Fish Tacos – Baja Style

Friday was once again fish day and we had the ingredients for Baja Fish Tacos.  My understanding is that fish tacos originated in Baja, California and Baja Style means the taco should contain, at least, fried white fish, shredded cabbage, and creamy white sauce.  This shot is from the food.com site and are not nearly as full as ours.

The sauce recipe we used came from Vickie on her no longer in use blog and I made it up ahead - this is a half recipe and I omitted the strike thrus.

Fish Taco Sauce

Ingredients:

¼ cup sour cream

¼ cup mayonnaise

½ lime, juiced

½ jalapeno pepper, minced

½ tsp. minced capers

¼ tsp.dried oregano

¼ tsp. ground cumin

¼ tsp. dried dill weed

1 tsp. ground cayenne pepper

Directions:

Mix everything together and refrigerate for a few hours for flavors to marry.

For our tacos, we got a couple packages of crappie fillets from our freezer and used the recipe from Food.com with a few changes.  The following is a half recipe of batter and it provided plenty for our 16 pieces of fish.  The original recipe can be found by clicking on the link.

Fish Tacos – Adapted from Food.com

Ingredients:

1 cup self-rising flour

¼ teaspoon garlic powder

1⁄4 teaspoon cayenne

¼ teaspoon dry mustard

¼ teaspoon dried whole Mexican oregano, rubbed to a powder

6 oz cold beer, more or less for desired batter thickness

16 crappie fillets

S&P

vegetable oil (for deep frying)

6” corn tortillas

Shredded cheddar cheese

Bev’s pico de gallo – tomato, cucumber, onion, lime juice

Shredded cabbage

Directions:

1. Make the batter: Whisk the flour, baking powder, garlic, cayenne, mustard, and oregano until well blended. Stir in the beer until there are no lumps. (Batter may be made several hours ahead and refrigerated).

2. Dry the fish and season with S&P.

3. Pour the oil into a deep, wide pan to a depth of 2 inches and heat to 350 degrees.

4. Dip the fish in the batter, allow excess to run off, and lay the fish gently into the hot oil. 
5. Cook until golden brown, flipping as needed. Just a couple of minutes per side were sufficient.

6. Remove the fish to a rack to drain.

7. To serve, hold a tortilla in your hand and spread a spoonful of sauce over one side. Top with fish, cheese, cabbage, and pico de gallo. 

It would have been nice to have guac and some cilantro. 

But they were still great, and I do mean great, and everyone else agreed – had we had an avocado for guacamole, they would have been fantastic and I can hardly wait to make them again.  As you can tell from the above shot, one fish fillet more than filled the tortilla.

After eating my two tacos, I could not resist just adding the toppings to a remaining piece of fish and eating it with a fork.  I remembered the shot after a couple of bites.

I wish we'd gotten more photos but we got to busy cooking fish and building tacos as it came off, then eating of course.  But I did get a shot of my Saturday morning breakfast - the batter didn't crisp up as nice as when fresh but it was still delicious and went well with a couple of scrambled eggs.

I know, you were expecting fish with fried eggs on top but this worked very well and what a great way to begin my day.  Bev had another taco and she almost never eats fish for breakfast so that tells me how good they were.

Photos can be enlarged by clicking on them and the blue words are links.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

4/17/20 event date