Walleye wings provide gourmet eating
The completely cooked wings, skin side up, with the skin removed and ready to eat. There is enough meat for an appetizer-size bite or two on each wing. The fins are used as handles as the wings are eaten.
Walleye have wings? Yes they do. At least there is a part of the walleye known as wings, but in the past anglers have called them chins and fins, bat wings, rabbit ears and pecks.
Today known simply as wings, this part of the walleye is delicious, but most of them are thrown away. Either anglers don’t know about them or they don’t want to take the time to deal with them. It takes about 30 seconds to remove the wings from the fish carcass, so the assumption must be most people don’t know about them.
The wings are found on the breast or chest of the fish. Place the fish on its back after removing the two fillets from the sides. There are four fins near the head.
Some fishermen cut out all four fins, but there really isn’t much meat on the second two, what I call the outside fins. Cutting down along the inside edge of the outside fin toward the head will free one half of the wings.
Cutting down the edge of the second outside fin, along with a cut across the head edge of the wings, should free this piece of meat from the carcass. The wings now consist of two fins and a hunk of meat. The amount of meat will depend, of course, on the size of the fish, with a large walleye wing measuring one half to three quarters of an inch thick piece of meat.
The wings are prepared as appetizers, as it would take a bunch of them to make a meal. There is enough meat for an appetizer-size bite or two on each wing. The fins are used as handles as the wings are eaten. Besides the fins and skin, there is another non-edible and bony structure embedded in the wing meat.
My experiments include cooking them in a small amount of oil with only Mrs. Dash as seasoning. This was good, as any walleye meat is good eating.
Next I placed garlic salt, granulated garlic and Mrs. Dash in a bowl, mixed this combination and dipped the wings in the mixture before frying. This was better than the first try, as any walleye meat is good eating. My next attempt will be to fully bread them and deep fry the wings.
Tartar and/or cocktail sauce makes a good accompaniment to the wings.
These wings are a delicacy to me. My plan is to keep and eat this meat at every turn. This means offering to assist an angler, fillet his fish at a fish-cleaning station, or asking if I could have the wings, if the angler was going to throw them away.
When this scenario occurs, a transport form must be completed, showing who caught the fish, their fishing license number and other information, plus the name of the person receiving the fish parts.
Some people report eating the fins, saying they are similar to potato chips. I tried them. They were OK, but they won’t be a regular item on my menu.