How big is the fish? Sounds like you are talking about cooking one large fish. If it is over 20 inches, you might as well throw it away. It will be FULL of worms in the meat. 16 - 20 inch black drums are not bad, but when they get large, they will be full of worms. I am sure thorough cooking would kill the worms, but no joke, there will be as much worms as meat when they get big. I have seem worms as thick as pencils in black drum. If it is big, and you insist on cooking it, I would fillet it first and if you still wanna eat it, grill it or bake it WELLLLLLLL DONE.

i have settled on a blackened recipe so i have filet the fish and believe me i knew about the worm situation and was hoping not to find any cause these fish would have been crab bait! Thanks for the reply

If it's fresh you can grill it on that wood grill with vegoil/salt/lemon/cayenne and it will be great. Don't go for the 'cook on the skin' craze. Filet and clean anything off the filet that's not meat. My favorite way to cook it is make a drum courtboulion (cu-b-yon).

We caught a few drum last weekend . I scaled and baked them whole like you might a flounder . Uck ! Nothing like flounder but edible .

We never kept drum back when I used to saltwater fish on a regular basis , now I know why . Maybe a courtbouillon with them wouldn't be bad but Ill have to be pretty hungry to put another black drum in my boat .

Make sure you cut every ounce of that red or black-red stuff off of the fish. That's what makes it tastes gross. I like to boil mine in crab boil and make patties using smashed saltine crackers as the breading. Or, just turn them loose and stop at Spar's restaurant in Des Allemands on the way home and get some fried catfish.

Those are all good ideas , especially stop on the way home at the restaurant ! Lol

Never thought of making patties with them , that's not a bad idea . I wonder what the people from dockside do with all that ?

Thanks for the tips boots !

love drum, find it to be very good eating myself. Not trying to start anything here, but have caught many over 20' with no worms, now anything over 25' I will throw back, I find the 22-24' the best. I bake em with a little salt, pepper, lemon, and butter, blacken, grill, but this is one of my favorite.

Creole Black Drum

2 lbs black drum fillets
3 tomatoes, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
½ green pepper, chopped
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Cayenne pepper to taste
3 tablespoons butter
olive oil

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Melt butter in a small sauce pan. Coat a large baking dish with olive oil and lay fillets inside it. Top black drum with remaining ingredients and pour butter over dish. Bake 15-20 minutes until fish is done. Great with wild rice.

White boots is correct, you have to trim the red line. I also cut out the dull grey matter on the front top. Drum is a great fish to eat, and we have it two times per week. The size doesn't matter unless its huge, mostly because they get hard to clean, and those are the spawners so let them do their thing.

We sautee them, grill them, blacken them, bake them, & shake and bake them. Its a great fish. Like all fish, it needs to be fresh, kept on ice until cooking, and don't overcook it which will dry them out (check inside with fork, if the fork is warm, the fish is done).

Let me put it this way: all the local restaurants with REAL chefs feature drum. There must be a reason. And, at Hopedale, I see the commercial fishermen come in all the time with 10-15 lb drum for the restaurants. They catch them up on trotlines rigged with crab. The 'too big with worms' issue is mostly a wives' tale. Also, the worms don't just occur in drum, but in most fish, they are harmless, and they dissolve when cooked.

Simple ways that can't go wrong (don't overcook!):

1) marinate with seasoning, put on charcoal grill. We like leaving the skin on, but there are pros and cons to this. The skin helps keep them from falling apart, and we mostly cook skin down then a quick flip. The con is the eating part since you have scales on your plate, and you have to work around the dark meat. However, this really isn't a big deal.

2) put in batter (cornmeal, Panko bread, etc), season, saute in olive oil.

3) shake and bake (put lots of olive oil on bottom of pan)

4) blacken on cast iron skill outside (follow Paul Prudhomme's instructions to the letter)

Add a crab meat or wine sauce to impress wife or girlfriend

Chef Ron

16' drum on the grill

I like all the replies and must say that everyone is correct. I like to grill the 16' ones on the half shell like red fish, if they are big and have worms, just pull the worms out and boil the meat in cheese cloth in with your crawfish or crab boil, then it taste just like crab meat and make a gumbo or sauce Piquant.

got news for all the naysayers about worms, they are in ALL fish.

they are in white trout, speckled trout, redfish, croaker, channel mullet, drum, and redfish.

the way it was explained to me by a guy working at the LSU fisheries research center, the worms arent really worms but just a parasite like a mosquito that live in fish for a while and burrow into the fish flesh but dont normally eat live fish flesh, they just burrow into it to make a home so they can consume nutrients from the host fish but will not consume the host fish flesh unless it dies. then when they outnumber or outgrow the fish they are in and dont get enough nutrients to sustain them they will leave by crawling out under the fishes scales and float away and sink to the bottom to die leaving the host fish to keep the babies alive. when the babies hatch they repeat the cycle.

the parasites like warm weather and die in cold temps so they go deep into the mud to hibernate in winter. the result of this is every year the fish are ''cleaned'' worm free by cold water temps and in the spring the worms crawl out of the mud they hibernate in over winter and the whole cycle starts again. this is why you find worms in trout in summer but not winter, large bottom feeding fish may find warm enough water to keep the parasites alive but for the most part all fish are ''cured'' of parasites in winter time.

things that determine the frequency you find them is the diet and feeding habit of the host fish as well as how much time it spends bottom feeding and being less active so the worms spend more time in the stomach an have more chance to burrow into the fish before its ''expelled'' as waste.

large fish tend to move more slowly, eat larger food that is often scavenged and not live food chased down so any worms in that food gets in them more. active fish and fish that dont bottom feed as much are less likely to have them for those reasons.

also the worms size coresponds to the size of the fish so when they outgrow the fish and dont get enough food they crawl out and hope to be eaten by a bigger fish, feed off of a dead fish, or they die.