.

    The wholesale price of lobster has taken a dive at an inopportune time, just as lobstermen are trying to cope with extremely high fuel and bait prices. The price of live pound-and-a-quarter hard-shell lobsters fell from $12.35 a pound on April 1 to $9.35 a pound on May 1. That’s not good when you consider what these guys and gals are up against in their day-to-day local markets with skyrocketing fixed costs. I hope they can find relief at some point during the summer.

    The Coast Guard will be increasing the number of safety checks they undertake on private boats this spring and summer both in and out of the harbor, so make sure you have the appropriate gear on board: life preservers, horn, working bilge pumps, firefighting equipment, signal flares, and a working radio.

    THE SCUTTLEBUTT

    The Season’s First Big Bass Is Caught Off Billingsgate

    Fogged in, wind-blown, and still fishing

    By

    It’s funny how the weather goes around here. Day after day, we hoped all these northeast winds would go away so we could get out there and fish. And it finally quit blowing. But it was replaced with no wind, which, along with super-humid air, created pea-soup fog that didn’t burn off with the morning sun. The fog covered the Cape, from the tip to the bridges, on the bay and ocean sides.

    The fog hampered the daily aerial survey done by National Marine Fisheries to determine the locations of the whales. That threatened to delay the opening of the commercial trap season, but fortunately the skies cleared in time for them to do a survey that showed the right whales were gone. In the end, it was just a one-day delay. As of May 16, traps could go out and the guys and gals could commence lobstering.

    Kayla Mullins and Sam Carlson of Foxboro with the 40-inch striper that Mullins caught this week off Billingsgate, fishing with Capt. Nico Pace of the Cape Tip’n. (Photo by Mike Rathgeber)

    We really need a few days of warm air temperatures and southwest winds to get things percolating around here.

    Water temperatures are still below what they should be at this time of year, running in the mid to high 40s, and on a quick ride from Sesuit Harbor to Provincetown things looked very quiet to me. Not a lot of sea birds or surface slicks from baitfish. It just didn’t smell productive.

    That being said, striped bass are filtering into the bay and right now the hot spot is Billingsgate Shoals. Capt. Nico Pace of Cape Tip’n charters looked around Wood End and Race Point for fish and after not finding anything took off for Billingsgate, returning to Provincetown with the first 40-inch fish of the season for our port. The fish was caught drifting a live mackerel.

    Mackerel are very plentiful from the Horseshoe Cove in the harbor all the way around to Wood End Light. The fish are on the edge, where the water goes from very shallow to very deep.

    Capt. Rich Wood of the Beth Ann went out and caught a few flounder around the Pamet over the weekend. That fishing should steadily improve as waters warm. Tautog fishing remains good, too, along the harbor breakwater.

    For those who like to venture out of the bay and fish Stellwagen Bank for haddock, it has been slow on the south side and is better to the north. But like every other species this season, the haddock are a bit behind schedule, feeding in shallower waters — though it has also been too rough to get out there for a real accurate picture of how the haddock fishing is.

    No sign of the seasonal seal invasion in the bay yet, but it’s probably only a few days away. Soon they will be all over Race Point and Long Point.

    A dead humpback whale washed up at Race Point this last week. IFAW, along with the Center for Coastal Studies, anchored the whale to the beach so that the next morning they could conduct a limited necropsy. Due to the tides and the remote location of the whale, they couldn’t bring in the heavy equipment needed to do a comprehensive investigation. The waves flipped the whale over the next day, however, allowing the team to examine its other side. They hope to determine the cause of death, but it doesn’t appear to be from entanglement.

    CHEF AT HOME

    Two Schools of Fluke

    Now’s the time for summer flounder, pan fried the old-fashioned way or plated raw in a crudo

    By

    I haven’t had much luck fishing this summer. There have been a few bluefish, sure. As for striped bass, I haven’t caught one keeper. They say the fluke are in their usual spots, including off the Pamet, right near my grandparents’ house. Which reminded me of fishing for dinner with Humpa.

    Marinated fluke
    Go light on the peach-onion-herb marinade so the fresh flavor of the fluke will shine through. (Photo Teresa Parker)

    Fluke are sandy colored side swimmers, well camouflaged against the sandy bottom where we used to find them, just about a half mile to a mile from shore. They’re not really exciting to catch, to be honest. You bounce your jig along the bottom and when you feel the line wiggle, you reel it up and that’s that. But like Humpa always said, “If you don’t catch what you want, catch what you can.”

    The challenges with fluke happen after you get them home: they’re tricky to fillet properly. First you slide the fillets off the bone, then you skin them. If you’re not good with a knife, there may not be much left when you’re done. Humpa made us practice. Getting it right was important; nothing should go to waste.

    Once you have your fillets, do something simple with them. For me, it’s hard to decide how they’re best. My grandmother would have pan fried them. The classic preparation is easy to do and it’s hard to beat that crispy golden crust as a counterpoint to the tender, flaky fish.

    It would be wrong to say crudo is better. It’s just a totally different pleasure. I take half-inch-thick slices of the day’s fluke, cut on the bias, and pound them gently with a rolling pin to tenderize them a little, then chill them well. They get their seasoning of fresh lemon and lime juices just three to five minutes before serving time — so the fish doesn’t cook as it would with a longer-marinated ceviche.

    Right now, there’s a peach tree in our yard that is producing bushels of fruit. They taste like summer, but they hint at fall. I wanted to capture that with this recipe. So, to my usual crudo dressing of ponzu or lemon and lime, good olive oil, and sea salt, I’m adding just a spoonful of flavors from the early-September garden: minced peach, fine-diced red onion, and mint.

    Maybe nobody races out to catch fluke. But they do get themselves to the table pretty fast when you tell them you’ve got flounder for supper.

    Pan Fried Flounder

    Serves 4

    1½ to 2 lbs. flounder fillets

    1 cup panko breadcrumbs

    2 eggs, beaten

    1 cup oil for frying

    Kosher salt and fresh black pepper

    Put the panko in a wide bowl and season it well with the salt and pepper. Beat the eggs in another wide bowl.

    Dip the fillets first in the eggs, then in the panko, patting extra panko on top to get a firm coating.

    Heat the oil in a cast iron skillet — this can be olive oil or any vegetable oil you like — until it is shimmering (but not smoking!) and slip the fish into the pan. Fry until golden, 2-3 minutes, and carefully turn the fillets for another minute or two of frying.

    Remove to a plate or paper towel to allow excess oil to drip off, and plate. A dollop of mayo with chopped pickle and a squeeze of lemon juice stirred in is a nice quick condiment.

    Summer Flounder Crudo

    Serves 4 as an appetizer

    Though crudo means raw in Italian, it’s important to dress the fish just a few minutes before serving so that it doesn’t over-marinate. The peach, onion, and herbs are added sparingly, so they’re just reminiscent of salsa, but they don’t take over the plate.

    3/4 lb. flounder fillet

    1/4 cup ponzu

    or 1/4 cup fresh lemon and lime juice, combined

    Fresh peach, red onion, and mint or basil

    3 Tbsp. top-shelf extra virgin olive oil

    Pinch of crunchy sea salt

    Roll the fillet gently with a rolling pin to tenderize it. Then cut it on the bias it into half-inch-thick slices. (Putting the fillet into the freezer for a few minutes to make it very firm will allow you to slice it perfectly.)

    Arrange the slices of fish so they overlap just slightly on a large chilled platter or on individual plates. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and place in the fridge until you’re ready to serve.

    Squeeze the lemon and lime juices (or measure the ponzu) into a bowl. Cut a few thin slices of peach into tiny cubes, to make about 1/4 cup, and add them to the bowl. Mince a slice or two of scallion or red onion to make about one tablespoon and add it. Do the same with a few leaves of mint or basil. You need only about a tablespoon of this mixture per serving.

    To serve, spoon the citrus-peach mixture over the fish, drizzle the whole thing with the olive oil, and sprinkle with sea salt.

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