Triggerfish – Chicken Wings Of The Gulf

I have eaten a lot of different types of fish in my day but over the weekend I may have stumbled upon my new favorite - triggerfish.

A good friend of mine that I have fished and hunted with for twenty plus years makes a few trips a year to go to Alabama to fish in the Gulf of Mexico.

My buddy Adam always throws me an invite but most of the time his trips down to Gulf come up when I have work or family time so I have yet to make down for a trip.

Adam, being the good buddy that he is, usually sets a side a few filets to bring up to my house for a good ol' fish fry.

My buddy recently did a fishing trip for some tuna, mahi and piles of other delicious fish the ocean has to offer. This time he brought up some triggerfish, this is a fish he has been telling me about for years. These fish also offer up a delicacy know as the chicken wings of the Gulf with Trigger Throats.

I know what you're thinking, when he told me trigger throats I was like what?

Adam related the trigger throats to something many of us Michiganders know as walleye cheeks. There are these little cheek muscles in the face of a walleye that when you get enough of them, they make for a special meal like no other. The walleye cheek meat is stringy similar to chicken meat and they are so good.

So this now brings us to the triggerfish. We fried up some filets and they were delicious. For a big fish, they didn't taste fishy at all, reminded me of somewhere between a walleye and a bluegill. Then for the finale, we fried up some trigger throats. These throats are on the bottom of the fish and they have a bone system in them similar to a chicken wing. You peel the meat off the bone and it is absolutely fire.

You can only keep one a day when fishing for them so it obviously takes a while to save up enough for trigger throats for a meal, but if you ever get a chance to enjoy it, don't pass it up because its an amazing once in a lifetime meal.