Cooking Fish

[Moose1am]

Man reading this post is making me hungry!

I have to agree that fried fish taste great.

I'll catch the fish, clean the fish and freeze the fillets and let my next door neighbor cook them. Only thing is that I have to insist that he use new fresh oil. He has a habit of cooking the fish in his Grand Pappy frier and then letting the oil sit in his cooker unrefrigerated for a few weeks before using the same old oi again. He claims that the heat sterilizes the oil as he is cooking the next batch.

I tried to explain to him that the bacteria have emitted toxins into the grease as it was sitting there unrefrigerated and that heat may not kill the toxins in the grease.

In any case I refuse to eat any fish that are not cooked in fresh or refrigerated oil that's been strained to remove all the sediment before use.

I let my peanut oil cool down and then strain it though paper towels and then put it in a glass jar and store the jar and oil in the refrigerator. That way I can reuse it a few more times before having to use new peanut oil. That stuff in not cheap.

My little Fry Daddy only hold 4 cups of oil and if I put more than two or three small filets in the grease the temperature of the grease drops too low to cook the fish fast. I like to keep the grease at 375 deg F before dropping in the filets.

I should not read these post on a empty stomach!

Have you no decency sir, have you no decency?

All bass and bluegill filets must be fried in BassPro's Light & Crunchy or Andy's Red batter.

It is a must, from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian border. Hey don't shoot the messenger here, I didn't make the law, I just abide by it.

Served with a garden salad with blue cheese and bacon bits, seasoned home fries, cole slaw, hush puppies, corn on the cob, finished off with blackberry cobbler and a scoop vanilla ice cream.

If I didn't have dance rehearsal tonight, I would come down there and set your house in order.

topwater

[topwater2007]

When I need cooking oil, I get it free out of the dumpster at Long John Silver's at 3am in the morning.

You can't tell the fish from the chicken, but its still good.

It is getting harder to find dumpster oil. They are making bio-diesel out of it now and it is making dumpster diving not quite the lucrative living that it used to be.

Fazoli's has the worst dumpsters, wow they need to pressure wash. Quizno's on the other hand is a widely overlooked pearl of dumpster prospecting.

topwater

[Moose1am]

I use to work as a short order cook when in High School. One night I had to take some old cooking oil out to the back of the kitchen and dump it in this 55 gallon drum. When I opened up the lid to the drum I was greeted with millions of fly maggots swimming in a drum full of old cooking oil. It's a sight and smell that's hard to forget. So ever since that time I have had this aversion to cooking oil and such.

My neighbor who saves the peanut oil inside his GrandPappy also worked as a cook for a while. So that's probably where he got the idea to save the oil in the GrandPappy with just the lid on.

Just don't let the lid come off and the flies get into the oil. The fly larvae love that stuff.

I won't be able to eat fish or anything else fried in oil for the next 24 hours.

Which reminds me of yesterday's disaster with eggplant. I was going to fry up 3 of my eggplants from my garden and decided to cook them in my new Coleman grill. It's more like a frying pan on top of a grill. So I got the eggplant all oiled up with olive oil. I had this grand idea on cooking the eggplants in hot oil like I do on the stove. This didn't work out very good. First I didn't add any egg batter to the the eggplants nor dip them in cornmeal/flour mix. So they were not breaded. Second the oil soaked into them and make them way too oily. I must have not had the oil hot enough to cook them. I ended up throwing the entire batch out. I fired up the gas grill and sliced up some zucchini and grilled them up. Now that was good. I also picked some fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and had them for dinner with some salad dressing. Ranch cucumber dressing goes well with these vegetables.

No worries Moose.

Your theory about bacteria and toxins is correct, however you'd have to go to the utmost extremes to have a contaminated final product. The indicator of this would be a limp, undercooked, unattractive fillet. If it could be contaminated, it would look and feel bad enough you wouldn't want to eat it anyway.

I was in the the restaurant business for years and literally served tons and tons of fried fish, chicken and other foods. You don't stay in the business long by making people sick. Restaurants filter their oil as necessary, might be daily, weekly etc, depending on volume. They discard their oil only when necessary due to break down or carbonization. Refrigeration of cooking oil or shortening in most cases is not an option.