The Tastiest Fish You've Never Eaten
The quirky puffer fish, known as sugar toads, are swimming onto more mid-Atlantic menus
by Brennen Jensen
The lure of local ingredients caught Jimmy Sneed before most—the chef trained under Jean-Louis Palladin, who introduced Washington, D.C., to the farm-to-table ethos at his lauded Jean-Louis at the Watergate back in the eighties. So when Sneed opened his own restaurant off the Rappahannock River in Urbanna, Virginia, he made it a point to befriend the watermen down at the docks to snag the freshest hauls.
“One day, one of them brings me a bucket of these strange-looking fish,” Sneed says. “He goes, ‘Those are sugar toads: as sweet as sugar and as ugly as a toad.’ I fried a couple of them up and was blown away—the light crunch, the salt from the batter, the sweet meat nibbled off the bone. Delightful.”
The “toads” were actually Sphoeroides maculatus, or the northern puffer fish—related to, but not to be confused with, the toxic puffers you need a trained chef to dismember. Colloquialisms abound for the boxy eight-to-ten-inch beasts: swelling toads, blow toads, sea squab. Found from Newfoundland to Florida, they enjoy a long season—roughly April to November—along the lower Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, a region with a deep culinary connection to the creatures, which, true to their name, puff up as a means of defense.
Sugar toads are caught commercially in pound nets, a fencing system placed on the bay bottom that collars just about anything swimming by.
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Click here for sugar toad recipe
