Walleye

Pronounced "Wally", this largest North American perch can grow to 42 inches and 25 pounds but the photo specimen was 18-1/2 inches and 2-3/4 pounds. This freshwater fish is found in the great lakes and in most major rivers in the Northeast of the U.S. and Canada. It is found in the Mississippi river basin as far south as Arkansas. Commercial aquaculture is in the development stages but large numbers are hatched for restocking lakes and rivers.

More on the Perch Families.

This sportfishing favorite is an excellent eating fish, particularly fillets lightly dusted with flour and pan fried. The flesh is firm enough to poach or bake well but the flavor seems more suited for frying.

This fish is completely covered with smallish hard scales with good adhesion so they take a bit of energy to scrape off and will fly around quite a lot. Cleaning the walleye poses no particular problems but you'll want to cut the gills out with kitchen shears and you may need to use your long nose pliers to pull out some fragments of the full length swim bladder.

Walleye is pretty easy to fillet and with a little care you can fillet right off the ribs - there are a lot of ribs and they can be tedious to pull from the fillet if you cut them from the backbone. Yield is reasonably good with a 2-3/4 pound fish yielding 1-1/4 pound of skinless fillet (45%). The skin is tough and it's an easy fish to skin using the standard long knife and cutting board method. Walleye skin shrinks very significantly when fried.