These might be the best fish tacos you'll ever grill!

Hey, I'm Matt with Meat Church. Let's grill these delicious Baja fish tacos. Well, I'm excited to be continuing our summer grilling series. We mentioned last week we hadn't done this in a while and we get lots of comments with people asking for fish. So here's a lighter option for you for the summer. Why am I doing this today? Well, I went to Canada a few weeks ago fishing with my friends at the West Coast Fishing Club. Caught a whole bunch of fish. One of the fish that I caught was lean cod. It's like one of the ugliest fish in the sea, which is pretty funny, but it's super versatile. You can do this with a lot of different fish, but when you're making a fish taco, I like a white kind of flaky type fish. So you can do a lot of different things with it as far as seasoning, sauces, that sort of thing. So don't get hung up on the fact that I'm using lean cod today. You could get cod at your local grocery store or, you know, whatever sort of fish you want to use. But lean cod, again, being a very ugly fish, it's actually a pretty beautiful fillet with all the different colors. But we'll definitely include some pictures of the fish that Christian and I caught. They look like little dragons. They make excellent fish tacos. They also make excellent fish and chips. So I thought it'd be great to use that fish for this today. And actually this specific recipe, my buddy Derek Nyro is at the West Coast Fishing Club. He actually cuts these up into strips and grills them, uses our Blanco, puts a slaw on it, adds avocado to it. And that's what he does for fish tacos. So I thought we would do something similar today. And by the way, if you ever want to fish with me on this trip, it's going to be the beginning of June, I believe, next summer. We'll put a link down in the description for that. It's definitely a bucket list trip. Enough about that. Let's jump in. And here's what it looks like, by the way. This is lean cod that I caught just a few weeks ago and the West Coast Fishing Club portions it out into one pound pieces. And you literally check this like luggage, bring it back to the US. Don't even have to claim it. No big deal. It's just like another suitcase. So pretty cool how easily they process this stuff. So let's talk about grilling fish. I think this is a reason a lot of people don't grill fish more often because they're afraid to do it. They don't really know how to do it. A lot of different options. We could cook this a lot of different ways. We considered putting it in a cast iron skillet with a bunch of butter, almost like a blackened. That would be super delicious. We're going to go on a pellet grill today. I find pellet grills give you a lot of latitude and safety when cooking delicate things like fish. You could also do this over a direct fire charcoal grill with a few tips. So the couple things that we're going to do, we're going to grill it with a skin on that will give you some protection. But we're also going to oil the grates. We're going to use a fish spatula and in the end we'll make us into tacos. So if the fish were to stick to the grate just a little bit, that wouldn't be the absolute end of the world. But when you leave fish on long enough, it will normally release from the grates. Anyway, we'll get it done. So this is going to be very simple today. Derek seasoned his as I mentioned with our Blanco seasoning. So that's what we're going to do today. I also know that our Voodoo is great on fish. Our Honey Hog is great on fish. Use whatever seasoning you like, kind of whatever flavor profile that you're going for. But in true Derek Nairo's fashion, I'm going with Blanco or Blanco as my Canadian friends call it. So I'd say we're going to go moderate to light. You don't have to give this a whole long to adhere. We had dried the fish off. I'm just going to kind of pat it in here. Okay, while this is adhering, let's talk about how we're going to cook it. Another thing that's going to help with a non-stick hopefully, is we are going to cook this at 450 degrees. So I'm running a Traeger pellet grill that's been at 450 for a little bit. And let's talk about your fuel. So I have two types of pellets. Meat Church has two versions. I'm using our newer version, which is pecan and cherry wood. The pecan wood is lighter than our other pellets and cherry also lighter, also gives a good flavor, a good color. So that's a great choice for fish. I thought this would be a great opportunity to show people what our new pellets are good for. So I'd love it on that. But when you're choosing what pellet you want to use, don't use something heavy for fish. Don't use a mesquite. Don't use a hickory. I wouldn't use anything heavier than pecan. I like things like fruit woods, alders, maples, those sorts of things, a lighter smoke. So it's subtle. Wood is the first ingredient in your cook. So let's head over to the grill. Hit the grates with some cooking spray and I'm going flesh side down to start. And then when the meat is cooked enough, it will release with a fish spatula and we'll flip it over. We're going to cook up our tortillas while the fish is cooking. These are par-cooked corn tortillas. All right, it's been right at five minutes. Fish releases nicely. Looks beautiful. Boom. Low 140s. I'm going to go ahead and pull the smaller one. All right, while this fish is cooling down, let's grab our ingredients and make a delicious slaw to top these tacos with. All right, for the slaw, we've got some red cabbage. Recipe always down below. I'll link you to meatchurch.com. A little bit of carrot. I'm going to start with crema and mayonnaise. So we're basically doing a chipotle mayonnaise. Crema, I call Mexican sour cream. A little bit of the mayonnaise, Duke's mayonnaise, and our chipotle. And just do this to the consistency that you want. So I like mine to be pretty wet. So if this is too wet, then I'll simply just add more cabbage. I like the red cabbage. Nice contrast with the white fish. And I went with a lighter color corn tortillas. So the good contrast will be really nice. You eat with your eyes first. See, that's a little bit wet, so we'll get a little bit more. And then you can always top these tacos with hot sauces, things like that. Just kind of make it your own at this point. It's all personal preference from here on out. We cook the fish to about 140. It's going to carry over, cook a few more degrees. I'm a big advocate of using instant read thermometer. That way you don't dry things out. If you've been on this channel for a while, you know that is the cheat code. All right, slaw looks great. Time to build our tacos. All right, let's build this taco. So I'm going to... Oh, the juice is just coming out of that fish. So here you can see this here. This is just all natural how the skin is separating away from the fish. So you could just cut down across this. You're making tacos. It doesn't matter the consistency of the meat, but I am going to try to get it off the skin here. We'll see. Boom. So again, the skin helped you as a barrier on the grill. The total cook time, by the way, was five minutes on the flesh side. And we were 13 minutes total on the smaller piece, 15, 16 on the other side. So you were able to cook it mostly on the skin side, which again acted as a little bit of a barrier. So you can use this to cut it up. You can kind of do whatever you want to do to get this cut. So let's cut it up and make a taco. This thing is not going to slice like a brisket. I can tell you that. Here we go. Fresh corn tortilla, the only way. Load it up with however much fish you want. I'm going to kind of break this up. I don't want big bites in there. So the thing about lean cod, it holds up to all different types of grilling methods. As you can see here, that fish held up nicely. I mean, I always got to try it by itself. Pretty dense for a white fish. That's unreal. People are going to ask me, what's the flavor profile? The Blanco, subtle salt, pepper, onion, garlic. I mean, anybody would eat that. Mrs. Meat Church, very picky fish eater. She likes these. So she's not like the biggest salmon fan, to be honest with you. She loves catching it. But as far as eating goes, she likes light flaky. We go to a restaurant and eat light flaky. So I've topped it with slaw. Since I left the slaw nice and wet, I'm simply going with a little bit of lime. Boom. Fresh as fresh gets right here. That's epic. I caught this fish on Wednesday in Canada, almost all the way to Alaska. And on Tuesday, I'm back home and walks at you grilling it. It doesn't get more fresh than that when you're coming all the way from far northwest British Columbia. You got to make that. Tacos of summer right there. I always say with fish, this won't get the clicks that brisket does, but it should because that is damn good. Huge fan. Again, it's going in the summer grilling list. The very end of this video, we'll have a card for that. Be sure you go back and check out our podcast where Christian and I talked about our trip to Canada, catching all this fish, and check out all the other episodes. Von Miller, Cleto, the lead singer, Flatland Calvary, Kevin Van Dam. Podcast has been a ton of fun. You guys have been loving it. Appreciate your comments. But hey, thank you very much for being here. Please make sure you like and subscribe if you're new to the channel. We drop weekly how-to cooking videos every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central. See you guys next week.