Crispy Fried Catfish Done Right | Southern Fish Fry Recipe

Check it out, folks. Today, we doing fried fish, and to be specific, it's fried catfish. Let's get it. Okay, folks, so look, I'm gonna have you guys take a look down this way. Look, there's not a whole lot to it, right? Listen, this is one of those things when I tell you about the secret and how we gonna guarantee this is gonna be fire, right? Look, now I want you to see, I got everything divided, right? And don't forget, the full recipe is on my website. That's smokingandgrillingwithab.com, W-I-T-A-B.com. Boy, that's a mouthful. Now, everything on this side right here is gonna be for my tartar, and over here is just the basics. It's what you see, right? This is how we, this is my cornmeal, and then we gonna season this. I told you, we gonna taste this, too, because we wanna taste our seasoning. Now, you only see a few things. You know, right here, you got the buttermilk, which is like to level up. That's gonna be our binder also, and then we got these two ingredients right here. I want you guys to pay attention to what I'm about to do. All right, so we got catfish, right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pour some buttermilk in here like this, and I'm gonna let this soak for about 15, 20 minutes, right? Now, that didn't completely cover it, so I'm gonna go ahead and just add a little bit more. I could've cut these filets down, which I'm probably gonna end up doing, too, but this is causing me right now to waste a little bit of my buttermilk, right? But we do that, and then, as always, folks, I've been getting away from 10 ago, but look, I always keep some hot, soapy water next to me. You know what I mean? So while I'm doing, you know, whatever, and I got a break, what I do is I wash my dishes. That'll keep it from being a chore, folks. While we letting this soak, right, you can put it in the refrigerator. You can leave it out. Listen, my buttermilk was cold. We only soaking it for like 15, 20 minutes, right? So what you wanna do is you wanna multitask. So I'm gonna start with my mayo. We might as well just go ahead and get our little tartar, you know, sauce together, right? Just a nice little dipping sauce. Then I go with my garlic and onion. Set this over in here. We're gonna put a little dill in here. How many of y'all cooking with dill? You know what I mean? That might've been a lot right there that came off in there. We're gonna come with our relish. And that's sweet relish, folks. Y'all talk to me and tell me, do you make any type of tartar sauce? And then I wanna know, do you use dill? Right, and then we gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and cut my lemon, but I'll add that after I get everything incorporated, right? So, and again, what we doing is we just multitasking. We marinating, and I hadn't said anything yet. Obviously, you see that I'm finna fry in this pan right here, right? I'm already starting to bring this up to temp. This is a lot of oil, so it's gonna take a minute. So I just start, you know, like I say, multitasking. Now, you guys can take a look at that right there. You can just see it, right? I thought that was a lot of dill, but you can see dill inside of here. And I can tell you now, after when I taste it, I might wanna add just a little bit more to it, but definitely wanna give it just like a little squeeze of lemon juice, right? You don't wanna put a whole lot. You just want it to be refreshing. Just gonna give this just a pinch of salt. That's all it needs. You know what I mean? And I'll go ahead and, you know, mix this up. If you guys wanna talk about how do I know when my oil is up to temp, there's so many ways. I could take a little bit of the cornmeal, drop it in there, drop a little flour. I could take the back of, check this out. I can take one of these wooden or bamboo, you know, cooking utensils, put it in there. Once it bubbles, we know that's right. But for me, I'm gonna give you guys a number and I'm gonna tell you 350 degrees, right? So I like about 360 when we put it in here. I'm gonna show you what you need right now. All right, so if you come here and look, this is what you need. Hey, I don't really talk about the thermometers that much, but listen, any meat thermometer works. These happen to be my brand right here, as you can see. Smoking and grilling with AB. Hey, they're magnetic. You ain't gotta put them in the drawers and have your drawers all cluttered up. You know what I mean? I'm gonna take this and we're gonna come on back over here. I'm gonna stick it inside here and I'm gonna find out where are we at? Telling me we got a long ways to go. We want 350 plus. I'm gonna say 350, 370, and we good. Now, let's come on back over here because we still gotta get ready. All right, so now we're gonna talk about the cornmeal, right? Listen, this is where we want everything to just be great. You know what? I'm gonna do it here like this. Instead of me putting it in here. Yeah, I'll do it right here. Since I got it already lined out like this, so I'm gonna add it, add it, right? Now, when it comes to putting your pepper inside of this right here, listen, it's gonna take a little bit of this. I just like fresh ground. Then when it comes to the salt, look, I give it two generous pinches. The first one was bigger, so I had to equal it out, right? We got that in there. Now, I'll use my whisk and I'll whisk this around and you can look at it, all right? When you looking at it, you can see where like, I don't know how much of it that you guys can see with the camera, but I can tell you it need to have a little bit more. Just from over the years of just cooking, I like to see my seasoning in my flour and in my cornmeal, right? This is what I put in there, you know, to make mine like over the top, right? Listen, it took me a minute to get these blend, you know, this seasoning and this blend perfected, right? Again, this is a low sodium product, but I put this in here. Now, you guys can put your favorite, whatever type of seasoning you want in there. Nine times out of 10, I'm either using this and look, I'm using the Creole Kit. I'll put that out there right there. Most of you guys have that also, you know what I mean? But today, instead of me doing that, I like to use the Creole Kit really when I do the mustard based one. You know what I mean? I'll make that one for you guys in just a little while. But right now, I'm gonna go ahead and just pour some of this in here, sprinkle a little bit of this in. Now, when I show it to you, might look like a lot, but it's not, folks. I want you to take a look. So you can see, you can still see the cornmeal and you can see what I put about just about on top, right? And I'm gonna show you how you can tell that it's not a lot because when you mix this together like this, look, the color doesn't really change as much as you would think it would be, but it's a nice, even mixture. All right, so what I do is I get myself a little pan because we're gonna have two, I almost wanna say we're gonna have two stations, right? But really, we don't because remember, we marinated over here in the buttermilk, right? And then you gotta have it dry. So real simple. We just pour this in here like this, drop that in. Look at the color of it now though. With all those herbs and spices inside of that right there. Yeah, that's it right there, folks. All right, so look, now after this has been, you know, marinating, soaking this up, it helps too with the moisture inside the flesh too, right? So just get off about as much as I can. When it's fresh, I don't worry about it tearing or nothing like that. And we just drop this in like that. Now I'm gonna go ahead and get in here and use my hand. Right? And if you guys pay attention, I got a baking sheet right here with a cooling rack on it, right? I use this to let it sit up and adhere. My cornmeal just adhere to it. You know what I mean? It kind of like soaks in, dries it out just a little bit, but that's okay. And then you guys know, it always have on the one side of the catfish has this opening, right? So I like to get it all in there just like this. I don't have a whole lot of fillets, so I can take my time with it, right? Don't forget, it's still fish. It's a little bit delicate. All right, so now I'm gonna do the same thing. All you do is repeat for how many ever, many fillets that you have. Then if your fillets are big, you know what you can do. You can always just cut them down, right? You know, make them the size you want to. You can actually cut these up into nuggets. But you know what I mean? I got a couple of grown men coming over here. Some grown folks. You know what I mean? They come over here to eat. Okay, so I just checked my oil. It's up to temp. I still give this a little bit of a shake. Now I want you guys to pay attention. I'm gonna put this in here like this. I let it start. I kind of like move it back and forth and I ease it down like that. And then we drop him in. Now, I'm gonna check my oil. I'm only doing one right now. When I check my oil, I just want to see how much did it drop. Right? I was at 370. Now I'm at 360. 354. And that's good right there. Now, this is fish, folks. What you want to do is you want to cook it to your, you know, you get a nice golden brown and we have the thermometer so we can make sure that everything is good. Now you can see it popping a little bit. Look, I can put my splatter guard on top of here right here. Okay, so after about four minutes, look at this right here. This is the color that we're looking for. You see that right there? Let me get this to come over. Get this underneath it. And then I'm just gonna set it and bring it over here. And that's what you want to have right there, folks. Okay, folks, look, I'm gonna keep it really real with y'all. You remember I had two other fillets? They gone. You know what I mean? That's just the people that's behind here. You know, everybody's saying they want a piece. Oh, I want some more. And then after I made all of that tartar sauce, this is about all I got left right here. Good thing I put this in my ramekin right here. But look, that's neither here nor there. I done already tasted it and I can tell you, it's fire, folks. So, you know what? Let me just go ahead and just cut me a piece like this. You know what I mean? Now, I'm gonna show you this part. This here is a must. You know, when you're doing fish, you want to get 145, right? That right there, just be right. But I'm gonna be honest with you, just when you, by the time you get your, you know, your batter on the outside and it becomes golden brown, it's probably ready. You know what I mean? But 145, for those of you guys that gotta have it, I'm gonna do it like this. You see that right there? Look at that meat right there. That's why I love catfish. And don't forget, you can do this with any type of fish that you would like. You know what I mean? I do it, I even do it with salmon, folks. Cheers. Yes, sir. This right here, I know a lot of, some people say they don't eat catfish. You know what I mean? Just because of where the catfish is. He's, you know, a fish on the bottom. I know that he's a bottom feeder. You know what I mean? But just in my southern roots, you know what I mean? This is what I know. This right here is good. But like I said, I do it with salmon. I do it with a lot of other things. You know what? And then I know some of y'all gonna look at this right here. Check that out. You gonna put that on there and then you gonna finish it. We gotta open up the discussion down in the comment section below. What's the best? And then I saw somebody put on there and said, Texas Pete. Hey, just talk to me, folks. Now, listen, if you're new to my channel, let me take this time to say, thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like, smash that subscribe button and tell everybody out there. There's a channel out here that's simplifying these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. And with that being said, folks, I'm gonna go ahead and take this. I already got the Kool-Aid over there and I'm finna take a break, y'all. I'm out. Peace.