It’s time for Maryland to get that deliciously invasive catfish on the table

If you don’t know about the invasive catfish population eating all of the baby crabs and fish (and anything else) in the Chesapeake Bay, we’re here to educate you on why you’re seeing more of it in the market and on the table at local restaurants. Let Damye and Alicia at Faidley’s Seafood at Lexington Market tell you how we can eat our way to a better bay!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Chesapeake Bay, crab population, invasive catfish, blue catfish, Maryland crab meat, catfish slider, Governor’s picnic, snakehead fish, Tillman Island Seafood, JJ McDonald, Maryland lottery, Lexington market, crab cakes, Old Bay, hot honey.

SPEAKERS

Alicia, Damye Hahn, Nestor Aparicio

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Nestor Aparicio  00:00

Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T, am 1570 task, Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. I have these Back to the Future. $10,000 scratch, also the Maryland lottery. Also friends at Liberty. Pure solutions. Curio wellness, sending us. I got one for you. Damian Han is here, Alicia is here, here, one for you. To give you a lucky one as well. We’re at fade leaves in the historic, beautiful Lexington market. We’re trying to have some fun around here today. You know, I thought the Orioles would be packing downtown this summer, doing all that stuff. And I know you close a little early and you get a little baseball traffic in here, but since the last time we got together, the bummer of being here on Fridays during baseball season and having a summertime though, we got the best crab cakes like this the time of the year, right? This

Damye Hahn  00:46

is the time of the year. Crabs are beautiful. They’re, you know, we’re we’ve got great Maryland crab meat,

Nestor Aparicio  00:53

delicious. I just had a giant I had a crab cake over here. Luke had a crab cake over here. What do people need to know about some What do you want to lecture me on? What do you teach me this year you taught me about oysters and grasses and the bay and picking crabs and going over to the Eastern Shore and the people that come in. What do I need to learn today? What do

Damye Hahn  01:12

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I need to know? Well, I think what we need to we need to spread, is that we have an issue with an invasive catfish the the blue channel, cats in the in the Chesapeake Bay, who love our crabs as much as we do. So they’re eating the mop. And these are catfish that are not just, you know, bottom swimmers. These are catfish that literally swim like, have

Nestor Aparicio  01:33

you seen a catfish online? It looks big and fat like Jabba the Hut? Yes, that’s what these are.

Damye Hahn  01:39

Yes. I mean, they’re like, the size of your kitchen table, and they are sucking up all the baby grabs. So that is an issue for us, and we’ve been trying to push eat more catfish. Now, one of

Nestor Aparicio  01:51

these things a Marco, you want me sing catfish on the table? Yeah. They’re gospel in the air, yeah. So we got to get the catfish on the table. We

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Damye Hahn  02:01

got to get the catfish on the table. The catfish here is absolutely delicious because you are what you eat, and that catfish is very crabby. It’s absolutely delicious. So it’s not like your muddy catfish that you get from a Louisiana River. Our catfish that are swimming in the bay and eating up all of our crab and rock fish taste delicious. So we’re actually going to be promoting a for eat more catfish, the catfish slider, a catfish slider that at the governor’s picnic in a couple of weeks. Yes, and go ahead, you can tell now.

Nestor Aparicio  02:37

So I mean, I screwed this up because I started seeing this fish called channa, C, H, A, n, n, a, and I thought that that was like taking a Chesapeake catfish and giving it like a name, a new name. It turns out it’s snake snakehead. Snakehead is channel invasive at one point. Well,

Damye Hahn  02:54

of course, delicious. It is also delicious. It is not as invasive as the cat. The cat’s far worse than the snake hood. Well,

Nestor Aparicio  03:02

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they were introduced by by idiots, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, Virginia government did this, right? Yes,

Damye Hahn  03:10

yes, they did and and they didn’t think that it was going to get out of the rivers. It was for the sport fishermen, but

Nestor Aparicio  03:16

they didn’t think it could survive in Sally. Needed water,

Damye Hahn  03:19

right? And then we had a very rainy year, but we had a very ranged monkeys, exactly. And I don’t know who made the not very bright idea of allowing this to happen. But then it just invaded the lower Chesapeake, and it’s just been coming further and further north and and just destroying

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Nestor Aparicio  03:42

everything, but they’re tastier than they are ugly. They’re ugly, but they’re delicious, is what they are

Damye Hahn  03:46

delicious, and we need to start eating them, because we got to eat our way out of this problem, or we’re not going to have any crabs. And that is the honest to God truth. We really need to eat our way out of the problem. So there are some people, specifically Tillman Island seafood, that’s doing a great job just their process.

Nestor Aparicio  04:04

Oh, you gotta go. Oh, she gotta go. She’s gonna get

Damye Hahn  04:09

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JJ, McDonald, aren’t you? Yes, all right. JJ, McDonald, they’re another one that that are doing a great job. They’re there. They’re processing 25, 30,000 pounds of this stuff a day, and sending it all over. I mean, it’s a

Nestor Aparicio  04:20

30,000 pounds of catfish coming out of the bay a day, a day. How many catfish are coming out of the bay? Five years ago? 10 years ago?

Damye Hahn  04:30

Zero. Yeah, I don’t think anybody was fishing. Was a commercial, right? That note. Well, there was this stupid law on the books. Again, another dumb law I can tell you about that that that you couldn’t gut a catfish without a USDA inspector, because, and it was set up for all the the catfish farms in the bayou where where they wanted to have it inspected. But this was not a farmed fish. It was wild. They should have done it. They shouldn’t have had to do it. But these both Tillman and JJ are having to comply with these regulations, and it took us longer to start commercially fishing them here in this region, because of that stupid we didn’t know we had a problem for five years. So we knew we had a problem. We’ve known we had a problem. They just didn’t do anything about it, and it was this stupid law that was holding us

Nestor Aparicio  05:26

up. All right, Alicia has smoked fish dip. Yes, I don’t think I like smoked fish, but convince me I’m wrong. Oh my

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Alicia  05:36

God. It is absolutely delicious. It doesn’t even taste what is this?

Damye Hahn  05:39

So this is Maryland catfish. It is smoked and made into this dip. Tillman islands don’t

Nestor Aparicio  05:48

make me smile. One on the air. I hated my aunt Angela because she made me eat tuna fish when I was a kid that I didn’t want to eat. I, like most of you too, I don’t know. I know I can’t do it. I can’t do it bacon. It bacon. It smells like bacon. It

Alicia  06:03

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does, it does, and it tastes like bacon too.

Damye Hahn  06:05

Let me tell you something. It is so

Nestor Aparicio  06:09

good, but I can’t do it just a little next week.

Damye Hahn  06:14

I

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Nestor Aparicio  06:15

put this smoke. Fish is

Damye Hahn  06:18

a thing. Bourbon and bow ties. We put over, over 1200 samples of this out that night, and we had a line the entire time

Nestor Aparicio  06:27

so people didn’t know what it was. No, no, they did. Oh, they did. We told them what it was,

Damye Hahn  06:30

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but they kept coming back for more. And they’re like, Wait, you guys, can I get more? Can I get more? Can I get more? And I had cracked it sitting right next to it. I had eat more catfish, save the crap, and sure enough,

Nestor Aparicio  06:42

gonna be a jerk, little tiny, you know, what’s the line from Rappers Delight? You know, the you know, when Mama brings the food, you gotta like, even if the chicken tastes like wood, you got to be polite. You know, Oh, mama, he’s just being polite. He ain’t finished. Ah, that’s bull. So I felt like I was full. Yes, you got it my jam, but

Alicia  07:09

it’s not bad. Like blind test. There’s no way you would know that

Nestor Aparicio  07:14

that’s kind of my wife doesn’t like fish so much. She’d eat this because it’s salty and it tastes like Joe, like the salty in the smoky

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Damye Hahn  07:21

and we put it on we put it on a cucumber round. Oh, okay, now you sprinkled some smoked paprika and fresh dill on the top of it. It was fancy.

Nestor Aparicio  07:30

You’re basically treating us like you treat a deviled egg. There’s a problem. Damian is here. Alicia’s here. We’re down here at Fauci. They are still shipping crab cakes, making crabs, so I get a lot of fish over here as well. Yes, sorry about the market a little bit. We get here about a year and a couple weeks ago, right? Like a year and three months, maybe you’ve been in here? Yes, yes. It’s only the second 14 months. Summer for you in the market. As I sit here today, and it’s a Friday and there’s a baseball game in a couple hours, couple of Oreo hats in here. But just, there’s a vibrancy about summer, yes, in the city that what might like, I was in Manhattan this week. Everybody leaves when it gets hot, right? Yeah, Baltimore’s not really like that. I mean, like, no summer. People come to

Damye Hahn  08:13

the city, yeah, come to the city. A lot of people walk. Yeah. We get a lot of tourism Science Center.

Nestor Aparicio  08:19

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I was at the zoo the other night. Yeah, people with with

Damye Hahn  08:23

wheelie bags. Yeah, they come right from the airport, straight here. Have a meal. And then this

Nestor Aparicio  08:27

gentleman made a great decision. He’s gonna get a scratch off from the Maryland lottery too. He doesn’t know it yet. Good, good. If he’s not here, we’re gonna treat him like a local. But the vibrancy of this market, I was here a few weeks ago for the crab races, and Katie pumpher will be here to talk about swimming in the Bay, which is its own. I’ve already tried this. I said I wouldn’t swim in the harbor either, but I will not be getting in the harbor tonight. But for the vibrancy of the area and the market, you’re a year into this, is it normalizing to some degree for what you’ve tried to do here, and you’re still trying to get

Damye Hahn  09:01

Catonsville, it is. It works. Oh my god. Well, I am trying to get Catonsville open. I’m hoping to be open in October. I want to imagine that to the end, but yeah, so, so we’re working on that. We still have the problem with our facade, that we’re having

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Nestor Aparicio  09:16

to deal that’s important. My birthday is a 14th, so you got some shoot for Yes, yes.

Damye Hahn  09:21

Well, I’m coming first. I’m beating up on my builder. They need to, they need to give me up to be

Nestor Aparicio  09:26

when we find it What? What? What will the fish mongers daughter look like? Featuring the faithless, you can have your the family’s name going to be on the outside of the slider. It’s

Damye Hahn  09:35

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going to say fadely Seafood the fishmongers daughter. So it’s a brand extension. Uh huh. We’re moving our shipping up there, so fade leaves will be in the building closer to the airport, closer to the airport, and we’ll have the second floor will be called the Plymouth room, and it’s a beautiful 4500 square foot event space. So we have that Plymouth room because the building, a lot of people in the area know it as the Plymouth building. Because that was there, because it was Plymouth wallpaper for 60 years. So it was heidelbach grocery store was built by the heidelbach family as a very high line grocery store, like a dean and DeLuca style grocery store back in the 1920s they left in the late 60s, the singer, swimmer family picked it up and had Plymouth wallpaper in

Nestor Aparicio  10:21

there has a lot of history, right? I mean, from the mill and Ellicott City, and so it’s a whole years

Damye Hahn  10:26

old, yeah, but only three, three people who have ever been in it, so we will be the third,

Nestor Aparicio  10:31

and so we’re the only one to serve a crab cake. Yes, right? Yes,

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Damye Hahn  10:35

yes. So it’s gonna the building. Everybody who walks in it is going, oh my god, this is going to be amazing. It will be beautiful. It is, it’s going to be hard fought. Let me tell you. It’s, it’s been, it’s been a challenge because it is an old building, and it’s, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. I think it’s kind of got a lot of ghosts in it.

Nestor Aparicio  10:55

Yeah, I was over State Fair last week. I looked up and I see things happening. Oh

Alicia  10:59

yes, there’s definitely things happening. The windows were just installed. Yeah, those look

Damye Hahn  11:03

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gorgeous. And so electric and plumbing is going in as we speak, and walls are going

Nestor Aparicio  11:08

on. We’re getting closer. I mean, look, it was like making this place. We thought it was never going to happen. And we’re last one standing over the old market there. You’ll get there. Your mom and dad are here, and there’s all 500 people here tonight. You open and then then you got a beautiful new business, right? Yes, yes, yes.

Alicia  11:27

It’s not a faint of heart, that’s for sure.

Damye Hahn  11:29

No, no, boy, it hasn’t been

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Nestor Aparicio  11:31

easy. It is summer here. The crab cakes are delicious. We’re down here at Fauci is it’s all brought to you by our friends at the Maryland

Damye Hahn  11:37

lottery, catfish. The catfish is delicious.

Nestor Aparicio  11:39

I’ll get one of those. I like catfish. I mean, I’ll sprinkle some lemon pepper on there and butter it down and get it out on a grill and all that stuff. But, but in a general sense, this catfish invasion is, and we’ve chronicled a little bit, but this has got to be the summer I start seeing in restaurants, right? Yes, that’s really the movement Maryland is, yes, I did the Maryland crab cake tour for the first time, like, four or five years ago, we weren’t talking catfish. Then last year, we started talking about it a little bit. I want to see catfish bites on menus, right?

Damye Hahn  12:11

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Catfish everywhere. I want to see catfish in the schools. I want to see catfish in the grocery stores. I want to see catfish in every restaurant. There shouldn’t be any reason why we’re not eating this. It’s an excellent product. We actually have. We came up with a really good recipe, and we were chosen to be a crispy catfish slider with fatally slaw and a mccutcheons hot honey made with tobacco barn bourbon. All Maryland

Nestor Aparicio  12:38

products say that. Say it again. Slow it down. Here. We’re talking about a cat. I’m thinking catfish is a filet, all right? And it’s not that it’s a sale, it’s a slider. It’s taking up an oversized catfish bite, and you’re putting that on a brioche.

Damye Hahn  12:55

Yes, they got hold me pictures. Yes, I got a photo. You know?

Nestor Aparicio  12:59

I walked around New York yesterday. I looked at 20,000 things, only eight, three or four ohms. I like looking at food. I gotta see it to eat it. Yeah, I eat with my eyes. So I’ll hold that up there. That looks like a chicken sand looks like a filet o fish. Which is better? Look at that. I hate that looks like Chick fil A. Yeah, it looks better. I like that. I’ll eat it. I’d eat that, but

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Damye Hahn  13:18

it’s our delicious fatally, slaw. Hold that up again and they see this, this.

Nestor Aparicio  13:21

See that fishy, that right there. That’s, that’s what we got to eat. Okay? The

Damye Hahn  13:25

batter has the Jo Bay in it. The so it’s got an old bay vibe to Yes, but then it’s got a hot honey that I made with, not mayo on this, Maryland bourbon, all right, no mayo on this. And mccutcheons Honey.

Nestor Aparicio  13:41

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No tartar, either, right? No tartar, no

Damye Hahn  13:43

mayo. It’s a hot honey drizzle,

Alicia  13:46

just a drizzle of it. So it gives you so it’s a sweet spicy, yeah,

Nestor Aparicio  13:49

so it’s a spicy fish sandwich. Yes, sweet and

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Damye Hahn  13:53

spicy because you got the because you got the sweetness of the slaw and the sweetness of the honey,

Nestor Aparicio  13:58

and crunchy too. And crunchy, it’s delicious. Can I say this competition a fish sandwich without tartar? I’m a winner. That’s that. That unto itself. I’ve been staring at your mother here for about a year and a half. I know you’ve been staring at her longer than that. And I looked over here about 20 minutes ago, and I saw this GQ piece here, Alan Richmond. All others were forgotten, however, the moment I tasted the big lump crab cake at John W fatley seafood. This story looks to be maybe about 25 years old. Looks like 1990 probably. Yeah, it says I found the best crab cakes in Maryland. But please hold the tartar sauce. And that’s the thing that I didn’t understand until I did the real tour and went everywhere everybody puts tartar to me. Tartar was for a fish sandwich. Yeah? Tartar always came on, like the filet o fish. That’s what you got, you know? So you don’t do sandwich different, yeah, yeah.

Damye Hahn  14:49

And we don’t need, we don’t eat tartar on the crab cake. We don’t need tartar on this sandwich. This sandwich is so good, but we’re going to be in a competition, right? I’m gonna eat them at the governor’s luncheon. There were 11 people selected, and we were one of. Them, and we’re gonna go serve this to 500 people.

Nestor Aparicio  15:03

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And you

Alicia  15:07

know what? They’re gonna come up and say, Fauci Oh,

Nestor Aparicio  15:13

there’s the catfish ate my crab cakes. Yeah, that’s a

Damye Hahn  15:16

sign for Yeah, yeah. We got to eat some catfish so that we can have the crabs. Are

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Nestor Aparicio  15:20

you featuring that down here? We will after the

Damye Hahn  15:23

competition. It’s actually competition. It’s

Nestor Aparicio  15:26

June, 6, July, 16, let’s just say Katie pumphard. She swallowed a lot of bay water, probably a lot of fish too. If I looked over here and she was eating that sandwich right now, I’d say, what is that? Can I have a bite of that? Because that did look really good. I mean, it is definitely if like, I want to

Damye Hahn  15:44

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eat, well, I can make you sound good, but what I don’t have is I don’t have the hot honey drizzle made, but we will have it after the

Nestor Aparicio  15:51

competition. I don’t need it today. I’m going to yoga today. I had to get together with Katie.

Damye Hahn  15:56

I’ll make it for you. Yeah, because we always have the slaw and we always have the catfish, try

Nestor Aparicio  16:01

to jump in Inner Harbor. I know she’s probably she lived. Yeah, look at her. I watched

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Alicia  16:07

her swim up. Definitely condone that

Damye Hahn  16:09

brought tears to my eyes when I watched her swim

Nestor Aparicio  16:10

up. Well, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna break and I’m gonna bring Katie in and I get a fourth mic. I figure out we’re gonna do here. I want you guys talk about your relationship with her, because I have a whole story with her about swimming the English Channel. 1011, years ago, she did the show. Then she was doing the bobber over there with the trying to piss off the crab to win the competition. And we got to talking, and it turns out, like she was already in my phone. So

Alicia  16:35

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it’s so funny. Yeah, I mean, I’m like, You need to meet Katie. I’ve got somebody to introduce you to. I know

Nestor Aparicio  16:41

who you are nasty. Nestor, all right, Alicia’s here, Jamie’s here. It’s all brought to you by our friends at the Maryland lottery. We’re faithless. We’re here at the beautiful new Lexington. Monica to call it new anymore. It’s just it’s the real Lexington market. Friday afternoon. People everywhere, Orioles in town, come on down. Enjoy yourself. Don’t order the the fish sandwich just yet.

Damye Hahn  17:05

Catfish sandwich, and you can get it with

Nestor Aparicio  17:07

coleslaw. You can’t get it with a hot honey. But our secret,

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Damye Hahn  17:11

our secret, well, it’s not a secret yet. Well, it will be until the competition is over, and then I’m gonna give them. You put obey into the batter. We put the Jo in the batter. I’m sorry. Then I used Old Bay hot sauce in the honey.

Alicia  17:25

I’m telling ginger, you know.

Damye Hahn  17:28

Look, I put it all in there. I wanted it all Maryland. No, I

Alicia  17:32

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thought, you know, we did use Jo. Hold on, what was this hot

Nestor Aparicio  17:38

honey? The Hot honey, right? Yes, yes. What’s the name? And I caught me

Damye Hahn  17:42

You said it’s the hot minis McCutcheon Tony, and it has tobacco barn bourbon from the Eastern Shore, from actually the Western honey,

Nestor Aparicio  17:52

hot, yeah, fish batter. Jo,

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Alicia  17:56

literally, all of the components even red in coleslaw.

Nestor Aparicio  18:00

No. Tomato made here. Yes, tomato, tomato, no. I like it the way you look at me. Like that. Tomatoes go to a sandwich. Oh, I’m not a tomato

Alicia  18:08

person. It’s, I know we do have delicious

Nestor Aparicio  18:12

little tomatoes to make it soggy. Well, we’re fairly skinny buffers. Gonna sit in oh, we’re fairly pumpers. Gonna sit in. We’re gonna talk about swimming in the Inner Harbor. I haven’t jumped in as before the oil spill, which I talked to Doug workman for Liberty pure about last week. We were families. We are Baltimore positive. Stay with us. We’re gonna maybe have some fun. Talk about swimming. Katie’s gonna try to convince me to swim across the bay. You.