Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Breading and deep frying fish.

Would like a few opinions on what breading/coating and the oil/shortning you have found best for deep frying fish. Sometimes my filets turn out like a picture in a cookbook and sometimes they don`t. Have not been able to come up with a system that works consistently.

I don't use a breading ever. I use a dredge(dry coating). Mostly I just salt, pepper and shake in a coating mix. My wife like a local prepared mix called House Autry Seafood Breader Mix but we use it dry. I like just plain course ground yellow cornmeal. Do all my frying in peanut oil, more forgiving of heat spikes.

I use a breading called Panko usually found in the Asian section of supermarkets. I use egg whites a little milk to dredge the fish, chicken, oysters etc...in. mix seasoning in with the Panko and roll the fish to coat. I too use peanut oil and keep it hot. Too much fish at one time cools off the oil and fish becomes soggy. YUCK. Too hot and the oil burns the breading again YUCK. Just rite and good eats are to be had.
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<br>A another way to is to mix Panko with corn meal and flour mix with beer and dredge fish in this and fry. I have found it best to let fish dry a bit before coating with a wet mixture the coating sticks to drier fish much better than wet fish. I do not measure any thing when I cook so I would say that equal portions are a good place to start until you find what you like and what works. Seasoning for me is always real light on the salt and heavy on the pepper. Put in some garlic, hot pepper, onion what ever you like. Toss out the ready made coatings unless you like all the chemical flavorings and anti clumping junk in your food.
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<br>Bullwnkl.

I too use peanut oil, best for fish frying. Use just corn meal, garlic salt, dry mustard, and plenty of pepper. If you want to make a batter just like Long John Silver chain ( I don't know why but aparently lots of folks like it) use club soda and Bisquick. Just get it just this side of soupy and dip your fish in it then drop it in the hot oil.
<br>BCR

Down here in the south there is only one thing to bread fish. Yellow corn meal. Any thing else is a dam yankee mess! You can add anything you want to the corn meal to suit your tastes. I like to add a pinch of salt and cayanne pepper. Peanut oil is good, if you don't like the flavor of that use the best corn oil. I like Wesson ok. Keeping the tempature of the oil is a trick. You don't want it so hot that it smokes, but it needs to be so hot that when you dip a kitchen match in, it will light when you bring it out.
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<br>After several years I finally found a system that works for me. My propane cooker is made from an old hot water heater burner. My pot is cast iron, holds three gallons of oil and has a stainless steel basket on a long handle. That combination of pot size and cooker flame is just right. It holds the oil at the perfect tempature and will not over heat.
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<br>Just before I had my surgery I cooked a mess of catfish I caught out of lake Amistad. They sure were good. Soon as I can swaller again I'll fry up another mess!

Hey, I fried up that mess of catfish last night. First I've been able to eat in about a mounth. Man was it some good vittles! Today I get to enjoy the cold leftovers for lunch
<br>pds

Hey 4pwr - Couple a thoughts for ya. My Bro turned me on to tempura batter. The brand he uses is Korean. While I visited him out west, we dipped oysters and razor clams and they was good. Ya just add water and it must be thick, not runny. You won't find this down the street, but if ya ever cross over at the Bluewater Bridge, you are sure to find it there.
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<br>My main preference is breaded. Put a good seasoning on'em (Old Bay?), roll 'em in flour, then beaten eggs with a little water added, then in bread crumbs. The key here is the bread crumbs. They have to be very fine. Don't get the sawdust they sell in those round containers at the market. Find a bakery that sells the crumbs by the pound. If you go to an Italian bakery, they will sell them and they will be very good. Cross over the bridge for those too if ya have to.
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<br>Good eatin', sse

Welcome back to the land of the living PDS
<br>BCR

Wow,I didn`t think I would get such response and good ideas. I`d better start catching more fish so I can try them all. Thank`s.

Thanks. I had the fix for sleep apnea. Lived on Jello and ice cream for two weeks. I can tell you that you can loose weight eating nothing but Blue Bell ice cream. Doing much better now, can eat just about anything. No chips and salsa or popcorn yet but fresh fried fish and peperori pizza sure are good when you have not had them in a while

The new nostick pans are a boon to frying fish but they seem to lose some of the flavor that the old cast iron pans added. One of the camp cooks I new used to salt the pan befor he put the fish in, the breading stuck to the fish instead of the pan. I still do it and it works for breaded porkchops too.
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<br>erich

erich - Its kinda neat to get the fragrance of what you last cooked in the cast iron pan, while its heating up for something new.
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<br>Sticking is best prevented by heating that puppy real good before adding the oil for frying.

Just got back from the west coast of Vancouver island have a mess of salmon steaked up for the grill but put in some time on bottom fish and brought backs some ling cod and black sea bass fillets for the frying pan, the quests get the salmon I save the good stuff for ME.
<br>Happy Frying
<br>erich

You are a real gent, serving all that good salmon to friends, and forcing yourself to suffer through the rough fish! Hard to believe halibut is more popular...
<br>art

I got a question for all you NW coast /Alaska folks. We all know that the fresher a fish is the better he eats. I can't get any of your fish fresh save one that has been hauled pillar to post on an airplane or something. Every body has opinions as to what eats the best. What's "the best" eating fresh.
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<br>Down here on the gulf coast I'd have to break it in to two categories. Offshore and inshore. Now this is my opinion but the best are:
<br> Offshore in order Dorado, Ling, red snapper, black tip
<br>Inshore flounder, specks, red's, pompano
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<br>BCR

Boggy fish from the N.Pacific is all good, some is just better than than others. It depends on what is in season. My favorite for fish-n-chips is halibut, I love Very rare cooked stealhead. For my guests I will do salmon mostly because that is what they want. Nothing beats fresh black cod, very delicate in texture and flavor. Lingcod from very cold water is good but the fish from around here tend to be a bit soft and wormy. Shell fish in the winter are best, oysters on the bar-b-que are tasty and they are great raw. Steamer clams are a treat with butter.Fresh cooked crab still hot and ice cold beer this will make a grown man cry tears of joy.Of course there is clam chowder and oyster stew. For your exotic seafoods there is Umi (sea urchin eggs) Sea cucumber strips, not a favorite of mine but not bad. There is Moon Snail foot that I find pretty good and Geoduck ( a very large clam) great fried and chowder. Of course these last two are simply fantastic that is Octopus and Skate. A 50 -80 pound octopus is great for fritters chowder most anything you use clams for. Skate is a relation to shark and has a flavor very similar to scallops. Darn good. Of course there is that super delicacy Razor Clams. Bog man we have plenty of seafood and some fresh water species that are all fine eats, Some day if I can figgure out a way to send you a batch of fresh oysters I'll ship you out a meals worth.
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<br>Bullwnkl.

Thanks Winky probably few will answer as this is a fairly exausted thread. May have to ask on a new thread. I don't know as I have ever seen a fish type skate. However the wings on small sting rays must be about the same and I have used a biscuit cutter to punch them. They taste a lot like scallops. I have never eaten octopus save in a Jap restraunt. Was kind of like chewing a hot inner tube to me. Maybe it was cooked wrong.
<br>On the shell fish I'll tell you what, If you got a good arm I could manage to come up about Amarillo and you could pitch me some sort of like you'd pitch a milk bone to a pet dog and I could snap them up on the fly.
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<br>BCR

Got to agree with Bullwnkl on most of his points... Rockfish of any flavor are as good as it gets also. Halibut pales in comparison, but halibut keeps better than any fish I know of. As an aside, the Swedish trollers back in the 70s had a halibut in a gunny sack hanging in their rigging at all times. They would spray it down on the occasional sunny day and let the rain keep it damp the rest of the time. Adiabiatic cooling kept it fine for about a week, when they would eat it.
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<br>Tried it because I could not believe fish is better aged and had to agree it was the best 'but I had ever eaten!
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<br>Skates are fun to deal with because you just whack the wings off with a big knife and release the body to the crabs. As kkalaska calls it "fillet and release." The muscles are in cords which are easy to separate if desired and the meat then looks like a scallop when cut into short sections. It is what you would be buying if you bought "bay scallops."
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<br>BTW Bullwnkl gots to be tough... I'd be very afraid of an 80# octopus!!!!!!! ;-)
<br>art

Sitka, as you may not be aware of or may, here in the Puget Sound and Hood canal we have the largest octopus in the world. In the past some twenty years ago when I was diving it was not unusual to capture one 50-80+ pounds. Once you got one away form the rocks you had a fair chance of capturing the critter. To do the job correctully you had to get him into a bag. Trying to boat an octopus is nearly impossible if he is not in a bag. Critter grabs hold of the boat with its suction cups and holds on longer than you can swim, then he lets go and zoom he's gone.
<br>If one were to prepair octopus with out tenderizing one will soon find out two facts about eating these guys:
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<br>1, the more you chew the bigger the piece of meat gets.
<br>2, If Goodyear Tire and Rubber could invent a fiber that wears as well as boiled octopus they would never sell a new tire again.
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<br>The fish that I have a fear of in our local waters are the wolf eels. Big, ugly, ill tempered critters that will snap a few fingers off your hand if you put a hand in the wrong place while diving for scallops, had one take a scallop out of my had....I wouldn't dive in that area for a long time.
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<br>Bullwnkl.

Bullwnkl
<br>Found out a long time ago that boiling octopus is the wrong way to go... if you get water boiling, in quantuty to match the the octopus, and just drop it in and fish it out, it will be tender and set. FAR BETTER!!!
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<br>Spent a little time at Sundquist Marine Labs in Anacortes, in the late 70s. Really liked getting out on the water...
<br>art