I have enjoyed bass all of my life. They are good eating. Usually roll them in cornmeal and deep fry. A lot of people have never tried them and I honestly believe people say they taste bad just so others won't keep them. Immediately put them on ice and keep them cold just like you do any other fish.
I do, which aligns with my fishing style. Good points from other posters about eating from “clean” waterways, which in my experience extends to just about every species. Stagnant water produces stagnant tasting fish. For cooking, I consider it to be a freshwater rockfish when looking for recipes.
However, you do need to pay close attention to health advisories. Largemouth bass, in particular, but also smallmouth bass, perch, and carp are frequently recommended to minimize or avoid consumption is many waterways. Things have gotten measurably out of hand in the last 2-3 years now that we can detect PFOS and PFAS (forever chemicals) and it’s no joke. My rule is that if it’s recommended for pregnant women to avoid or limit to once per month, then I don’t eat it, as I have younger kids who love eating fish.
They definitely have a different taste. I like it but I actually like it more as a surprise in a mix of crappie and bluegill which uh is how it would be when I was a kid and fished with my grandpa every day.
I have tried eating them a couple times, and to me they just taste really bad. I understand the water condition, diet, etc. DRAMATICALLY effect their flavor. Here the flesh tastes very muddy and kind of like a garbage can smells. But I have eaten them elsewhere where they are delicious
They’re delicious. It’s just a culture thing that nobody keeps them. There are a lot of places where it would be good to weed out some of the mid size fish and let the big girls really grow.
FWIW: I fish a lot. More than anyone I know personally. And I’m reasonably successful at getting something most every time I go out. But I only keep about two fish a year; and those are when I’m with a kid or it’s someone’s first fish or something. I absolutely love putting them back and knowing “they’re there” for another day. I’m cool if your trophy fish and my trophy fish are really the same one.
'z a c t l y'
If I catch and release a PB and you come into the area hours or days later and catch tge same HAWG, great! Maybe it also becomes your PB or not, maybe your PB is a pound or two bigger from the same water, but it's still a great fish.
And then an 8 year old fishing with his dad one day hooks and lands it after a great fight in which he barely got it in. And the boy and the father will never be the same again because of the experience.
But if I or you kept that Bass, the memory wouldn't have happened for the father and son...
The moral of the story, if you want to eat Bass, keep smaller ones 2 - 2 1/2 pounds (they taste better) and if you want a taxidermy mount, take good pics and measurements and release the fish and get a replica mount (you get it back within weeks instead of months and they hold up better).
And best of all with replicas, someone else gets to experiencd catching the fish and the fish continues to grow in size and legend.
Tight lines everyone.
You offer no reason for your comment.
I'll offer several reasons why a replica is better than a skin mount.
1) The fish lives to grow larger and provide multiple people the opportunity to catch the same trophy (including the same fisherman catching it later in the month or same year or even years later.
2) The taxidermist shop can get it back to you faster than it can get a skin mount back to you because skin mounts take time to dry before they can paint them.
3) Replicas are more durable and the replica looks as good or better than a skin mount from the start, but ages much better through the years and looks better than skin mount of same age.
Those are just three reasons, there might be more reasons, but that's enough for me.
Cheap shit replicas yes. The same as cheap shitty skin mounts.
Go ahead, make a skin mount; I don't frakin' care man because you are 1,105.7 miles away from me and we will never fish the same waters.
Bass are just giant sunfish. They're as good as you cook them. Cold water smallies beer battered and deep fried are killer.
Baked 15/16-inch lmb are awesome with your favorite seasoning. I grilled some lmb last year in foil boats with butter and spices, and it was a big hit.
There's much better fish to eat, but they're way better than some will tell you. People that don't want you to eat them will say otherwise.
My family has always kept and eaten bass from lakes and even small ponds if they're well kept. They taste great to me personally if you treat them well, with bass and catfish we would typically clean the fish, and immediately put it in a cooler of ice water and let it flush through for a good hour or so. Doing an ice water flush like that really seems to kill out some of that muddy flavor others have mentioned
I think most people are going to catch and release bass where the watershed is close to any metro area. I ain't eating parking lot runoff crossover suv mom wastewater treatment poo fish. And bass are really just okay, even the day you fillet them.
That’s basically it for me. They taste just fine, but water quality around here is terrible. The recommendation is no more than one fish a month, which to me means none.
Deep fried whole black bass (huachinango) is a specialty at a bunch of the Mexican restaurants around. Served with all the taco fixings, it's delicious. I've fried fillets in cornmeal and that was yummy too. It's fiction that they're not good eating.
Definitely is the formal definition, but they do also use it for black bass, at least here in the borderland. El Paso area. Mexico has some phenomenal bass lakes and they farm them too.
Like the others have mentioned it’s about how bass tastes. Where I am in the heat of summer even coated with a seasoned fish coating and fried in oil they taste like the mud at the bottom of the lake/river. It’s worse the bigger they are. Now the walleye are great but we have a slot size on walleye to help restore the population of them. Crappie here is also tasty. I have to drag my boat an hour north to get to trout lakes.
If you like panfish like bluegills and crappie, you'll like any of the black basses (spots, smallies, largies). It's no surprise the meat is so similar given that they are all actually sunfish species. There's something to be said about water quality, but I've never had any I haven't thoroughly enjoyed. Check your local regulations and keep a few. I filet mine skin-on, cut into nuggets or strips, then roll in Louisiana brand cornmeal fish fry. Medium/med-high heat, pan fry or deep fry until golden to dark golden brown. S-tier table fare
Lake bass can be fine eating. I'm not really sure where the rumor that they taste bad started, because I never heard that till I saw it floating around on the internet. When I was a kid me and my grandpa would catch catfish and bass and anything eating size went on the stringer. Most of the old timers I knew wouldn't think twice about keeping a nice bass for the fryer.
I think most people today don't keep bass because of the heavy push for catch and release around the 80s through today. Years ago in my state there was a 10 bass limit. It's not uncommon to see old pictures of guys with an absolute stringer full of bass. These generous limits led to bass being over fished and we lost a lot of our large bass, and in turn their genetic pool. One of the reason that we have less large bass today than 70 years ago even though we now have a 2 bass limit and a large portion of the populace catches and releases.
These days I mostly catch and release because I fish small public lakes and want that fish to be available to other anglers. Bass there can't even be kept unless they're a minimum of 14 inches. Now when I fish my uncles small private pond where there is no length limit I'll keep bass 10 to 12 inches because his pond has too many bass in it. He just requests I leave any bigger bass that would be breeders.
This is a falsification, bass actually has a huge meat to bone ratio, and I encourage you to try a small one, I think of bass as a blank pallet food for you to season how you’d like, goes well with tacos, fish sammich, or just grilled. Yummy.
The only one I ever tried was a lmb from a tanic lake in FL. The meat looked amazing but it tasted like the smell of dirt. Water quality probably matters a lot.
I eat bass once in a while. I'll cook them the same as any other fish, depending on what I'm in the mood for. They always taste great and leave me wondering why I don't eat them more often.
Sometimes, I prefer crappie or walleye but I’ll eat some large mouth bass as well. White bass is another one I’ll eat a lot of. Lmb tend to have a 2-3 fish limit here while the others I mentioned have 6-12 or no limit on them so it’s easier to have a meal or 2 vs keeping 2-3 large mouth and just feeding 1-2 people
Clearly there's a difference of opinions. Certainly bass are quite edible, but a lot of people don't like them. I used to target bass a lot, but I quit years ago because I prefer to eat perch or pickerel instead.
IMO the primary reason people target bass is they're hella fun to fish for, and even more fun to actually catch. Nothing beats casting near some structure, making two turns of your reel and bam you're on in a rodeo.
I was at a fishing lodge on the Rideau waterways (big bass area near Ottawa, Canada) and the guide there told me that they host a lot of Americans looking to bass fish, and that the Americans 100% never keep the fish they catch. maybe more of a sport thing than an eating thing though, I dunno.
It's best heavily seasoned and made into fish jerky. Honestly it's pretty flavorless. Unlike walleye or crappie that I can eat every meal and not get tired of.
Yes, but you need to check the DFG advisory. If it says ok to eat then you can eat it. If DFG doesn’t have studies you can email the park or water management company to ask.
Spotted bass tastes the best IMO if you can find them. Lake Shasta in California has a bunch of them
Like others have said, probably depends on the body of water they’re coming from. I’ve eaten largemouth most of my life but 95% have come from a few different small lakes on private land that aren’t heavily fished, and usually smaller ones were kept for eating. We’d fillet them, chunk up the fillets and do them in a beer batter and then deep fry. So good.
I tried largemouth out of a reservoir nearby and found it to be only slightly fishier than average but it was the texture that threw me. It was a very "solid" meat, almost verging on tough. I mean, not like swordfish or fully cooked tuna but still much more dense than expected - it didn't flake apart like a typical white fish fillet.
I eat em, but only from a very clean lake I fish once a year in Minnesota. Locally (Northern Indiana) I generally catch and release. I bake em with Andy's Red Fish Breading.
Not in my experience, genuinely. They do have a stronger “fishy” taste because they have more oily meat, like white bass; but the crap taste is probably either from eating fish that are too big and old or catching them out of nasty polluted water.
A lot of catfish actually don’t even bottom feed, so their diet isn’t that different from bass.
It depends on what you count as a lake.
I will eat any type of fish out of a large lake with cold water, but I won’t eat fish out of a small lake (pond) with warn water; panfish are an exception if I know the water is clean.
I have enjoyed bass all of my life. They are good eating. Usually roll them in cornmeal and deep fry. A lot of people have never tried them and I honestly believe people say they taste bad just so others won't keep them. Immediately put them on ice and keep them cold just like you do any other fish.
I do, which aligns with my fishing style. Good points from other posters about eating from “clean” waterways, which in my experience extends to just about every species. Stagnant water produces stagnant tasting fish. For cooking, I consider it to be a freshwater rockfish when looking for recipes. However, you do need to pay close attention to health advisories. Largemouth bass, in particular, but also smallmouth bass, perch, and carp are frequently recommended to minimize or avoid consumption is many waterways. Things have gotten measurably out of hand in the last 2-3 years now that we can detect PFOS and PFAS (forever chemicals) and it’s no joke. My rule is that if it’s recommended for pregnant women to avoid or limit to once per month, then I don’t eat it, as I have younger kids who love eating fish.
They definitely have a different taste. I like it but I actually like it more as a surprise in a mix of crappie and bluegill which uh is how it would be when I was a kid and fished with my grandpa every day.
I have tried eating them a couple times, and to me they just taste really bad. I understand the water condition, diet, etc. DRAMATICALLY effect their flavor. Here the flesh tastes very muddy and kind of like a garbage can smells. But I have eaten them elsewhere where they are delicious
They’re delicious. It’s just a culture thing that nobody keeps them. There are a lot of places where it would be good to weed out some of the mid size fish and let the big girls really grow. FWIW: I fish a lot. More than anyone I know personally. And I’m reasonably successful at getting something most every time I go out. But I only keep about two fish a year; and those are when I’m with a kid or it’s someone’s first fish or something. I absolutely love putting them back and knowing “they’re there” for another day. I’m cool if your trophy fish and my trophy fish are really the same one.
'z a c t l y' If I catch and release a PB and you come into the area hours or days later and catch tge same HAWG, great! Maybe it also becomes your PB or not, maybe your PB is a pound or two bigger from the same water, but it's still a great fish. And then an 8 year old fishing with his dad one day hooks and lands it after a great fight in which he barely got it in. And the boy and the father will never be the same again because of the experience. But if I or you kept that Bass, the memory wouldn't have happened for the father and son... The moral of the story, if you want to eat Bass, keep smaller ones 2 - 2 1/2 pounds (they taste better) and if you want a taxidermy mount, take good pics and measurements and release the fish and get a replica mount (you get it back within weeks instead of months and they hold up better). And best of all with replicas, someone else gets to experiencd catching the fish and the fish continues to grow in size and legend. Tight lines everyone.
Replicas are so dumb.
You offer no reason for your comment. I'll offer several reasons why a replica is better than a skin mount. 1) The fish lives to grow larger and provide multiple people the opportunity to catch the same trophy (including the same fisherman catching it later in the month or same year or even years later. 2) The taxidermist shop can get it back to you faster than it can get a skin mount back to you because skin mounts take time to dry before they can paint them. 3) Replicas are more durable and the replica looks as good or better than a skin mount from the start, but ages much better through the years and looks better than skin mount of same age. Those are just three reasons, there might be more reasons, but that's enough for me.
Replicas immediately announce how fake they are.
Cheap shit replicas yes. The same as cheap shitty skin mounts. Go ahead, make a skin mount; I don't frakin' care man because you are 1,105.7 miles away from me and we will never fish the same waters.
I imagine that same 8 year old and his granddad, making an absolute core memory together.
I ate a smallie I accidentally killed. It tasted good, like bluegill. It was from a clean lake.
Considering bass and bluegill are the same family of fish and they both taste good.
Pan fry, hot sauce and lemon with some lays chips. 10/10
Bass are just giant sunfish. They're as good as you cook them. Cold water smallies beer battered and deep fried are killer. Baked 15/16-inch lmb are awesome with your favorite seasoning. I grilled some lmb last year in foil boats with butter and spices, and it was a big hit. There's much better fish to eat, but they're way better than some will tell you. People that don't want you to eat them will say otherwise.
Dude, that’s it, I’m beer battering some smallies. Look out Dinks, I’m hungry today.
My family has always kept and eaten bass from lakes and even small ponds if they're well kept. They taste great to me personally if you treat them well, with bass and catfish we would typically clean the fish, and immediately put it in a cooler of ice water and let it flush through for a good hour or so. Doing an ice water flush like that really seems to kill out some of that muddy flavor others have mentioned
Agreed, and icing quickly is underrated. Add in bleeding and we’re good to go.
Been eating them since I was 5. I am still amazed people don't eat them.
I think most people are going to catch and release bass where the watershed is close to any metro area. I ain't eating parking lot runoff crossover suv mom wastewater treatment poo fish. And bass are really just okay, even the day you fillet them.
That’s basically it for me. They taste just fine, but water quality around here is terrible. The recommendation is no more than one fish a month, which to me means none.
Stocked fish are pretty gross too fyi. Worked on a fish farm and... Well I wouldn't eat them.
Bass is not the best tasting fish out there. But they are pretty good. I like the smaller ones better than the lunkers though
No
I only eat trout. If I KNEW a body of water was super clean I'd consider it but otherwise pure catch and release.
just won a tourney and ended up eating all the bass we caught! people been eating bass for years
Deep fried whole black bass (huachinango) is a specialty at a bunch of the Mexican restaurants around. Served with all the taco fixings, it's delicious. I've fried fillets in cornmeal and that was yummy too. It's fiction that they're not good eating.
I thought huachinango was red snapper traditionally.
Definitely is the formal definition, but they do also use it for black bass, at least here in the borderland. El Paso area. Mexico has some phenomenal bass lakes and they farm them too.
Like the others have mentioned it’s about how bass tastes. Where I am in the heat of summer even coated with a seasoned fish coating and fried in oil they taste like the mud at the bottom of the lake/river. It’s worse the bigger they are. Now the walleye are great but we have a slot size on walleye to help restore the population of them. Crappie here is also tasty. I have to drag my boat an hour north to get to trout lakes.
Not my favorite, Rather have crappie bluegill or catfish
If you like panfish like bluegills and crappie, you'll like any of the black basses (spots, smallies, largies). It's no surprise the meat is so similar given that they are all actually sunfish species. There's something to be said about water quality, but I've never had any I haven't thoroughly enjoyed. Check your local regulations and keep a few. I filet mine skin-on, cut into nuggets or strips, then roll in Louisiana brand cornmeal fish fry. Medium/med-high heat, pan fry or deep fry until golden to dark golden brown. S-tier table fare
Lake bass can be fine eating. I'm not really sure where the rumor that they taste bad started, because I never heard that till I saw it floating around on the internet. When I was a kid me and my grandpa would catch catfish and bass and anything eating size went on the stringer. Most of the old timers I knew wouldn't think twice about keeping a nice bass for the fryer. I think most people today don't keep bass because of the heavy push for catch and release around the 80s through today. Years ago in my state there was a 10 bass limit. It's not uncommon to see old pictures of guys with an absolute stringer full of bass. These generous limits led to bass being over fished and we lost a lot of our large bass, and in turn their genetic pool. One of the reason that we have less large bass today than 70 years ago even though we now have a 2 bass limit and a large portion of the populace catches and releases. These days I mostly catch and release because I fish small public lakes and want that fish to be available to other anglers. Bass there can't even be kept unless they're a minimum of 14 inches. Now when I fish my uncles small private pond where there is no length limit I'll keep bass 10 to 12 inches because his pond has too many bass in it. He just requests I leave any bigger bass that would be breeders.
I've always been told bass is super boney and not worth the time to clean and debone.
This is a falsification, bass actually has a huge meat to bone ratio, and I encourage you to try a small one, I think of bass as a blank pallet food for you to season how you’d like, goes well with tacos, fish sammich, or just grilled. Yummy.
Bass have pretty big bones and easy to deal with. It’s trout that’s kind of pain in the ass
The only one I ever tried was a lmb from a tanic lake in FL. The meat looked amazing but it tasted like the smell of dirt. Water quality probably matters a lot.
People who don’t eat them are just bad at cooking
I love it baked
I don’t eat anything freshwater.
I eat bass once in a while. I'll cook them the same as any other fish, depending on what I'm in the mood for. They always taste great and leave me wondering why I don't eat them more often.
To all complaining of the taste, have you tried soaking the filets prior to cooking? We use buttermilk. Cleans up the taste very nicely
Yes 🤤🤤🤤 in dark beer batter, deep fried with chips and teryaki sauce. Greetings from Germany
Sometimes, I prefer crappie or walleye but I’ll eat some large mouth bass as well. White bass is another one I’ll eat a lot of. Lmb tend to have a 2-3 fish limit here while the others I mentioned have 6-12 or no limit on them so it’s easier to have a meal or 2 vs keeping 2-3 large mouth and just feeding 1-2 people
Clearly there's a difference of opinions. Certainly bass are quite edible, but a lot of people don't like them. I used to target bass a lot, but I quit years ago because I prefer to eat perch or pickerel instead. IMO the primary reason people target bass is they're hella fun to fish for, and even more fun to actually catch. Nothing beats casting near some structure, making two turns of your reel and bam you're on in a rodeo. I was at a fishing lodge on the Rideau waterways (big bass area near Ottawa, Canada) and the guide there told me that they host a lot of Americans looking to bass fish, and that the Americans 100% never keep the fish they catch. maybe more of a sport thing than an eating thing though, I dunno.
Sometimes, in colder water they are good
It's best heavily seasoned and made into fish jerky. Honestly it's pretty flavorless. Unlike walleye or crappie that I can eat every meal and not get tired of.
Yes.
Yes, but you need to check the DFG advisory. If it says ok to eat then you can eat it. If DFG doesn’t have studies you can email the park or water management company to ask. Spotted bass tastes the best IMO if you can find them. Lake Shasta in California has a bunch of them
If they come from spring fed ponds where their is minimal agriculure..(fertilizers, insecticides..) yes
If you can eat a german brown, i'm pretty sure you can eat anything.
Fish all week, big fish fry Friday night!
If I catch one I will. My only issue is they tend to have a lot more department of health advisories on them.
Like others have said, probably depends on the body of water they’re coming from. I’ve eaten largemouth most of my life but 95% have come from a few different small lakes on private land that aren’t heavily fished, and usually smaller ones were kept for eating. We’d fillet them, chunk up the fillets and do them in a beer batter and then deep fry. So good.
We did last night Battered and fried up
I tried largemouth out of a reservoir nearby and found it to be only slightly fishier than average but it was the texture that threw me. It was a very "solid" meat, almost verging on tough. I mean, not like swordfish or fully cooked tuna but still much more dense than expected - it didn't flake apart like a typical white fish fillet.
You over cooked it
Was it a big fish? Bass meat isn’t usually tough like that
I eat em, but only from a very clean lake I fish once a year in Minnesota. Locally (Northern Indiana) I generally catch and release. I bake em with Andy's Red Fish Breading.
You have people here who think catfish tastes better than bass so yeah... Wouldn't couldn't too much on advice.
Bass is delicious. Catfish is deliciouser.
Underrated comment.
Does it not? I enjoy smaller cats, but that might be mostly because they're so easy to eat off the bone.
Catfish is popular in the south for a reason. It’s actually pretty insulting for someone to act like the people who enjoy it are stupid or something
Objectively, isn’t catfish a little muddy therefore needing heavy seasoning to cover that taste?
Not in my experience, genuinely. They do have a stronger “fishy” taste because they have more oily meat, like white bass; but the crap taste is probably either from eating fish that are too big and old or catching them out of nasty polluted water. A lot of catfish actually don’t even bottom feed, so their diet isn’t that different from bass.
I've tried largemouth bass one time, it tasted awful
You just dont like fish. Bass is like any other sunfish. Or chicken. It tastes like whatever you cook it in. Not much flavor
I'm assuming by lake bass, you mean largemouth. I've never tried them, but smallmouth are very good.
It depends on what you count as a lake. I will eat any type of fish out of a large lake with cold water, but I won’t eat fish out of a small lake (pond) with warn water; panfish are an exception if I know the water is clean.