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You are here: Home / Food & Recipes / Food / ‘Now for Something *Completely* Different’ Open Thread: Copi, the Other White Fish

‘Now for Something *Completely* Different’ Open Thread: Copi, the Other White Fish

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… Alas, were Richard Guindon with us at this hour…

… “The ‘carp’ name is so harsh that people won’t even try it,” said Kevin Irons, assistant fisheries chief with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. “But it’s healthy, clean and it really tastes pretty darn good.”

The federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is funding the five-year, $600,000 project to rebrand the carp and make them widely available. More than two dozen distributors, processors, restaurants and retailers have signed on. Most are in Illinois, but some deliver to multiple states or nationwide…

Span, a Chicago communications design company, came up with “copi.” It’s an abbreviated wordplay on “copious” * — a reference to the booming populations of bighead, silver, grass and black carp in the U.S. heartland.

Imported from Asia in the 1960s-70s to gobble algae from Deep South sewage lagoons and fish farms, they escaped into the Mississippi. They’ve infested most of the river and many tributaries, crowding out native species like bass and crappie.

Regulators have spent more than $600 million to keep them from the Great Lakes and waters such as Lake Barkley on the Kentucky-Tennessee line. Strategies include placing electric barriers at choke points and hiring crews to harvest the fish for products such as fertilizer and pet food. Other technologies — underwater noisemakers, air bubble curtains — are in the works.

It would help if more people ate the critters, which are popular in other countries. Officials estimate up to 50 million pounds (22.7 million kilograms) could be netted annually in the Illinois River between the Mississippi and Lake Michigan. Even more are available from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast…

In the U.S., carp are known primarily as muddy-tasting bottom feeders. Bighead and silver carp, the primary targets of the “copi” campaign, live higher in the water column, feeding on algae and plankton. Grass carp eat aquatic plants, while black carp prefer mussels and snails. All four are high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in mercury and other contaminants, Irons said.

“It has a nice, mild flavor … a pleasant surprise that should help fix its reputation,” said Brian Jupiter, a Chicago chef who plans to offer a copi po’boy sandwich at his Ina Mae Tavern. The fish is adaptable to numerous cuisines including Cajun, Asian and Latin, he said.

Yet it could be a hard sell, particularly because the fish’s notorious boniness makes it challenging to produce fillets many diners expect, Jupiter added. Some of the best recipes may use chopped or ground copi, he said…

Next step: Seeking approval from the federal Food and Drug Administration, which says “coined or fanciful” fish labels can be used if not misleading or confusing. A familiar example is “slimehead,” which became a hit after its market moniker was switched to “orange roughy.”

Illinois also plans to register the “copi” trademark, enabling industry groups to develop quality control procedures, Irons said…

*Also, ‘coping’!

At the moment, the ad below is a joke; in five years, who knows?

Reader Interactions

92Comments

  1. 1.

    MagdaInBlack

    I was wondering ( here in Illinois ) when they’d find a way to harvest and market these fish. I hope it works.

  2. 2.

    Ben Cisco

    I remember (kinda) a recipe for carp that consisted of placing it on a board, seasoning it, cooking for a period of time, then throwing away the fish and eating the board..

  3. 3.

    raven

    My good buddy died last month and he’s most responsible for my love of fishing. He grew up in Carthage, Illinois and fished at Hamilton, across the might Mississippi from Keokuk, Iowa.  That’s where I first dropped a line after 3 hours drives from Champaign-Urbana. This was a business card from “Strohn’s Fish Market: in Hamilton. He sold smoked carp that he ran though some contraption that crushed the bones so you could eat it! Great memories of lock and damn #19. Here I am in the late 70’s with the dam behind me! 

    Thanks for the memories.

  5. 5.

    Ken

    Worked for Patagonian toothfish Chilean sea bass, well enough that the fisheries came near collapse.

  6. 6.

    Peale

    Just call it something exotic Kampuchean tilapia. Or Winnebago milk fish. It’s worked with chilean  sea bass.

  8. 8.

    SpaceUnit

    I caught an enormous carp from a deep pool in the creek behind our house when I was about eight or nine years old.  The thing must have been 12 to 15 pounds.  I was so proud, thinking that I’d caught dinner for the night.

    Got home and my mother, who had cleaned and cooked many a trout, just stared at me and that fish with a bemused look on her face.

    We fed it to the cat.  I can still remember it gagging on the bones.

  10. 10.

    Anne Laurie

    @Ben Cisco: I remember (kinda) a recipe for carp that consisted of placing it on a board, seasoning it, cooking for a period of time, then throwing away the fish and eating the board..

    Way I remember it, that was catfish, and the quote was attributed to Mark Twain.

    (Only seafood I eat voluntarily are scallops & tuna salad, so I’m not the target market… )

  11. 11.

    James E Powell

    “Please taste this and let me know what you think. I’d like to serve it to the men.”

    “What is it?” asked Yossarian, and took a big bite.

    “Chocolate-covered cotton.”

    Yossarian gagged convulsively and sprayed his big mouthful of chocolate-covered cotton right out into Milo’s face. “Here, take it back!” he shouted angrily. “Jesus Christ! Have you gone crazy? You didn’t even take the goddam seeds out.”

    “Give it a chance, will you?” Milo begged. “It can’t be that bad. Is it really that bad?”

    “It’s even worse.”

    “But I’ve got to make the mess halls feed it to the men.”

    “They’ll never be able to swallow it.”

    “They’ve got to swallow it,” Milo ordained with dictatorial grandeur, and almost broke his neck when he let go with one arm to wave a righteous finger in the air.

  18. 18.

    Kristine

    @MagdaInBlack:

    I was wondering ( here in Illinois ) when they’d find a way to harvest and market these fish. I hope it works.

    So do I.

    Now if they can figure out a use for quagga and zebra mussels….

  19. 19.

    Jay

    @opiejeanne:

    carp is bland white meat, ( from cold water) , like tilapia. It seasons well, is dry, the problem is the bones. They have thousands of fine radial bones, that are impossible to filet or cut out. Most traditional European and Asian carp recipes use cooking/prep/serving methods that “render” the fine bones like sardines, usually with a pressure cooker or pickling of some kind.

  20. 20.

    Kent

    A real problem is generating enough seafood protein to feed fish farms.  For example, Menhaden are being overfished along the Atlantic coast in order to produce cat food and feed for fish farms.

    I would think someone could build a processing plant in order to turn these carp into fishmeal for fish farm food on an industrial scale.  I doubt Atlantic salmon and Tilapia are going to care about the flavor or the pin bones.

  21. 21.

    trollhattan

    Yee gods.

    They’re forever scrambling for some “trash fish” to industrial-fish and make into fish meal for fish farming, so why not these critters? The supply seems effectively infinite. Like Florida pythons.

  23. 23.

    Anne Laurie

    @Jay: Most traditional European and Asian carp recipes use cooking/prep/serving methods that “render” the fine bones like sardines, usually with a pressure cooker or pickling of some kind.

    Gefilte fish, for instance.  I don’t know the proper names, but I do know that variations on ‘chopped carp, plus filler’ recipes are found in all the Eastern European / Central Asian cultures I’ve read about.  For one thing, carp are easy to keep alive in a stockpond, so they were reliable ‘peasant food’ going back to the Middle Ages.  In fact, I was taught one reason fish was permitted on Catholic ‘fast days’ is that carp was cheap & plentiful, if not very exciting for people who could afford animal flesh!

  26. 26.

    Anne Laurie

    @trollhattan: They’re forever scrambling for some “trash fish” to industrial-fish and make into fish meal for fish farming, so why not these critters?

    Not an expert, but I suspect the ‘floating factories’ that suck up & process trash fish would be unwelcome in the Great Lakes.   IIRC, most of those ‘processors’ are only viable outside national borders — every nation with a coastline accuses every other nation of clear-fishing *their* natural resources.

  27. 27.

    Jay

    @Kristine:

    they won’t. Both Quagga’s and Zebras accumulate not just biohazards, but also heavy metals and other chemical in both their waste and bodies. Yellow Perch have adapted to eat them, which is why you aren’t supposed to pig out on Great Lakes Yellow Perch.

  28. 28.

    opiejeanne

    @Jay: I have eaten tilapia and thought it was ok, but these days I avoid farmed fish and tilapia in general.

    I know about the bones in carp and I just watched a guy last night who prepped one, filleting some of the belly and making steaks out of the rest. Those bones, especially the “y” bones are a real pain; he showed that the belly doesn’t have them, but that’s less than a third of the fish after the head is removed.

  29. 29.

    Kent

    @Anne Laurie: You don’t need floating factories.  Just an ordinary processing plant in some industrial park in Kentucky.  The reason floating factories exist is to service distant water fisheries that have no shore-based processing plants available.

  33. 33.

    opiejeanne

    @MagdaInBlack: In SF area they did that with crabs. They’d drag a net through the east bay and dump what they caught onto the fields, and plow them under. No one thought about eating them, and that makes me weep because back then the bay was clean. Now there are signs everywhere warning people not to eat fish they catch there.

  34. 34.

    Jazzman

    Carp is indeed an important food fish in many parts of the world.  It gets a bad rap in the USA because it can thrive even in badly polluted water (one of its unflattering nicknames here in Indiana is “sewer bass”).

    I remember reading a survey of aquatic life in the St. Joseph River made by Notre Dame biologists in the late 1940s.  There were stretches where they found none at all–except carp.  (The river has since been cleaned up enough to support a Steelhead population.)

  36. 36.

    Alison Rose

    Don’t you dare, Manischewitz. I’m almost 42 and I still haven’t recovered from the constant trauma of seeing jars of gefilte fish in our fridge as a kid. I love my mother dearly, but liking that stuff was definitely a character flaw.

  37. 37.

    MagdaInBlack

    @opiejeanne: Our northern Illinois rivers are much cleaner than when I was a child, but Im still not going to eat anything from them, tho people do.

    I’m 64 and when I was a child the rivers were a soupy green from algae due to ag fertilizer run off. My father would not allow me to even touch the water in the Fox River, which we lived along. When he as young, the water was crystal clear and people gathered clams for a button factories.

  38. 38.

    Jay

    @Kent:

    They already do. There are plants that turn them into animal meal and fish meal. The key issue, is that they are low in fats, where sardines, menhaden and herring are high in fats, and for salmon farms, a high fat diet is required, as salmon are not great fat accumulators..

    @trollhattan:

  40. 40.

    RobertB

    @Jay: ISTR reading about carp being fished for in places where trout can’t be caught.

    I have a small pond, and it has a couple of *amur, whose purpose in live is to eat the weeds.  I managed to catch one last year by accident when I was fishing for bass; I think I hit the fish in the head with it by accident, and it grabbed it out of reflex.  That thing was huge, and put up a crazy fight.  It didn’t jump in the air like a bass, but it fought hard.  If I hadn’t had 30-lb test on that pole it would have gotten away.

    *note: they sterilize them before they sell them.

  44. 44.

    Jay

    @opiejeanne:

    here, farmers, ( prior to the canning industry), would pitchfork spawning salmon and steelhead out into their fields, for 2 key reasons,

    1) salmon wouldn’t take a “fly”, so they were considered worthless as a “sport fish”, ( they will, just “wrong flies”, wrong techniques)

    2) the Indigenous populations relied on them for all year food, ( fresh, smoked, dried), so fewer salmon, more dead and starving Indigenous peoples, thus, more “free” land.

  45. 45.

    dmsilev

    @Alison Rose : You and me both. Also not a fan of chopped liver; my grandmother made that as an appetizer for most holiday meals, and it was very definitely not to my liking.

  46. 46.

    Jay

    @RobertB:

    here, you can along the Fraser, you can catch trout, ( rainbow, cutthroat), pikeminnow, black bass, steelhead, salmon, crappies, carp and suckers, all in the same stretch of water, often on the same fly.

    When you are fishing a 4 weight for cutties, bows, bass or crappies, salmon, steelhead, large pikeminnows or carp, can cause several heart attacks.

  47. 47.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Alison Rose :

    I used to love jarred gefilte fish when I was a kid. (Yes, I was weird.) Not sure if I would still like it now; haven’t had it for years.

    @dmsilev:

    I also loved chopped liver. (Reacknowledging weirdness.)

  48. 48.

    Mart

    Working along the Illinois River a few years back noticed a couple boats netting the Asian carp, er Copi – who really could get some air. Asked about it and was told they load the carp into frozen shipping containers and send ’em back to China as food. What a world…

  52. 52.

    NotMax

    If the piscatorial industry could convince people to consume tilapia they can probably market anything.

  53. 53.

    Eljai

    @Kay:  lol.

    I got a text from Ryan’s campaign today inviting me to take the $7.85 that it costs to buy Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and donate it to the Ryan campaign instead. So I did.

  54. 54.

    MagdaInBlack

    I want to say I am thankful for this thread. My anger was wearing and needed a break. I’m also indulging my enjoyment of celebrity fluff to divert myself for a while.

  57. 57.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, … BBC News

    Russia is on the brink of its first debt default since 1998 as the Sunday deadline to make a $100m interest payment seems certain to be missed.

    Russia has the money and is willing to pay, but sanctions make it impossible to get the payments to international creditors.

    […]

    The $100m interest payment was due on 27 May. Russia says the money was sent to Euroclear, a bank which would then distribute the payment to investors.

    But that payment has been stuck there, according to Bloomberg News, and creditors have not received it.

    “They have not got it,” says Jay Auslander, a US lawyer who has worked on many government debt cases. “And the overwhelming probability is they’re not going to get it.” If this money has not arrived within 30 days of the due date, that is, Sunday evening, that will widely be considered a default.

    Euroclear wouldn’t say if the payment had been blocked, but said it adheres to all sanctions.

    […]

    [ womp, womp ]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  58. 58.

    Jay

    Got my 2nd booster today, Pfizer, so I have had them all and should be queued up for the fall booster of the newer more new variant targetted booster early in the fall.

  60. 60.

    NotMax

    A little surprised they didn’t opt for calling it something more exotic and hoity-toity, such as Carpathian Silkfish.

    //

  62. 62.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @NotMax: when I was growing up there was an old school restaurant my parents loved (me too), they put out a huge relish tray when you sat down. My brothers and I would fight over the chopped liver

  63. 63.

    HumboldtBlue

    @O. Felix Culpa:

    Wow. My dad would not eat at that table, you just named two things that we absolutely and under no conditions banned from our house.

    I didn’t learn this until I was a teen and learning to cook, and mom gave us some background.

  68. 68.

    Jager

    All I know about Carp is they would turn up dead on the river bank, and my Cocker Spaniel would roll in them.

  72. 72.

    kindness

    Carp.  It’s greasy & boney.  When one of my Jewish friends told me gefilte fish was carp (back in the 70’s) I couldn’t believe it.  Most the gefilte fish I had had was that jarred stuff.  The fish’s breading was always some kind of gelatinous gooey and I just wasn’t all that fond of jarred gefilte fish.  Never had fresh so I could be mistaken.  Still though, carp.

  74. 74.

    Mnemosyne

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Thank you! Click on my name to see the THREE anthologies I have up for pre-order.

    @gwangung:

    I just hyped you on FB. Writers gotta stick together.

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    Thank you! I was going to recommend a recent historical romance by queer author Alexis Hall that has a trans heroine, but it was only on ebook sale for one day. You can probably find it at the library, though — it’s called “A Lady for a Duke.”

    (Short version: the heroine is reported dead at Waterloo and seizes the opportunity to start living as a woman the way she always wanted to. Then she looks up the old friend she was secretly in love with and they live happily ever after. Eventually.)

  76. 76.

    James E Powell

    @O. Felix Culpa:

    Polls on Ohio Senate race on 538.

    It’s a toss-up. Ryan has got some headwinds. Wonder how abortion rights will affect the race, if at all

    Have you seen Ryan’s “Neighborhood” ad where he talks about opposing Obama and voting with Trump? Whatever it takes, Timmy, whatever it takes. Just win.

  77. 77.

    opiejeanne

    @gwangung: 
    That sounds like fun! I’ll see if we’re still too chicken to be in a theater, after recovering from Covid.

  78. 78.

    lgerard

    Flipping through the channels I just came across an infomercial starring The Defender of Western Civilization himself, Newt Gingrich. Of course it’s a scam

    You may have seen ads for the anti-fraud service Home Title Lock on national TV, heard them on talk radio, or watched them on social media — often featuring right-wing personalities such as Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich.

    The prolific ads urgently warn of a scam called “home title theft,” when a con artist fraudulently claims ownership of someone else’s home to swindle lenders or even sell the property.

    In several commercials, Giuliani, Gingrich and other pitchmen claim the FBI classifies home title theft as “one of the fastest-growing” crimes in America. Some marketing materials also showcase people who’ve been identified as “real victims” — a “devastated” Texas cowboy and a Florida-raised grandmother whose “heart-wrenching story of losing her rightfully-owned home is occurring all too often nationwide.”

    Sadly for the “real victims” their story doesn’t quite hold up, and now they have been victimized again.

  81. 81.

    cedichou

    1. I recommend reading “undera white sky” by Elizabeth Kolbert, the opening chapter explains the struggle to prevent the carp from getting into the great lakes. It discusses eating it to engage people to fish it/control the population. The book is how human have created problems (in this case digging a canal connecting the great lakes to the Mississippi and importing the carp) that they are trying to solve with more messing up of nature (building electrical barriers) that never work as intended. The white sky of the title is what we would get if we tried to control climate change (another human created problem) by sending particles in the atmosphere – with whatever other unintended consequences would come off that. The book is amazing, well documented, and i would not say entertaining because it is so chilling and it looks like, no matter what humans will try, they’ll mess things up, but still hard to put down.
  82. 82.

    oatler

    First thing I thought of was Louise Belcher’s Kuchi Kopi nightlight. Those critters are 60 bucks at Wal Mart.

  83. 83.

    There go two miscreants

    Thanks for the book recs in this thread; I will have to check them out.

  85. 85.

    JMG

    Here on Cape Cod, fisherpeople have attempted to rebrand their largest catch, dogfish, as “Cape shark.” This is not going well. But they still have a large market for dogfish — Great Britain, where it is widely used in commercial fish and chips outlets. Cape shark is clean and very very bland fish.

  86. 86.

    Geminid

    @oatler: The freshwater sport fishing industry has many subsets, and carp angling is one of them. Now there are specialized carp rods, with supple tips to allow for the carps’ soft mouths. An annual carp tournament is staged at Lake Orange, Virginia, about 20 miles from my house.

    Carp fishing is a popular pastime in Europe, and Romania is a destination for trophy fishermen. A special hotspot is Lake Raduta, in the Sarulesti district. The dictator Ceaucesku had the lake formed the lake by damming the Danube in an ill-conceived attempt to improve navigation on that river.

    In 1990, former tennis player Robert Raduta leased the lake from the state and gave it his name. Then he stocked the lake and built a hotel as a haven for carp fisherman. In 1998 someone caught an 82 lb. carp there, a world record. After that, Lake Raduta became known as “the carp angler’s Everest.”

  89. 89.

    Ella in New Mexico

    The wild carp in the rivers and lakes of our state over 6-10″ in length are so are full of mercury and other heavy metals they’re unsafe to eat in any amout, and ever the “safe” ones taste like moldy dishwater.

    Sounds like these guys are talking about farming certain breeds that aren’t bottom feeders but man, I dunno

  90. 90.

    Geminid

    @Ella in New Mexico: I think that people in the midwest are farming walleye now. But walleye are more like trout in their eating habits, and may even eat the same pelletized food. The trout that the state raises for stocking are fed yellow pellets so the trout can see them better. People often fish for stocked trout using canned corn kernels.

    There is a private stocked trout pond not far from me, in the Shenandoah Valley. It’s spring fed. My friend Debbie and I went last summer, and she caught five and I caught two. After a charge for cleaning they cost about what farm raised trout cost at Krogers. They were very tasty.

  91. 91.

    Geminid

    @RAM: Those big grass carp are hazardous to boaters because they jump so high. They can injure boaters, and I read of a passenger in a speed boat who was killed by one.

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