Fried Crappie & Catfish with Brown Butter

A couple of years ago, I mistakenly cooked the butter too much while sauteing some Royal Red shrimp and we all loved them in brown butter (especially Big Daddy Dave).  Not sure why, but I don’t believe we’ve made something with browned butter since but then I saw this very simple recipe that needed to be tried.  Amanda’s recipe on her Crafty Cooking Mama blog calls for baking the haddock but I opted to use crappie & catfish and give it a quick pan fry.  Click on the above link for her recipe and more pics like this one.

Pan Fried Crappie with Brown Butter – Adapted from Crafty Cooking Mama

The Ingredients: 

12-16 oz of haddock fillets or white fish of choice

olive oil

salt pepper, paprika & dried parsley

4 tablespoon butter (increased from 2)

The Instructions:

1. Heat a skillet to medium high and add olive oil.

2. Lightly season fish with a sprinkle of salt, pepper, paprika & parsley dust with flour.

3. Fry fish until lightly brown, remove from pan and keep warm in a 130F oven.  I cooked the catfish first.

4. To the same skillet, add 4 tablespoons butter. Don't walk away, stay by pan during whole process - it only takes a few minutes start to finish and can burn easily.

5. Over medium to medium high heat, melt butter and continually whisk or swirl butter.

6. Butter will start to foam up, keeping whisking or swirling. You'll notice little brown specks at the bottom of the pan. Remove from heat and continue to whisk or swirl for a few seconds.

7. Drizzle brown butter over the fish.

I forgot the finished pic but my catfish looked almost identical to this one with a different side dish.

We served it with steamed broccoli and Bev's homemade bread to sop up the remaining butter on our plates – rice, pasta, or potatoes would also work well.

The Verdict:

We all thought it was very good and would make it again – the girls all had crappie but Bev still prefers hers in lemon/butter/caper sauce – so do I but this was a nice change.

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

12/23/20 event date