Mrs Cad hates skate but I love it. Absolutely nailed it tonight. A little Old Bay. Sauteed one side in real olive oil for about 4 minutes then a 400 degree oven for 8 minutes. Served with roasted cauliflower. That set me thinking - I’ve never heard of anyone eating skate and only saw it once on a Hell’s Kitchen episode and never in a real restaurant. So I’m curious if anyone here has eaten skate and if so, do you eat it on an ongoing basis.
Occasionally. Not in the top five fish we go for though. I tend to flour it and sauté it with lemons and capers as my go to. Nice texture.
Aren’t they frequently passed off as scallops? Can’t taste too bad.
It’s commonly available in British fish & chip shops.
How?! They look nothing like each other!
I have eaten/do eat skate occasionally - it’s commonly available at my local fishmongers and various seafood restaurants. I can’t get very excited by it though. I much prefer turbot or a nice lemon sole for my flat fish.
I wouldn’t say it’s a widely popular fish around here in the sense that, say, cod or haddock is, but it’s certainly known.
I have, I liked it, but not any more, as most commercial species are red- or orange-listed.
I’m curious which skate species you’re eating, that isn’t.
Good shout, Mr Dibble. I hadn’t kept up with sustainability of certain fish, so I’ve just checked with the Marine Conservation Society, and it’s a blanket red. No more Skate for me.
I’ve had it before and enjoyed it, but I haven’t seen it for sale in a long time.
According to Seafood Watch, Little Skate can be sustainable, and a couple other species are on the green (or yellow) list. I found similar information at a couple other sites.
I’ve never(to my knowledge) eaten skate, but I do eat stingray on a semi-regular basis. Google tells me that the taste is the same, and they look almost identical. The difference is that skate don’t have a venomous spine on the tail. That might be why skate are more commonly eaten than rays.
About 25% of the time when I go surf fishing I will catch a stingray or two, and occasionally keep one. And I could point out a few places along the Corpus Christi ship channel where you could catch a dozen in an hour if you wanted. I cut off and keep the wings, fillet the skin off of them, and slice them into meal-sized portions - delicious with a white wine-butter-tarragon sauce!
I have heard about “fake” scallops for years, but never saw it first hand. The internet is full of stories claiming that it’s extremely common and as many sites claiming that it’s an old wives’ tale. Supposedly a ‘cookie cutter’ is used to get the right shape for scallops.
I tried it on myself once - carved cylindrical pieces (no sharp cookie cutters in my house) that look remarkably like scallops and sauteed them accordingly. But you can’t fool yourself, I suppose. Perhaps I should have some non-fisherman friends over for dinner and try to fool them. 
Maybe a restaurant in an inland city could get away with serving ray/skate as scallops. There would be a sizeable percentage of people who only eat seafood as an occasional delicacy and might be fooled. Possibly they got away with it before Yelp existed, but I’m not convinced
I haven’t personally eaten British fish and chips for many years, so my cite that skate is on the menu there may be outdated.
You use a cookie cutter to remove short cylinders from the wings (pectoral fins).
Wow, the things people do. Seems very wasteful, no wonder they’re endangered.
I can’t recall seeing it on any menus in recent times. The defaults are cod, haddock, scampi (breaded langoustine), sometimes plaice. That’s about it really.
I’ve thrown a lot of skates and rays back when fishing. My biggest reason for doing so is the almost human looking “face” on their underside.
You’re not the only person to notice the resemblance:
I don’t go to the fish market any more, but I used to get skate occasionally under the impression that it was an inexpensive bycatch. Didn’t know many species/locations weren’t sustainable. Won’t get it in the future unless it’s a certified product.
Years ago, when we were both still living with our parents, my brother brought home some skate wing and threw it in the freezer. Some months (or more) later, we took it out for a meal. It was in poor condition and frosty all over. As it thawed, the smell of rotten seafood and ammonia became room-clearingly powerful and we couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. And that was my first and last experience with skate.