We shared earlier this week about our recent fishing adventure at a mountain lake where we harvested some wild trout. Since we shared how to gut and clean a trout, we figured we might as well share how we cooked up our trout. This recipe for grilled trout with lemon garlic butter sauce is simple, easy and delicious. You can grill this trout on a standard barbecue grill or place it on a grate over an open fire.
This recipe is my go to method of cooking trout. How can you go wrong cooking fish with lemon, garlic and butter? I occasionally think about branching out and using another recipe. There are some delicious sounding recipes in this wild game cookbook but I never seem to have all the ingredients needed on hand. Maybe that’s why I always end up using this favorite recipe since I always have lemon, butter and garlic in the house!
Grilled trout recipe
- 2 trout gutted and cleaned (here’s our post on how to gut and clean a fish)
- 4 cloves garlic chopped fine
- 1 lemon halved and sliced
- 2 TBS butter sliced into thin strips
- sea salt
- fresh cracked pepper
1. Place the trout in the center of a large piece of tin foil. Sprinkle a dash of salt and pepper inside each fish cavity. Place an equal amount of chopped garlic inside each trout.
2. Place several lemon slices inside and several slices on top of each trout.
3. Place several thin strips of butter inside the fish and the rest on top of each fish.
4. Wrap the tin foil up around the trout and roll the edges together to create a tight seal.
5. Grill the trout on medium heat for 3-5 minutes on one side. Then flip the tin foil pack and grill the other side for the same amount of time.
6. Carefully open the tin foil pack to check if it is cooked. The fish meat will easily flake off the bone with a fork when it is done. If it isn’t fully cooked, wrap the fish back up in the tin foil and grill another few minutes on both sides. Be sure you don’t overcook the trout since it won’t taste as good when overcooked.
7. When it is ready to eat, you can use a fork to flake the meat off the bone. You can also pull the bones from the meat by grasping the uppermost part of the spine and gently pulling back away from the meat.
We coupled our trout in lemon garlic butter sauce with some homegrown potatoes in a butter garlic sauce and a fresh garden salad. It was so delicious! There’s just something so satisfying about eating a meal with wild harvested and homegrown foods.
What’s your favorite way to cook trout?
I am not much for fish that live in fresh water. To me, it is a little too “fishy” so I prefer fish from the ocean. That said, this might actually work for me, especially if you add soaked mesquite or cedar to add some smoky flavor. Hmmm … yeah, I would eat that. Thanks for the recipe!
Oddly enough this trout wasn’t fishy at all! I grew up eating wild caught trout and there were definitely some fishy tasting ones. I’ve read a couple places that the key is cutting off all the fins since that can make it taste fishier.
I’ve spent the best part of fifty years eating fresh caught, fresh water fish, trout included, and only rarely have I had problems with a fishy flavor and that was mostly with catfish. Never had that problem with trout.
Here’s a couple of tips though. If you can’t eat them fresh, clean them and put them in a plastic ziplock bag, fill it with water then freeze it. I’ve had trout frozen like this that kept well and tasted great after four years in the freezer. The water surrounding them prevents freezer burn.
When we’re camping we make a very light corn meal, salt, pepper, garlic powder and flour dry batter and coat fresh caught fish with that before frying them. Then we squeeze lemon on them before eating. Yummmm! This coating is mostly corn meal with very little flour.