Trout Coloring

[bobby b.]

Occasionally I'll keep a couple 11.9 inch rainbows to eat. I've come to think that the brighter the color of the fish the longer it had been in the lake and likely to taste the best. Recently I keep two fish to eat - one was brightly colored and the other more silvered in color. I expected the brightly colored fish to have a more pink meat and the silver to be more grey. But this was not the case. The brightly colored fish was somewhat pink but the silvered fish was almost orange like salmon. They both tasted good but the salmon colored one was better. Both baked in aluminum foil with butter, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Questions - Can someone explain this? Is there a good way to predict the color and thus the taste by from the fishing coloring?

Thanks

Bobby

[Seth]

Good question because I was wondering the same thing myself. When we came down this past summer, we caught a lot of trout down by Monkey Island that were the same way. A few had good color, but the flesh was still very light in color where as some of the "silver bullets" had very orange/pink meat. Now as to whether one tasted better than the other, I never paid much attention. They all taste pretty good to me when they are fresh.

[Phil Lilley]

Meat is white when they're fed hatchery food and orange when they've eaten natural food from the lake so your observations are correct there. The only exception I've seen is when males are in spawning mode that tend to have white meat.

Rainbows are stocked by Shepherd and Noesho hatcheries- neither stock the same strains of rainbows. I don't know about Neosho but Shepherd stocks several kinds of strains and each have different looks. Some are very colorful and some stay silver. The Neosho rainbows I've seen are all silver and stay silver.

I don't eat enough of them to tell you the difference in taste.