My mouth starts to water anytime fish is mentioned or even when I am thinking of fish. I love every type of fish including catfish. There is nothing anyone can do to keep me from eating this yummy fish. They may as well keep trying and if they are it is no use.
There is a lot of health benefits to eating fish. It is also very light and very easy to digest. It is even perfect to eat late in the evening if you have no choice to eat kind of late because you had to work. This dish pairs very nicely to eat with coleslaw and hush puppies and I have a hush puppy and coleslaw recipe published already on this blog.
Ok I started off in a small bowl where I have added 1/4 cup each of all purpose unbleached flour and cornmeal. To this there is a choice of seasoning that I would use and not everyone of them went in to this fish lol, so please pay attention. The choices are 1 bullion cube/ or 3 shakes of seasoned salt/ or 1 pinch of vegtea seasoning/and or or 3 shakes of adobo. After you add one of these and only you can use one of these types in this recipe only because you do not want your fish too salty. I chose to go with 1 pinch of vegtea seasoning followed by 1 pinch of paprika, 1 pinch of mustard powder, 3 dashes of lemon pepper, 1 pinch of black peppercorns I ground in to a coarse powder in my mortar and pestle then I added it to the cornmeal mixture. You can add 1 pinch of red chili powder if you are not adding hot sauce. If you are adding hot sauce then don’t add the red chili powder.
I washed the catfish I had thawed out to fry and placed that in another small bowl then crushed 1 clove of garlic with mortar and pestle and added it to the fish, 3 dashes of maggi or knorr aroma, 1 tsp of manzano chili sauce or any other type of hot sauce. If you are using this then skip the 1 pinch of red chili powder.
In my cast iron skillet on medium high I added 1/4 cup of vegetable oil and let that heat up and started to coat the fish and added it to my skillet for cooking. Since I had catfish steaks they took a little bit longer to cook compared to catfish nuggets or fillets.
I covered the skillet while my fish was cooking and cooked until the fish started to flake off of the bone and it turned golden and crispy on the outside. I was turning them every 3 minutes or so. When I finished cooking them I added them to a plate lined with paper towel for the rest of the oil to drain. I did this in batches of 4 for smaller pieces and for bigger ones it was 2 pieces until all of my fish was fried up.
This gets served at once with hush puppies and coleslaw. Please enjoy.
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