How do you preserve longnose gar hide and what is the best way to dress and cook one.?

Answer 1

I have a friend who has gar hide curing right now for future use as a belt buckle! I also understand that during the war gar hide was used for shoes and leather substitute. A very strong hide.
carefully skin the gar with a fillet knife. Start by a slit down the belly to the anus. then do a long cut down the spine. these are skinny fish, but if you have experiance filleting....
Start at the head, make a cut down one side of the spine to the caudal penacle (infront of the tail). flip the fillet with the skin still attatched over (like opening a book with the tail as the spline of the book) so the fillet lays on the table skin side down. Take your fillet knife and run it between the meat and the skin. Now you have a fillet to prepare how you want, and skin to prep.
use a scraper, or hold your knife at a 90 degree angle to the hide, to get the excess meat and or fat off, like a squirrel or other pelt. Be sure not to break through the skin, it will ruin the final product.
Rinse with cool clean water. Here is where some methods differ.
I like to sprinkle both sides with borax. put the hide in a single layer between the folds of a newspaper. Put it between two pieces of ply wood with about 50lbs of weight on top of that. If you dont weight it, the hide will curl.
after a day, change the news paper, and scrape the dried, goopy borax off. If you missed any meat or fat, try to get it off now.
Add more borax and stick in new newspaper and repeat. After the firt couple of changes it will begin to dry out better (less fluids seeping out) and you will have a flat dry hide. Brush off the borax, and store in a dry place pressed flat.
as for the meat, I hear it is great pickled. also cooked and eaten cold in sandwiches.
start here
http://www.garfishing.com/

then here (I know of at least one person here who regularly prepares gar)
www.roughfish.com

then here
http://www.bassonhook.com/fishforfood/garrecipes.html

Answer 2

Amazing answer Eric!

Thumbs up!