handling/eating longtails

[Siminikish]

can someone tell me what i should do with longtails. do you bleed them? fillet or steak them. they also have a large blood line, remove it? how should i cook them? any help would be appreciated

[cobiaman]

we bleed them and fillet them and also remove th blood line as well, hope that helps a little bit

[kingtin]

can someone tell me what i should do with longtails.

Give 'em to me.............they taste like vermin ;) ;D

kev

[Jamaryiz]

Siminikish, I don't quite know why so many people refer to longtails as bait as I am more than happy to put a couple on ice. We kill the tuna with a brain spike and bleed them immediately - if I get a chance, I will also gut them as soon as possible to get ice/cold slush into their belly cavity to help chill them quicker.

I also fillet them. I'm not sure if everyone else does it this way but I generally fillet them by making the long cuts top and bottom along the fish but then also cut down to the backbone along the lateral line to make four lengthwise fillets (it seems to be the easiest way for me as I can thern pretty much just lift these fillets off the frame and avoid the hard backbone). I then skin these four fillets and remove the dark red bloodline. I then cut these fillets into sizeable portions before freezing (yes, I think it freezes well). To eat, I normally slice these portions at angles across the grain into say 1.5cm thick and then use a marinade of 1/2 cup olive oil, couple of cloves of crushed garlic and 1/4 cup lemon juice. Then it's a simple matter of throwing onto a clean and hot barbie plate until the outside is seared but still just raw inside. All ready to eat.

Good luck.

[gleeeza]

Mate I had my first longtail last year and it was as good as gold fresh. My lesson for keeping the things wasn't what I had hoped for. At 20 KGs there was plenty of chewing so I followed the bleeding and butchering procedure to the letter.

A tip for freezing the stuff is to chop up oversize chunks, inevitably it will brown off no matter what you do.However because I froze large chunks and once they were defrosted I was able to trim off the brown and to my surprise the center was as good as fresh, seriously! A pro mate said good berley but I like my sushi and it was better than average I reckon. Hope this helps.

Gleeeza

[Siminikish]

thanks guys