Like, from an expert on some of the U.S. E&E.
Public broadcasting is very...
It's just, you go like a local prophet.
Because it's just like a...
Part of like...
You gotta guarantee your funding so you can't make people do.
Yeah.
So, that's because they all have feelings coming to the needle if they want to be more.
Uh...
All right, we're just going to show how they do it.
They've been speaking it off.
You know, I think that's where the people are going to be.
They're going to be able to start them off.
They're going to have revenue changes.
They're going to help me to do it.
Yeah.
Those things are like, no one's going to...
No one's going to call in and say,
Oh, I love seeing that needle on there, but...
Someone might say, I didn't like it.
All right.
Flying a little bit of flying here.
You good whenever.
I don't know why you don't have to go for it.
Oh.
All right.
Hopefully it's waterproof too.
Yeah.
We are ready whenever you are.
This gives us a second.
Sounds good.
Right now, the framing, you're going to get a lot of this table in the foreground.
Okay.
So, if we kind of frame it up,
I don't know if we can just compare the crop in if we need to.
Yeah, that's 4K.
Look at that.
All right.
You're good.
Awesome.
So, these are a chip wall strain of walleye.
So, they have just coming from this region.
They have been domesticated for a number of generations.
So, they are technically known as a domesticated strain.
But here, this was a cohort.
This was probably about a two-year-old fish.
So, a little bit slightly slower of growth than what we're used to.
But you always kind of have that tapering.
You have your fastest growing fish and then you have your ones that grow a little bit slower.
So, with the walleye, the main pieces of meat that we use are just the two fillets.
So, the best way to start, just get right behind the gill.
I like to angle it a little bit up towards the head of the fish,
because there is a good amount of meat right in this pocket that's often missed.
So, you get that angle down to the spine.
Then work your way down the spine.
This is flat as possible.
Then, once you make it to the top of this fin, I like to punch all the way through.
Then, keeping your nice flat work in your way down through the edge of the tail.
In general, probably our fastest growing fish are going to reach about this size in 15 months.
We have plenty of these fish left from this cohort.
With just a couple fish tanks, we have to kind of be very strategic about our bio plan.
Make sure we have enough fish to support our plants that make sure they're providing enough nutrients.
So, I know there's some people who cut right through the ribs and take the ribs off after.
Are you more of a carve around the ribs?
I'm more of a carve around the ribs when I don't have an electric knife.
Otherwise, if it was an electric knife, you'd just buzz right through that.
Then, work your way around the ribs. You can do it quite a bit faster.
Especially if you're doing this in a commercial setting.
The way we're getting these fillets done right here would be too slow.
That's a beautiful piece of wood.
We try to, and we do a little bit of a purge toose and no food beforehand.
Once they're dispatched, we put them in a little bit of water.
Then, you're just left with perfect white flaky piece of meat.
Then, the only bones on this fillet are going to be right here on that walleye.
Generally, you just do a little y-cut.
There are pin bone machines that you can take care of that.
But, quite expensive, you need to reach a certain economy of scale to get there.
This would be a great fillet for the frying pan.
You just do the same thing on the other side.
There are these walleye that we have here today are probably just big enough
where there are a couple of hidden pieces of meat that many walleye fishermen will be aware of.
Maybe it'll be news to some of us.
This is the famous walleye cheeks.
The walleye cheeks and also walleye wings.
It's something I picked up an Eagle Lake in Canada.
I had a resort up there.
My family goes to.
Once a week, they did a fry and they would bring out these walleye wings that end up being more of a seafoody
rather than that nice white flaky.
It's a little bit different texture but a really nice piece of meat
that you can get a good bite from on the bigger size of walleye.
How long is this fish?
This is probably about a 16 or 17 inch fish.
It's about a probably 1.5 pound fish.
We'd be hopefully harvesting.
We'd probably get maybe about 8 ounces worth of meat off of this fish.
Those are ready to go.
You're not the first nor the last traditional to do it on a newspaper.
Fish wrap is...
I was going to go with a nice Wisconsin cutting board but I figure it's true to the Wisconsin fish fry
right on a newspaper.
The walleye cheeks, you can pretty much fillet them out right here.
You can feel it, you can see the little squishy piece of muscle.
That is more seafoody as well.
Right here are the walleye wings.
It's that space in between.
It's two bottom fins.
You can see there's a nice layer of meat right there, about a half inch.
You just try to cut around that.
Then you can fry the whole thing up and you kind of slurp the meat off the fins then.
It can be a little bit easier if you have like a wire cutter or something honestly.
This is a job that I have cut myself a couple of times doing so.
The caution is suggested.
So how old were you when you first started filleting your own fish?
Oh, geez, probably 15 or 16.
I have so many memories of my dad doing it and I honestly, almost every time I'm filleting fish,
I feel like my dad standing here.
It's definitely a cool connection piece and a cool kind of like family tie in.
And a good thing to know.
A lot of fish end up being real similar with how you fillet them.
Knowing how to do a walleye, you can do so many other fish.
Then there's a lot of goodness left over in this fish.
Even when you take out all of the meat possible.
You can use this for fish emulsion, turn it into plant nutrients.
You could take these skins that are still on the fillets, turn it into fish leather.
We could take the head, freeze dry it, turn it into a sort of pet treat.
All things we are considering as we kind of scale up on the walleye side of things,
but don't have a use for it just now.
So it'll go into our compost pile and then we'll at least get some nutrients for plants out of it that way.
We'll get the other one.
Right.
The worst is when I have to grab my dad's and like the best.
Yeah, there's not, that's more of a, I am a quarterback's coach.
So that's always kind of a running joke when you get new quarterbacks.
Oh, you've got your left handed football today.
No, it only becomes, it becomes a right or a left handed fillet knife.
After the person's using it enough.
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
So there is actually.
About the best version of a walleye cheek that I'm going to get.
You know, you can, there's a little bit more meat in there, but that's mostly what you get, that little chunk.
This one's just slightly bigger, maybe, maybe quarter pound.
And one of the main things that like made us interested in this, we just went past some pigs on the property, which we give some extra produce to.
But one of the main things of walleye that we're really enticed by is that feed conversion.
So fish in general are as close to a one to one feed conversion where you feed one pound, one pound of feed into this animal and you get close to one pound of food for humans coming out of it.
Whereas a cow is more like nine to one.
A pig is more like five to one chicken, more like four to one.
So that just like taking advantage of your resources that you're putting into these and making sure you're getting food for people out of it was the thing that we really like the idea of.
And these, so this fish, you know, pound and a half over the course of its life at max three pounds, but probably it only ate probably about two pounds of feed throughout its life to get to this size.
All while we're, we know exactly what type of feed it's in.
It's a healthy fish based high protein diet.
So we just know we're going to get really good fillets out of it.
And it's a healthy, healthy fish that has been stressed out a minimal amount throughout its life.
But yeah, you can definitely see it probably half your time or better with a, with an electric filet knife here.
And there again, that's really nice.
Piece of meat.
It's not as interesting to go through these ones whenever I catch a wall and I'm flailing it.
I like to go through the stomach contents, see what, see what it's eating.
You know, if it's crayfish or more like leeches and you can kind of match the hash when you're fishing, this, you're not going to find anything in its stomach.
So a little less interesting, but these will, although these are feed trained and they've been eating feed their whole life, these will go bat.
If they were stocked into a pond or in someone's fish tank or stocked into a lake, these will go back to praying on minnows, leeches, invertebrates.
I like the, the Chippewa strain of walleye. It really has a nice black, black top to the color, a nice cold bottom.
One thing that I don't know if you guys have came across much in your just studies of Wisconsin walleye and everybody involved, but you ever heard of like a blonde walleye?
Yeah, it's really quite color.
Right, but it's like, you know, one in a thousand or something like that when people see it out of dam and make a big deal.
We found that it's been about like one in, one in a thousand of our walleye are that blonde walleye. It looks a little lighter.
No different, but they just look different. They eat the same, they act pretty similar.
Yeah, piece there.
You guys are getting enough bad shots where if this wasn't like a nice puff piece.
Look at how gross fling fish is.
We can tell you, but we're actually for PETA.
Right. I told you a little bit about that the last time that that is, that is a concern of fish farmers.
But you know, there's studies coming out all the time that plants feel pain. Plants cry when they get chopped down so.
Not that I want them to, but I'm just saying everybody's got to eat and we can just provide food in the most ecological way possible. That's kind of what we're about.
The walleye of course are named after their eyes until they hunt. They like to hunt in low light.
We have grown a green bay strain. That's the only other walleye we've seen.
And I believe UW-Stevens Point NADF facility is working on some strain comparisons.
There's definitely some differences of the green bay strain to the Chippewa strain. Green bay strain is lighter.
It seemed to just put on weight slightly differently, but there's been no scientific comparisons of one strain of walleye compared to another being raised in a.
Aquaculture system like this. So we'll be really interested to see what the study finds and if, you know, one is better than the other.
You got to think like how long have livestock cattle or pigs been selectively bred to get to where we are today.
You can imagine we could do a lot, lot of work on the wall and making it more efficient.
So after all that time, we have some nutrients for the compost, four fillets, a couple of walleye wings, and four cheeks.
So when you see that, those are beautiful fillets. That's like when people talk about the best eating fillets.
And that's one of the cats. They love catching the big ones, but when they talk, people know what they're talking about for eating. That's the size they want to eat.
Definitely. Yep. And that's kind of, it works out with our growth rates. It kind of makes the most sense to harvest them.
About that one to two pound range. And then speaking of plates, you know, it fits on a fish fry plate or a walleye sandwich or something.
That size makes a lot of sense kind of through and through.
So what's your favorite way to prepare this?
Oh, we actually, just a, you know, pan fry it. We actually do have our own tartar sauce and fish breading too, which Chef Ray prepares. This is his kitchen.
And so that is actually my favorite way. New is just developed, but yeah, pan frying with our breading and tartar sauce for sure.
The walleye wings are a little different here, but you can put full, you can basically bread this whole thing.
And some people will get the fins, you know, they're not super keen on that, but actually if you deep fry those and just have a bite of them, there's a little breading on them.
It's like a potato chip, basically.
So how would you suggest it? Because I've never seen the wings.
These, yeah, I would just clean them up just a little bit and then you can just throw breading on them and then fry them up the same way deep fry them.
And then it's bit like you can, it's another seafood like it where you just kind of scoop it off the breast plate.
It's oysters. It's like a oyish. Yeah, right. It's kind of like that.
And it is more like a, kind of more similar to shrimp rather than freshwater white fillets. So yeah.
Yep. But yeah, any other questions or anything else you guys want to see with the fillets at all?
So do you take the skin off or do you serve, you freeze them just like this?
Yeah, we will, for customers, we'll take these off and it'll be boneless skinless fillets. Yep.
Yep. I know some places it'll scale first and then lead the skin on.
I think perch especially, they roll up then.
Like that, it's back to you. And perch fry? Gotcha.
This stuff takes quite a bit of time in the processing time so doing it up boneless skinless just makes it a little bit more ready to eat for consumers too.
But it is, you know, with that nice color I like having the skin on there too because it's kind of more representative of what it is.
But we hope to get to a point where all the ones we are harvesting that we're using most of the skins actually.
We've only slightly experimented with turning leather from the fish skins but we're really excited about maybe doing some walleye wallets or walleye belts, things like that just to take advantage of the resource.
So are you going to take the skin off these or what's your plan for these in particular?
I could. I was just going to take these home probably like this.
Okay.
But I could do that if you guys want to see that.
If you could do a couple of...
Sure.
Just to get some video on that.
Sure.
These are going into the fry pan tonight.
Yeah, I think so.
And I have a pregnant fiance at home, no worries about mercury or plastics and these.
There's no monthly limit that you can eat of these all land-based.
You know exactly what's going into them.
Perfectly clean, safe.
So tell me about walleye leather. How does that work?
Yeah.
So you can feel, you know, this is... I couldn't rip this.
You know, so this is a really just nice piece of something you can make something with it.
In the Pacific Northwest tribes for arguably thousands of years have been turning salmon
skins into boots or other things to use strings.
So we just love the idea of making use out of this.
It would have to be scaled before that scaled and then tan.
But me and the partners here, our first entrepreneurial venture was actually trapping.
So mostly like raccoon, muskrat, mink, turning the furs and selling those.
So we do have some actual experience in tanning skins and furs and things like that.
But yeah, still in the early stages of this.
But all of that was part of the 100% use of fish pledge that we joined.
The Great Lakes Coalition is partnering with other fisheries and fish farms in the area
where you're trying to use 100% of the fish, not just the fillets and stuff you can eat,
but the rest of the carcass as well.
Yeah.
Yeah. Any other questions on that stuff?
We're good on that.
I'll probably get a shot of you just packaging that up.
Sure.
I'm going to wash my hands quick.
I was looking for some ice, but a chef didn't have any on hand for us.
I guess not.
No ice in the water either.
But this kitchen worked out so nice.
This is chef's kitchen, but we got it licensed through the county.
So then we can do all of our pastos, dressing, stuff like that in here.
All right.
Remember, you're ready.
Good.
So, that's what I want, maybe a little bit better.
Sure.
What was it?
A plate of your hands.
Sure.
What was it?
Sure.
What was it?
A plate of your hands.
Sure.
So, do you want me to like?
You don't have to.
Okay.
And grab to a mitten spot.
Sure.
Come in.
Yep.
Let me ready.
Awesome.
Good shot.
One more time.
We can start right there.
Perfect.
There you go.
Perfect.
There you go.
A little bit.
Grab a little bit.
Take care.
There you go.
Yeah.
You