Are Carp good to eat?

I have always considered carp as one of those things you eat if there is nothing else around, not unlike Greens and Okra.

Carp has a really fishy taste, similar to barbotte and catfish. A lot of people don’t like it. There are ways to prepare really fishy, gamey fish which make them edible, such as soaking them in milk or “cooking” them with vinegar, but it’s not as simple as gutting and filleting so most people don’t want to bother.

Isn’t Bluefish like that also?

And Catfish is pretty popular also (at least in the South it is).

So is Carp considerably worse than either of those?

My family is really into fishing and nobody eats carp. I’ve heard of putting it in the smoker and then eating it. But we didn’t eat carp when we caught it, or suckers (bottom feeders) and there was a another one my brother would throw against the wall of the dam if he caught one…. I can’t remember… We did eat bullheads, but they had to be cooked and prepared a certain way. Their flesh was pink-ish and they didn’t have scales. My brother would peel off their skin and bone them and them fry up their flesh in a cast iron skillet with lots of butter. Yummm!

Gefilte fish is made from carp. Many love it but I’ve never been able to try it.

@Buttonstc Bottom-feeders (like carp and catfish) have what’s called a “hot stomach” (even though carp don’t actually have a stomach). That means they have to be gutted and cleaned as soon as they’re caught or the bacteria in their guts will contaminate the whole fish and make you very sick when you eat them. This is why bottom-feeding fish have such a bad reputation.

I just remembered the other fishes name. My brother called them ‘Chub’ fish. Google tells me it is a type of carp, too.

My understanding is, if you know how to get the ‘mud vein’ out, Carp are edible. I was especially interested in those invasive jumping carp Which are a hazard to boating and an environmental problem because they eat so much. Apparently this species is good to eat. The old Mississippi river carp, not so much. I think it would mostly depend on where the fish lived and fed before being caught. I read that the common goldfish is a species of carp as are Koi! I don’t know if these species is routinely eaten, but they certainly live in clean water.

When I was about 12 about 55 years ago we went on a 3-day survival trip, bringing no food and living on what was growing wild around us. The place we camped was a point where a stream joined with a creek. There were plenty of carp, and a few catfish. This was decades before the invasive jumping carp mentioned by @majorrich above.

I do remember the mud vein, which, if I remember correctly, is the same point as the lateral line. The lateral line on a fish is heavily laden with nerves and is used to detect movement in the water around them. That helps them locate prey, avoid predators and stay in their schools more easily. There is supposedly a higher level of fat in that area and the meat is darker due to that section being more saturated with blood. It also makes sense that the fat would have a larger concentration of pollutants and heavy metals, making for a muddy flavor if it is kept or cut while removing.

Carp taste like mud. I’ve never met anyone that could make them taste good. We had a Chinese national living below our apartment in college, and he’d do his best to make it taste good, but the best I can say about it was it didn’t completely suck. Close but not there. Bullhead and I assume catfish in the Spring are excellent. Very sweet if prepared right.

Catfish are a diverse group in my experience, @SmashTheState. I don’t recall a particular hurry to process the freshwater variety around the Mississippi.
I think catfish taste muddy, and I eat catfish on a regular basis.

I’ve had fried and scored carp.

Mixed results.

Crazily enough I’ve been kind of digging into uses of the jumping catfish and apparently it is pretty tasty albeit bony growing up to 100 pounds! I can imagine getting whacked by one while water skiing or something like that. Apparently one enterprising woman is exporting these fish back to China where clean habitat for the fish is in short supply. If there is a zombie apocalypse, we may end up eating these buggers, but they are compared to Tilapia in their flavor.