Let Them Eat Fishcakes!

I recently went on a bachelor weekend, where we finished up the festivities with a morning of fishing off the coast of Long Island. Between the 13 guys on the boat, we caught at least 100 bluefish. These are way bigger than the other stuff I catch. And apparently they are pretty fierce fish.

My roommate and I ended up with 17 pounds of fish jammed into our freezer. A lot of people will tell you not to freeze bluefish because it won't thaw well. Being an oilier fish, some people think it gets mushy when thawed. (Later, we cooked some regular fillets that we had frozen and thawed, and I had no complaints with them.) We didn't really have a choice though, because we weren't going to have a chance to cook it for a while, and we definitely didn't want the apartment to take on the aroma of 17 pounds of aging fish meat.

But, fishcakes are a good option for unfrozen bluefish, because it involves mashing up the meat anyways, so, you can get away with it not having the best texture. Also, fishcakes seemed very deep-fry-able, which was obviously appealing to me.

We followed this recipe, which sounded easy enough -- and very good. Still, the whole thing was pretty work intensive. You have to get potatoes cooked and mashed, and the fish cooked and flaked, then you mix everything together. When we mixed it all together, we had made a HUGE amount of bluefish cake material. This picture was taken after most of it was already cooked, but overall, it was enough fishcakes for two huge dinners and more leftovers.
At first we pan fried them on the stove. We knew we had enough to try both, so we went with the stove first since that's what the recipe described. But later, we tried deep frying, and these were excellent. They only need to cook for a couple minutes. Also, the patties stick to the basket a little, but if you shake the basket carefully after dipping them in, it will dislodge them and then the bottoms will fry enough in the first few seconds that sticking isn't a problem anymore.

Really both were excellent, but the deep fryer cooked them to a perfectly even dark brown, where the frying pan left them more blackened in some areas and still white in other spots. I will give the frying pan some credit, of all the leftovers we had, the pan-fried ones might have been slightly better, since they didn't absorb as much oil. But right out of the deep fryer was much better than pan fried.

We still have about a dozen more bluefish fillets, so at some point I'll bread and deep fry them or check out other recipes for deep frying them. This isn't your typical deep frying fish, but I think it's worth a try.

Next post, I'll be cooking some Asian food -- deep frying dumplings and spring rolls. Also on the horizon is a big, deep-fried breakfast planned for a friend coming in from out of town.