how do different folks do it?

i put mine in a big no-stick pan w/ a good bit of canola oil, or kroger olive oil.

salt & pepper and lift in, when the grease is hot enought. about 8 minutes to the side, but maybe more. the thickness varies from thick to thin and back again.

tony chachere seasoning, maybe garlic powder (not salt). and let slowly cook. if i'm in the mood, they put in fish dip (meal/flour conconction), and sometimes just plain.

the plain is much more catfish flavorful. but, the breading/dip adds, and smooths it out. so i do both, depending on the mood.

i'm thinking the nuggets come out of arkansas or mississippi, but i don't know that. they do vary in flavor in my view. so the seasoning helps, and that's why some folks want them dredged or dragged through a coating of some kind.

pure catfish, if done right, is hard to beat in my estimation.

My experience with catfish is limited to farm raised . Some was excellent while at times it was just plain vile. Apparently catfish can be "in season" or "out of season". At least that's what my fish monger told me.

?????????

i soak in salt water for a while.
dredge in plain yellow mustard
then yellow cornmeal w/ salt and
pepper and maybe a bit of old bay
or some c'est bon seasoning.
i fry in plain vegetable oil or
lard. to me, olive oil will flavor
whatever you cook in it. i do use
it for other things.

to me, if you don't fry fish or
chicken deep and smoking hot it
absorbs too much grease

EDIT- should have added i use
black iron pots for this duty

Time for me to drag out my #14 dutch oven.

'preciate the commentary. i don't mind dragging the cutlets (nuggets/trimmings) through flour/meal.

sometimes i do.

but often, if the nuggets look pretty good, just heat the kroger olive oil to a high point, and cook about 8 minutes on each side.

some folks just don't like the "aroma" of catfish. but to me, it's pretty good when i'm in a mood for catfish.

definitely all catfish didn't come out of the same pond. that's pretty much a military certainty.

sometimes it's an issue of crispy or less crispy depending upon the heat & length of time in the cook.

there's a lot of seafood coming from
se asia raised in cesspool conditions,
especially shrimp crawdads and catfish.
i'd be really skeerd of any of that.
i'd imagine yoofloob has a vid or two

I dump a bunch of A-1 seasoned flour in a bag then paint the top of the flour with old-bay shake it up and throw in the nuggets then deep-fry. No olive oil for i hate the taste .

Corn meal. Nuff said..

Farm raised will have a muddy taste to me. Catfish from fresh moving water is an entirely different critter. Try some tabby's.

same to me; love catfish, but not the muddy tasting stuff.

we usually eat it filleted, rolled in seasoned corn meal we spice up with creole seasoning, black pepper, onion powder, and granulated garlic...

Good channel catfish are hard to beat.

You could roll a dog turd in House Autry and deep fry it and folks would ask for seconds.

Very similar to my favorite way to do halibut and lingcod. I use cornmeal and cracker meal 50:50 after the mustard.

I have seen some of the Taiwanese shrimp operations... you could not get me to eat tilapia on a bet.

There was a segment on "Dirty Jobs" once.I beleive they said the talapia were raised in sewage lagoons

OR they raise different seafood in different ponds and the tilapia are in the very last pond...

That's some darn good looking catfish filets, fyrepowrx.

Never thought of olive oil as a deep fry oil.

I won't eat farm raised tilapia either. They farm raise them here in AZ.

The process is, raise shrimp, and harvest said shrimp. Add tilapia to the shrimp tanks. Let the tilapia feed on all of the left over waste excreted by the shrimp.

Now... we do have them in the local canals and city ponds, although I've not tried those either. Once a poop eater, always a poop eater.

If catfish tastes like mud, tilapia must taste like chit.

I net tilapia in the local canals here whenever I want. Haven't seen a problem with them.

Fish I'd rather eat, but they go down ok. Usually pan fry with Cajun spice and eat them with some tartar sauce.

besides channel cats, both wild and farm raised, there's lot's of catfish out there different from the channel cat species.

we always called them mudcats when i was growing up. they had a distinctly different flavor than the channels, stronger i would say. and they looked different, and in our case was usually smaller.

and yes, river caught cats are a breed apart from lake raised cats, but they're both good, and not nearly as cheap as they use to be.

Farm raised will taste different depending on the ponds/tanks they are raised in, and how they are handled after. Put them in vats for a few days before shipping, with running water and let them clean out, will taste better that directly on the truck to the processing plant. The plant should test a few for off flavors, but who knows. They take a tail section and microwave it, so nothing but the fish taste is there. Any off flavors should show and the batch rejected, but not near as many raised as in the past and not as many processing plants, so they might think they can skip a step to two. miles

yes, i understand it can be related to the soil in the pond where the fish are raised.

it's a peculiar subject. some ponds always produce "sweet" fish, others, not as often if ever. i do not know how their food source interacts w/the water to affect flavor. most of our fish is imported from arkansas & mississippi. we have struggled mightily to bring the catfish processing industry to georgia. right now, growing poultry remains one of our strong points. those cubans love good, low-cost chicken.

It should not. They should be fed floating feed, to keep them off the bottom mud when feeding. Arkansas catfish farms took a hit a few years ago when feed got high, and many farms were abandoned due to bankruptcy. For years your saw fish farms just growing up into weeds and brush. some have since been converted to farm land, but the money borrowed on the fish farm made the price prohibitive. Lots of money spent building levees that would have to be pushed down and leveled for other farming. miles

the idea that we Americans can grow our own food is a good subject. we import a lot of food, while still growing a lot of protein and carbos here...beef, pork, poultry, corn, wheat, rice, fish, etc. etc.

grain prices and the demand for protein vary day by day. milk production is a good example, and just add in gov't subsidies, regs, and rules and one wonders how the dairy farmers make it?

but, in terms of fish, stream caught natural fish is about as good as it gets. i just wish there were more opportunities to do so.

if push comes to shove, stream caught fish is more flavorful than pond/reservoir raised fish. imho.