I bought some frozen cod at Trader Joe’s over a week ago. My goal was to learn to cook fish when I moved to Maryland (where seafood is more abundant than in Chicago). However, I’m pretty sure TJ’s frozen cod hails not from the East Coast but from Alaska or somewhere. Nonetheless, I’m trying to expand my culinary repertoire. After defrosting the cod and searching all over the internet for ways to cook cod that didn’t involve using my oven (since it was 88 degrees outside today). The only recipes I could find were those that involved deep frying. I thought maybe I could make a nice pan-seared cod or stir-fried cod. But no recipes were available on allrecipes.com. I remembered I had a box of pancake mix that I used to make pancakes for my bro. (I love to use up ingredients that I already have. It makes me feel productive.) So I googled “bisquick” “fried cod” and came up with dozens of “beer battered cod” recipes. I finally gave in and followed the advice of this blogger. Instead of Smithwick’s, which they didn’t sell at the Hopkins Deli liquor store, I bought Dogfish Head Aprihop.
The fried cod turned out really great. I added too much cayenne pepper and didn’t have any paprika. But the texture was amazing. Super crispy on the outside, soft and flaky inside. I don’t own a deep fryer (for good reason–I would be 200 pounds by now) but I have a high quality, heavy duty 2 quart saucepan and decided to cut my cod up into small 2 inch strips (as suggested in the recipe). Frying took about 30 minutes total (3-5 minutes per round) because my little pot could only fit 1-2 pieces of fish. Here are some photos depicting my endeavors.
