Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Muddy water catfish flavor????

I have a very small pond, about 1/4 acre. It is not very deep (4ft). I stocked it with catfish in Feb. I irregullarly feed them Purina Gamefish Chow. The water is ALWAYS muddy. I attempted to clear it with gypsum, but it was only a temporary fix.
Anyway, a friend mentioned that one time he ate some catfish from the store that tasted "muddy"??? What causes that to occur, and is there a way for me to avoid this?

thanx

The "muddy taste" is caused primarily by a specific specie of algae (Oscillatoria perornata) that produces 2-methylisoborneol (MIB), which imparts the nasty flavor to fish. The off-flavor has no direct correlation to water turbidity caused by suspended colloids (clays).

we have a 2 acre lake with two feeders feeding aquamax, and the channel catfish i catch out of there, the meat is soft as cotten , white as snow, and has no fishy flavor what so ever, probably some of the best catfish i've eaten!

chris

Hi Robert you probably have the same problem as I do the catfish in a small pond tend to stir up the mud and keep it muddy all the time. I can actually see them in the shallows stirring it up. Guess we just have to live with it but it doesn't seem to affect the flavor of the fish.

Bob

Bob you sure you have channels and not bullheads? Bullheads seem to trouble the water and make it muddy...

Believe it or not never seen a bullhead in the 12 years I've lived in Alabama and fished a ton of the lakes around here. Plus mine is an excavated pond fed from runoff from the front yard and no way for a bullhead to get in there unless he came in on the herons foot! Did have something unusual this weekend while cleaning up from Ivan, I have never seen a snapper in my pond but have had one go across the yard from a neighbors pond but I guess one made a nest in my flower bed someplace cause I found a silver dollar sized snapper Saturday and another one Sunday about 10 ft from where the other one was.

Bob

How are you doing? I have the same problem. I heard that marinating the filets in milk "the night before" gets rid of the muddy flavor. Heven't tried it yet because I didn't have any milk last time I was out there. My brother's girlfriend caught 4.4 lb, 22 in channel cat. She currently holds the pond record.

in Brazil again.

I use milk for my crappie and catfish. It should work well.

yeah ed, my brother in law holds our pond record, the largest two catfish yet.. 3.3lbs, and a 4.3, also the largest soft shelled turle i've seen.. larger than a dinner plate!

bass record is yet to determine,, got a 3lber out of our 3rd lake, witch is the pond record, but i had to eyeball his weight...no camera or scale, but a damn good cup of coffee!

i might start a post on pond records!

chris..

damn inlaws!!..

Robert,
We used to catch catfish out of the river and sometimes the bigger ones had a muddy taste to them. My Grandpa would throw them in a horse trough with clean well water in it. In a couple of days he would clean them and cook them- no muddy taste. He marinated bullheads and crappie in milk for a couple of hours- don't know if it was to get the muddy taste out.

Brad B.

On the Lake I live on the old time catfishers tie the catch to the peir for a day or three beofre cleaning them

Try using lemon juice,the acid in the juice helps to remove the bad taste and will leavea slight lemony taste to the meat.

True. In fact, fish caught from turbid water is less likely to have an algae taste than fish caught from clear water. Of course that's because the turbid water inhibits algae growth.

Robert,

Fish flavor can be effected by diet. Although I wouldn't expect this to be a problem with the quality food your feeding them, perhaps they are eating something else as well.

I have family that lives on a very slow moving body of water just below Tulloch lake and above the Stanislaus river in Jamestown, CA. In the spring when the spillway is flowing the fishing is great and bellies of the trout are filled with shad. These are some of the best tasting trout I have ever had. On the other hand, on the same body of water, in the summer time when the spillway has stopped and is no longer bringing in shad, the bellies of the trout are filled with snails and other invertebrates. Undoubtedly, they are foraging on the bottom due to lack of shad. These fish taste like dirt.

In my own pond (Pacific Ocean, Central Coast, CA) my favorite tasting fish are Cabezon. When you fillet a cabezon and its belly is full of crab, the fish meat tastes like crab. If there is no crab, it tastes like fish...good fish, but not crab.

Just goes to show, you are what you eat. Check out my Lingcod from my last outing.

See this link http://srac.tamu.edu/index.cfm?catid=3 and go to

SRAC 0192 Managing Off-Flavor Problems in Pond Raised Catfish .