Question on Coot...

Here's how we cook 'em.

dhbp-recipe.LouCoot
There are many times we go out specifically on Buffy shoots as well as Coot shoots. Sculling on Coot is fantastic. I love ‘em. They're fun to hunt, shoot and taste great. Any of the divers are good eating if prepared correctly.

If you are hunting ducks, the Coot swim into your rig and swim out and you can't get them to fly. But, if scullling, you can herd them around and bunch them up. Now, when you sit up, they freak out and depart the water and look like a Goldeneye or Buffy pouring the coals to it. It's a real gas to hunt them and they are great eating. We've made many dinners of nothing but stir fried Coot.

There are some secrets.....I always place a duck or coot on its back right after it's shot. This lets the blood drain out of the breast and removes a lot of the gamey taste. I will then typically age my birds a couple days (this is temperature dependent). If you think about it.......all the meat you eat has been aged. It makes a big difference.
Now you can barbeque the breast if you'd like and I love the Jim Beam Barbeque Sauce.......it's awesome.
My favorite is to stir fry them little puppies.
1. Breast the bird out and chunk the breast into pieces about 1/2" to 3/4" square or so. You can marinade them if you'd like but I typically don't......no need.
2. Heat the wok up and put some peanut oil in and get that good and hot. Then add some Lawrey's seasoning and mesquite seasoning and allow this to steep a little.
3. Once hot, you can throw some chopped onions in and half saute’ them then bring them up on the sides of the wok (learned that from eating Eiders with Keith Mueller). Now put the meat in and begin cooking it. Half way through you can bring the onions down into the meat.
4. I often add some cinnamon to the mix at this time and towards the end..........add a little vanilla extract.
5. Do not over cook.....keep it red in the middle a little. Near the end, add a little Drambuie (sp) to the mix and this will change the boiling point and saturate the meat with some of the flavor and the alcohol will flash off.
6. Add some veggies if you'd like....water chestnuts, etc. ........drain and serve. It's awesome. It's also the way I do coot and we've made entire dinners of nothing but coot.
7. Enjoy.
Lou
 
Lou
They are fun to shoot from the skuller. I put in at Pointe M. and skulled for them on the open lake. They like to flock tight and can make for good shooting.

Dennis
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I've never intentionally shot them but my dog manages to get nearly a limit of his own every year when we are jumpshooting small desert creeks. We will be skulking along and he will dive into the cattails and come out holding a live coot, I guess that they are tight-sitting birds! The ones he gets I usually feed to him chopped up and mixed with his food, I've tried a few pieces and they aren't really that distinguishable from most other ducks. Oddly enough he won't touch the gizzards or livers, cooked or raw. We get huge masses of them in the winter, I agree with the fellow who posted above that sometimes it's impossible to compete with a raft of 1.000+ coots when you're trying to decoy divers, I've actually thought about trying to sneak a layout or scull boat into a raft of coots and shoot the divers that come in to them. Might only work once but it would be a fun thing to try!
 
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Poole d'eau (what y'all are calling a coot) is definitely edible, and is better eating than mallard or pintail, when shot in South Louisiana. When shot in Northern Calfornia I found to my great dismay, having invited some good friends over to the house (when I lived out west there for a few years) for dinner after slaughtering masses of "coots" (who the locals leave alone and therefor they have no fear of humans out there) and cooking a gumbo that not only are they totally inedible there they stink up your house. Reckon they're eating mussles or some nasty little critters that live in the Pacific Ocean over there that we don't have over here (thank God). So, not sure if your "coots" are edible or not. The only way to cook them that I know of is to breast 'em out and make a gumbo. Don't try to eat a whole "coot". There's a musk gland in back of a "coot" that may ruin the flavor. Just eat the breast meat. Ours are most tasty. The only bird better eating than a poole d'eau is a gallinule, or maybe a grosbeck but it's not legal to kill grosbecks. PM me if you don't know how to make gumbo. Don't make gumbo from online recipes.

Ed.
 
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