Recipe from our lakeside lunch at the South Fork of the Snake River in Idaho.
Find out more about our trip by visiting AmericanRiversTour.com !

It’s not often that a trout is harvested from any river and transferred directly to the skillet on the American Rivers Tour.

Previously unknown to us, the Idaho Fish & Game Department is focused on reducing non-native rainbow trout in the Snake River. For this special occasion, we harvested a 19 inch non-native rainbow and cooked it along with 2 elk steaks for lunch. This is a simple 2 skillet meal. We prefer to use Lodge Skillets. The vegetables were purchased at a grocery store in Idaho Falls, pre-cut, and poured into the skillet from a bag. The vegetable stir fry with garlic, ginger, onions, jalapeno and soy brought the vegetables and elk steaks together nicely. Adding the rainbow was a unique and unexpected surprise.

As you can see in the video, cooking the rainbow on the bone makes preparing trout over fire easy. It helps to have a large cast iron skillet so the need for a grill is eliminated, the skillet can sit directly in the coals. In 5 minutes the fish is almost cooked through, then allowed to rest for a few minutes before de-boning. This helps to ensure that the trout is heated through to the bone. The skin does a nice job of providing a foil between the high heat and the fishes delicate flesh.